The goal of the World Bank is ‘a world free of poverty’ but the most widely used poverty measures do not show when poverty might be eliminated. The ‘head-count index’ simply counts the poor, while the ‘poverty gap index’ shows their average shortfall from the poverty line. Neither measure reflects changes in the distribution of incomes amongst the poor, but squaring the poverty gap brings sensi...

This paper uses household level unit record data from South Africa to examine the behavioural and welfare impacts of private and public transfers. We allow for joint endogeneity of resource variables and the expenditure shares. Our results show that crowding out of private transfers as a result of the introduction of public pensions holds only for poor households and not for the non-poor. Both ...

From the capability approach, child poverty is understood as the deprivation of basic capabilities and related achieved functionings. This paper examines multidimensional poverty among Afghan children using the Alkire and Foster method. The case of Afghanistan is particularly relevant as years of conflict aggravated by several severe droughts, political insecurity, bad governance and on going v...

This paper explores the e ects of rainwater harvesting (RWH) on aggregate household labor supply in areas prone to droughts. Using a Brazilian survey on rainwater harvesting, we nd that having a RWH infrastructure at the homestead increases household wellbeing through three channels: (i) a direct time allocation e ect since households spend less time fetching water from distant sources, the tim...

A Portrait of Child Poverty in Germany This paper offers a descriptive portrait of income poverty among children in Germany between the early 1980s and 2001, with a focus on developments since unification in 1991. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to estimate poverty rates, rates of entry to and exit from poverty, and the duration of time spent in and out of poverty. The analys...

This paper documents the variation in living standards of the poorest fifth of children in rich (and some middle-income) nations, with a focus on the relative importance and interaction of social transfers (net of taxes) and labour market incomes. Overall, the cross-national variation in the disposable income of disadvantaged children is comprised equally of variation in market and transfer inc...

p eople’s business credit program (kur) has been launched to alleviate poverty through provision of micro financing to micro entrepreneurs in indonesia this study aims to estimate the impact of kur program using cross-sectional data and propensity score matching technique (psm). the survey was conducted on 332 household entrepreneurs, consisting of 155 kur receivers and 177 non-kur receivers. r...

microfinance, banking to the poor, is a recent global phenomenon introduced as a way for combating the poverty in the 1970’s. before that the poor were not allowed access to credit and loans due to the widespread belief that the poor could not repay loans. but microfinance movement with financial innovations reduced the costs and risks of lending to poor households, and presented as tool for re...

Rural People’s Perception of Poverty in China Subjective Poverty Line methodology is applied to rural China 2002 using a sample from 22 provinces. Respondents were asked two questions: one on amount of food necessary and another on amount of cash necessary for their households. The respondent’s perception of how much cash is needed varies profoundly and positively by income in the county where ...