I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, and this reduced the global poverty line relative to the US dollar. The recent large increase of nearly half a billion poor people came from an i...

This paper analyses the determinants of household welfare in the Northwest region of Tanzania using microlevel cross section data. Despite having gone through a series of structural adjustment programs in the late1980s, Tanzania is still considered one of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper argues that the determinants of household welfare are numerous and complex, ranging fr...

This paper concentrates on the complex interplay between poverty, wealth and life satisfaction. Main areas of life are quantified in a multidimensional approach of poverty and wealth: Individual income, current health, occupational autonomy or employment status and life satisfaction. The analyzed data was taken from the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) at the German Institute for Econom...

The most popular general univariate polarization indexes for discrete and continuous variables are extended and combined to describe the extent of polarization between agents in a distribution defined over a collection of many discrete and continuous agent characteristics. A formula for the asymptotic variance of the index is also provided. The implementation of the index is illustrated with an...

This paper compares the dynamic consistency of targeting methodologies that use multidimensional welfare indicators with those based on means and proxy means tests using panel data from Mexico. To make these comparisons, an extension of the Alkire and Foster (2008) dual cutoff multidimensional poverty methodology is proposed. This extension provides a relative approach to multidimensional depri...

Economic transition is associated with significant shifts in relative prices between private and public goods. If, as a result, public goods claim a larger share of total expenditures, economies of scale in consumption increase. We show how relative price changes might alter the welfare of different-sized households in the short run and over time. We illustrate, for a selection of transition ec...

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 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...

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...

ecause a large number of tourists come to  Mashhad, this city has a high potential for the development of tourism-related activities. Therefore, it is necessary to equip resources for tourism activities and investment in this regard. Despite the highest tourism potential in Mashhad, there are great opportunities for the tourism industry, which has not been fully identified and has not been made...