Despite the widespread use of income as a measure of household welfare, there is much to recommend the use of consumption. Indeed, standard economic arguments suggest that consumption expenditure will better reflect expected lifetime resources and many economists have been unequivocal in advocating its use. Slesnick (1993), for example, suggests that ‘From a theoretical perspective it is more a...

Inequality in Vietnamese Urban-Rural Living Standards, 1993-2006 Using data from five waves of the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey, we find evidence of significant urban-rural expenditure inequality. Urban-rural inequality in Vietnam increased dramatically from 1993 to 1998, and peaked in 2002 before reducing slightly in 2004, and significantly in 2006. The urban-rural gap also monoton...

By its very nature, standardization claims to set unique rules and procedures, thus aiming unique, i.e. comparable and reproducible results. Also, to be effective, the standard and the underlying approach need to be broadly accepted by the addressed user community. To come up with such general agreement it is typically required that a “best” approach, covering all relevant applications of inter...

Acknowledgments: We thank Tran Quoc Trung for his assistance in providing information about the enterprise laws that were instituted in 2000, and we thank Dwayne Benjamin for sharing important data with us that he had developed together with Loren Brandt. Furthermore, we appreciate the comments provided by Paul Glewwe, as well as the many suggestions offered by the participants of the conferenc...

We use records of 870,000 burials and 610,000 baptisms to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of birth and death in London from 1560 to 1665, a period dominated by outbreaks of plague. The plagues of 1563, 1603, 1625, and 1665 appear of roughly equal magnitude, with deaths running at five to six times their usual rate, but the impact on wealthier central parishes falls markedly throug...

This study aimed to construct indices of living standards in rural Bangladesh that could be useful to study health outcomes or identify target populations for poverty-alleviation programmes. The indices were constructed using principal component analysis of data on household assets and house construction materials. Their robustness and use was tested and found to be internally consistent and co...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Child maltreatment (abuse and neglect) has established effects on mental health. Less is known about its influence on adult economic circumstances. We aimed to establish associations of child maltreatment with such outcomes and explore

almost every experinced manager has been faced with the necessity of dealing with the problems of productivity in connection with wages and salaries. during the last two decades, governments, cultural centers, managers and ::::union::::s have focused their attention on productivity as an important subject and there have been many articles emphasizing the linkage between wages and productivity a...

This paper examines whether, in the absence of information on household income or consumption, data on household infrastructure, building materials, and ownership of certain durable assets can be used to measure inequality in living standards. Principal components analysis is used to obtain a relative measure of inequality, and a bootstrap prediction method is provided for use when auxiliary su...