We explore the consequences of liberalized credit markets for growth and inequality in a lifecycle economy with physical and human capital accumulation, populated by households of different abilities, and calibrated to match the longrun economic performance of a panel of emerging countries. Relatively modest improvements in extending credit to the ablest households appear to have large economic...

This paper concerns with rank-dependent poverty measures and shows that an ordered weighted averaging, hereafter OWA, operator is underlying in the definition of these indices. The dual decomposition of an OWA operator into the self-dual core and the anti-self-dual remainder allows us to propose a decomposition for all the rank-dependent poverty measures in terms of incidence, intensity and ine...

A substantial number of recent studies have examined the relationship between poverty and corruption to clarify the ways in which these phenomena interact. An understanding of this complex relationship can inform USAID planning and programming in democracy and governance, as well as in poverty reduction strategies. Corruption in the public sector-the misuse of public office for private gain-is ...

Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, focus on the reduction of absolute poverty measured in terms of achieving some minimum level of income for each person in society. It is recognized, however, that poverty entails more than a lack of income, and the question of relative poverty – that is, inequalities of income within and between countries regardless of level of income – is as ...

This paper asks how much we should care about changes in Lorenz curves and standard inequality measures when economic growth takes place. I conclude that these changes are of some importance but that other aspects of inequality and poverty are more important. Introduction In December, 2006, the new President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, convened a workshop on economic inequality. Chile has achi...