This article focuses on the case of M-PESA mobile payments service in Kenya. It critically analyzes the assumptions and cultural contradictions that underpin notions of the low-income consumer and their implications in practice for business strategy. The poor-as-consumer model assumes that, in order to target low-income groups, one needs to design products, services, and marketing speciacally f...

This paper explores the link between polarization and inequality and proposes some analytical methods to decompose the Duclos, Esteban, and Ray (2004) polarization index by population groups or income sources. In some cases, the decomposition methods were extended to the Esteban and Ray (1994) one. The main aim of these decomposition methods is to extend the interpretation derived from polariza...

We study how the level and composition of household expenditures changes over the business cycle for households at different positions in the income distribution. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we find that transitory, state-specific increases in unemployment causes lower income groups to lower their total expenditure outlays, contrary to the prediction of the textbook account...

This note outlines the results of the annual survey of the fee income of Australian banks for 2000. This survey covers the fees that banks earn in the process of taking deposits, making loans and providing payment services to households and businesses within Australia. Results from the survey were first published in the Reserve Bank Bulletin in June 1999. The main findings of the survey are tha...

It is a truism that the national accounts have engendered their own concept of income which is different from other contexts such as business accounting, taxation or welfare analysis. Less known are the principles on which this income concept is based. This article is an attempt to specify such principles, investigating in particular the role of the transaction principle, and to derive an incom...

The economic well-being of most U.S. farm households depends on income from both onfarm and off-farm activities. Consequently, for many farm households, economic decisions (including technology adoption and other production decisions) are likely to be shaped by the allocation of managerial time among such activities. While time allocation decisions are usually not measured directly, we observe ...

The main purpose of this study was to determine the factors affecting the export of flowers in Iran. After data collection using by the index of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA), the condition of business of flowers in Iran was compared with a number of countries exporting the product. According to the results of study, the small elasticity of the exportation price in the function of export...

Utility regulators frequently focus as much or more on the distributional impact of electric rate structures as on their efficiency. The goal of protecting low-income consumers has become more central with recent increases in wholesale power costs and anticipation of significant costs of greenhouse gas emissions in the near future. These concerns have led to the widespread use of increasing-blo...