INTRODUCTION Health-income inequality has been the focus of many studies. The relationship between economic conditions and health has also been widely studied. However, not much is known about how changes in aggregate economic conditions relate to health-income inequality. Nevertheless, such knowledge would have both scientific and practical value as substantial public expenditures are used to ...

Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Floods. Natural disasters can shut the doors of a business for days, weeks or even months. For some small business owners, the inability to recover quickly can spell a death knell. Having a disaster recovery plan in place can make the difference between going forward and going under. It can help to bring organization to an otherwise chaotic situation. A disaster plan begi...

Despite a recent flurry of empirical research on the effects of taxes on small business activity, state-level taxes faced by entrepreneurs have been overlooked by most of the existing literature. Using a 50-state panel of tax policy information spanning the years 1989 through 2002, our analysis reveals that state tax policies generally do not appear to have quantitatively important effects on e...

Standard economic theory suggests that one-time business grants can have at most temporary effects, and accordingly, policies to increase incomes of the self-employed in developing countries typically rely on sustained engagement. In contrast, we found long-lasting impacts from one-time grants given in a randomized experiment to subsistence firms. Five years after we gave $100 or $200 to 115 of...

THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION has been on the forefront of generation and transfer of modern agricultural technologies. However, much still needs to be done to promote better and more effective methods of technology transfer, in order to achieve increased output and higher incomes for small-scale farmers. Technology does not stand alone, but encompasses political, social, economic, and cultural facto...