infrastructure plays an important role in the process of economic development. access to such infrastructures as safe piped drinking water, educational and health services, electrification and efficient transport system enhance human welfare. the main objective of this study is to determine the contribution of the main types of infrastructure investments to reduction of poverty and more balance...

Urban Poverty: a multidimensional concept; Educational Package I Poverty: monster with many heads; income poverty, poor living conditions, social and political exclusion. Defining urban poverty is the basic requirement for conceptual thinking and relevant policy discussions, especially because poverty is not that easily defined and well understood. A generally-agreed thinking on poverty could b...

Many authors have insisted on the necessity of defining poverty as a multidimensional concept rather than relying on income or consumption expenditures per capita. Yet, not much has actually been done to include the various dimensions of deprivation into the practical definition and measurement of poverty. Existing attempts along that direction consist of aggregating various attributes into a s...

This paper investigates the persistence of poverty over individuals' lifetimes using a hazard rate approach that accounts for multiple spells of poverty and incorporates spell duration, individual and household characteristics, and unobserved heterogeneity. The findings highlight the importance of considering multiple spells in an analysis of poverty persistence, with half of those who end pove...

This paper estimates trends in absolute poverty in urban China from 1988 to 2002 using the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) surveys. Poverty incidence curves are plotted, showing that poverty has fallen markedly during the period regardless of the exact location of the poverty line. Income inequality rose from 1988 to 1995 but has been fairly constant thereafter. Models of the determinat...

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In order to avoid the usual binary definition of poverty, a fuzzy set approach to poverty measurement has been used. The poor are typically analyzed by partitioning the total population in three mutually exclusive groups around the poverty line. This builds on fuzzy sets theory whereby the definition of the threshold of who is poor or non-poor, is fuzzy. This paper presents a method that consis...

Thanks to continued economic growth and increasing income, the overall poverty rate has been on the decline in China. However, due to escalating medical costs and lack of insurance coverage, medical spending often causes financial hardship for many rural families. Using data from the 1998 China National Health Services Survey, the impact of medical expenditure on the poverty headcount for diffe...

Drawing on recent work concerning the statistical robustness of inequality statistics we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function. We show that poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties, and demonstrate that an important commonly used subclass of poverty measures will be robust under data...