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Martin Ravallion, Markets and Famines
No full textMahieu François-Régis. Martin Ravallion, Markets and Famines. In: Tiers-Monde, tome 30, n°120, 1989. p. 953
Book Review: The economics of poverty by Martin Ravallion
No full textIn a post for From Poverty to Power, Oxfam inequality number cruncher Deborah Hardoon reviews The Economics of Poverty by Martin Ravallion
Martin Ravallion: Measuring Poverty, Shaping Policy
Get PDFThis special issue celebrates the remarkable contributions of Martin Ravallion to the field of development economics, and especially his lasting impact on the Development Research Group at the World Bank. The papers featured here were selected from an open call for a conference held in Martin’s honor, co-hosted by Georgetown University and the World Bank, as well as from a symposium organized by Monash University and the Bangladesh Institute for Development Studies. Martin was one of the most influential development economists of his generation. Over more than four decades, he transformed the way poverty is measured, understood, and addressed. His research brought together methodological rigor, deep empirical insight, and a profound moral commitment to improving the lives of the world’s poorest people. His work shaped academic debates, informed global policy, and laid the empirical foundations for poverty-reduction strategies across the globe
Martin Ravallion Recommends “Poverty Traps” by Samuel Bowles, Steven Durlauf, and Karla Hoff
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Targeted transfers in poor countries : revisiting the trade-offs and policy options
Get PDFThe conventional wisdom in mainstream development policy circles is that income transfers to the poor, and safety net policies more generally, are at best a short-term palliative and at worst a waste of money. They are not seen as a core element of an effective long-term poverty reduction strategy. These views are starting to be questioned. Firstly, evidence from careful evaluations has pointed to a number of success stories. Secondly, the presumption of an overall trade-off between redistribution or insurance and growth has come to be questioned. This paper revisits the role of targeted transfers in poor countries in light of the new theories on the social costs of uninsured risks and unmitigated inequalities.This body of theory and evidence offers a new perspective on social protection policies in poor countries, suggesting that there is scope for using these policies to compensate for the market failures that help perpetuate poverty, particularly in high-inequality settings. While acknowledging caveats to policy implementation, the paper suggests that it is time for a pragmatic and open-minded approach to this class of interventions, recognizing the potentially important role they can play, but using careful design and evaluation to assure that the potential is realized.Safety Nets and Transfers,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth
Are the Poor Protected from Budget Cuts? Evidence for Argentina
Get PDFMacroeconomic adjustment programs often emphasize the need to protect social spending from cuts, and to protect pro-poor spending in particular. But does this happen in practice during fiscal contractions? The paper presents evidence for Argentina. Using aggregate time series data the paper first finds that social spending was not protected historically, although more "pro-poor" social spending was no more vulnerable. Turning next to new data for an externally-financed workfare scheme introduced in response to a macro crisis, the paper finds that this program was far better targeted than other social spending. However, it appears that the program still had to assure that a small but relatively well-protected share of its benefits went to the non-poor. This appears to be a political economy constraint.Fiscal incidence; social spending; budget cuts; Argentina
Estimating the Benefit Incidence of an Antipoverty Program by Propensity Score Matching
Get PDFIncome gains from participation in economic programs are estimated as the difference between income with the program and that without it. The "with" data can be collected without much difficulty. But the "without" data are fundamentally unobserved, since an individual cannot be both a participant and a non-participant of the same program. It is common practice to estimate the unobserved income without the program as income with the program minus wages received. However, there are opportunity costs of participating in the program. Ignoring these foregone incomes of participation will result in over-estimation of the gains from the program. We apply recent advances in propensity-score matching methods (PSM) to the problem of estimating the distribution of net income gains from an Argentinean workfare program. PSM allows us to draw a statistical comparison group to workfare participants from a larger contemporaneous and comparable survey of non-participants. The average incomes of the comparison group are compared with the average incomes of the participants to assess the direct income gains from the program. The average gain is found to be about half the gross wage. Over half of the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally, and 80% are in the poorest quintile. Our PSM estimator is reasonably robust to a number of changes in methodology, including a instrumental variables test for selection bias after matching.
Assisting the Transition from Workfare to Work: A Randomized Experiment
Get PDFto assess whether a wage subsidy and specialized training could assist the transition from workfare to regular work. Randomly sampled workfare partici-pants in a welfare-dependent urban area were given a voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable wage subsidy; a second sample also received the option of skill training; and a third sample formed the control group. Voucher recipients, the authors find, had a higher probability of employment than did the control group, even though the rate of actual take-up of vouchers by the hiring employ-ers was very low. The employment gains were in the informal sector and largely confined to female workers, younger workers, and more educated workers. Skill training had no statistically significant impact overall, though once the analysis corrects for selective compliance, an impact for those with sufficient prior education is found. *Emanuela Galasso and Martin Ravallion are economist and research manager, respectively, wit
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