This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income...

Several sub-Saharan African countries have succeeded at increasing their economic growth rate in recent years, and this has translated into substantial poverty reduction according to objective measures based on household survey data. At the same time, many people do not feel that the poverty...

This paper presents some analytical techniques to help policymakers gauge the technical and fiscal feasibility of development targets. While each of the techniques discussed below has deficiencies, taken together they have proven very useful in providing a sense of realism to target setting. The...

This paper serves as an introduction and overview for a volume that aims to shed light on the question of “time poverty” in Sub-Saharan Africa and its relationship with consumption-based measures of poverty, as well as other development outcomes. Time poverty, especially as seen in the...

Governments in low-income countries have the difficult task of making wide-ranging decisions about public spending, taxation, and borrowing. Although we can analyze at length how both public spending and taxation can be designed and implemented to contribute to growth and poverty reduction, the...