The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation

On the green and innovative side of trade competitiveness? The impact of environmental policies and innovation on EU exports

In \"The Age of Revolution\", Eric Hobsbawm traced the transformation of European life between 1789 and 1848 by the \"Dual Revolution\" - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. In the years that followed the values developed which, taken together, made up the age of capital. In this history of the years 1848-1875, he continues his analysis of the rise of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of bougeois culture. The extension of capitalist economy to the four corners of the globe, the mounting concentration of wealth, the migration of men, the domination of Europe and European culture made the third quarter of the 19th century a watershed. This is a history not only of Europe, but of the world. Hobsbawm's intention is not to summarize facts, but to draw facts together into an historical synthesis, to \"make sense of\" the period, and to trace the roots of the present world back to it.

The Age of Capital, 1848-1875

This report is the first of a two-part volume on poverty in Africa. This study documents the data challenges and revisits the core broad facts about poverty in Africa; the second report will explore ways to accelerate its reduction. The report takes a broad, multidimensional view of poverty, assessing progress over the past two decades along both monetary and nonmonetary dimensions. The dearth of comparable, good-quality household consumption surveys makes assessing monetary poverty especially challenging. The report scrutinizes the data used to assess monetary poverty in the region and explores how adjustments for data issues affect poverty trends. At the same time, the remarkable expansion of standardized household surveys on nonmonetary dimensions of well-being, including opinions and perceptions, opens up new opportunities. The report examines progress in education and health, the extent to which people are free from violence and able to shape their lives, and the joint occurrence of various types of deprivation. It also reviews the distributional aspects of poverty,by studying various dimensions of inequality. To shed light on Africa’s diversity, the report examines differences in performance across countries, by location, and by gender. Countries are characterized along four dimensions that have been shown to affect growth and poverty: resource richness, fragility, landlockedness and income status. To conclude, a portion of inequality in Africa can be attributed to inequality of opportunity, circumstances at birth that are major determinants of one’s poverty status as an adult.

Poverty in a Rising Africa

The determinants of East Asian trade flows: a gravity equation approach

Education is forbidden: The effect of the Boko Haram conflict on education in North-East Nigeria

The economic debate on existence and definition of the middle class has become particularly lively in many developing countries. Despite this growing interest, the identification of the middle class group in these countries remains quite challenging. Building on a recently developed framework to define the middle class, this paper tries to estimate the Nigerian middle class size in a rigorous quantitative manner. By exploiting publicly available panel data, the expenditure associated to a 10 percent probability of falling into poverty is estimated, and this is used as the middle class threshold for Nigeria. The threshold expenditure for the middle class in Nigeria is found to be 378.39 Naira per capita per day (2010 PPP). Relying on this threshold and through survey-to-survey imputation the size of Nigeria's middle class in 2003 is also estimated. The results show that there has been considerable improvement on the size of the middle class and poverty reduction between 2003 and 2013. Poverty decreased between 2003 and 2013 from 45 to 33 percent, while the middle class increased from 13 percent to 19 percent. Nevertheless the results still paint a heterogeneous picture of poverty and the middle class in Nigeria, where the largest portion of the population, although above the poverty threshold, continues to live with average or high vulnerability to poverty.

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No Condition is Permanent: Middle Class in Nigeria in the Last Decade

This report consists of four chapters. Chapter one profiles the trends in household consumption and poverty rates, and in the characteristics of the poor observed between 1991 and 2012. Descriptive statistics of consumption and selected poverty indexes are presented and a profile of the characteristics of the poor is given. The chapter concludes with an analysis of vulnerability. Chapter two uses descriptive and econometric techniques to identify the drivers of Ghana’s success over the last two decades. Chapter three examines the main challenges Ghana continues to face: widening inequalities, a persistent spatial divide, and the deteriorating macroeconomic environment. Chapter four provides a roadmap for policy action to effectively address these challenges and consolidate Ghana’s success as a middle-income economy.

Poverty reduction in Ghana : progress and challenges

Although resilience has become a popular concept in studies of poverty and vulnerability, it has been difficult to obtain a credible measure of resilience. This difficulty is because the data required to measure resilience, which involves observing household outcomes over time after every exposure to a shock, are usually unavailable in many contexts. This paper proposes a new method for measuring household resilience using readily available cross section data. Intuitively, a household is considered resilient if there is very little difference between the pre- and post-shock welfare. By obtaining counterfactual welfare for households before and after a shock, households are classified as chronically poor, non-resilient, and resilient. This method is applied to four countries in the Sahel. It is found that Niger, Burkina Faso, and Northern Nigeria have high percentages of chronically poor: respectively, 48, 34, and 27 percent. In Senegal, only 4 percent of the population is chronically poor. The middle group, the non-resilient, accounts for about 70 percent of the households in Senegal, while in the other countries it ranges between 34 and 38 percent. Resilient households account for about 33 percent in all countries except Niger, where the share is around 18 percent.

http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2015/01/21/000158349_20150121111032/Rendered/PDF/WPS7170.pdf

Vasco Molini

Papers

The determinants of East Asian trade flows: a gravity equation approach

Education is forbidden: The effect of the Boko Haram conflict on education in North-East Nigeria

No Condition is Permanent: Middle Class in Nigeria in the Last Decade

Poverty reduction in Ghana : progress and challenges

Can we measure resilience? : a proposed method and evidence from countries in the Sahel