While city migrants see their welfare increase much more than those moving to towns, many more rural-urban migrants end up in towns. This phenomenon, documented in detail in Kagera, Tanzania, begs the...
Do poor households shop in a way that leaves money on the table? A simple way to maximize consumption, conditional on available cash, is to avoid regularly purchasing small amounts of nonperishable goods...
For a long time, the urbanization and development discourse has coincided with a focus on economic growth and big cities. Yet, much of the world's new urbanization is taking place in smaller urban entities...
This paper develops the concept of ‘action space’ as the range of possible destinations to which a migrant can realistically move at a given point in time and, intimately linked to this, the set of possible...
This paper develops the concept of "action space" as the range of possible destinations to which a migrant can realistically move at a given point in time and, intimately linked to this, the set of possible...
Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question, this paper extends the basic Todaro-type model of...
Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question the authors extend the basic Todaro-type model of...
Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question we extend the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban...
A good understanding of the constraints on agricultural growth in Africa relies on the accurate measurement of smallholder labor. Yet, serious weaknesses in these statistics persist. The extent of bias...
There is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys both across countries and over time. This variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey...
There is widespread interest in the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution...
A rather unique panel tracking more than 3,300 individuals from households in rural Kagera, Tanzania during 1991/4-2010 shows that about one in two individuals/households who exited poverty did so by transitioning...
Over the past two decades, more than half the population in rural Tanzania migrated within the country, profoundly changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing. Mass internal...
This paper uses data from eight different consumption questionnaires randomly assigned to 4,000 households in Tanzania to obtain evidence on the nature of measurement errors in estimates of household consumption...
This study explores to what extent migration has contributed to improved living standards of individuals in Tanzania. Using a thirteen year panel survey, we find that migration between 1991 and 2004 added...
Consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards. However, accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions...
This paper reports on a randomized survey experiment among one thousand eight hundred and forty households, designed to compare pen-and-paper interviewing (PAPI) to computer-assisted personal interviewing...
This study explores the extent to which migration has contributed to improved living standards of individuals in Tanzania. Using longitudinal data on individuals, the authors estimate the impact of migration...
This paper presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long run for health and education outcomes, in a region of Northwestern Tanzania. The paper studies a sample of 718 non-orphaned children...
The authors use a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data which...