The income lever and the allocation of aid

Lidia Ceriani () and Paolo Verme

No 6367, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The paper develops a concept and a measure of the monetary capacity of a country to reduce its own poverty and shows how these tools can be used to guide budget allocations or the allocation of aid. The authors call this concept the income lever. Making use of tax and distributive theory, the paper shows how different redistributive criteria correspond to the different normative criteria of the income lever. It then constructs various income lever indexes based on these criteria and uses such indexes to rank countries according to their own capacity to reduce poverty. As shown in the empirical application, this methodology can provide an equitable tool to rank countries or regions when it comes to budget or aid allocations, whether it is the allocation of social funds within the European Union (North-North transfers) or the allocation of aid from rich to poor countries (North-South transfers). The findings indicate that the allocation of social funds in the European Union follows closely the rank that results from the income lever indexes proposed while the allocation of aid to Sub-Saharan African countries does not.

Keywords: Regional Economic Development; Rural Poverty Reduction; Services&Transfers to Poor; Achieving Shared Growth; Economic Conditions and Volatility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-dev
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Related works:
Journal Article: The Income Lever and the Allocation of Aid (2014)
Working Paper: The Income Lever and the Allocation of Aid (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6367

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