Household intertemporal decisions and poverty dynamics

We study the implication of poverty traps for the design and performance of a government's targeting transfers for poverty alleviation and for those of poverty measures in Chapters 1 and 2, respectively. The analysis of Chapter 1 shows potentially large returns to a social protection policy that places a productive safety net below the vulnerable to keep them from slipping into poverty traps. Such a safety net would enable households to increase production, preventing unnecessary increases in poverty and leaving more government spending for chronic poverty. Chapter 2 proposes new poverty measures which can predict expected future welfare status and vulnerability by taking into account a household's forward-looking behavior and utilizing information on assets and productivity.;In Chapter 3, we ask whether prime-age adult mortality due to HIV/AIDS decreases the endowment of knowledge for agricultural production in Kagera, Tanzania, reducing total factor productivity. We also quantify how much this negative effect contributes to the decrease in long-term household agricultural income growth compared to the contribution of decreased accumulation of productive assets; household members, land, and livestock. We find that prime-age adult mortality decreases the accumulation of knowledge stock as total factor productivity and the contribution of this negative effect to the decrease in agricultural income growth is larger than the contribution of decreased accumulation of each productive asset.