Person:
Lanjouw, Peter Frederik
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty and Inequality Analysis; Rural Development; Small Area Estimation; Village Studies
Degrees
Departments
Poverty and Inequality Team, Development Economics Research Group, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Peter Lanjouw, a Dutch national, is Research Manager of the Poverty and Inequality Team in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Amsterdam Institute of International Development, Netherlands. He completed his Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics in 1992. From August 2003 until August 2005, he was a visiting scholar at the Agriculture and Resource Economics department at UC Berkeley, and he held the appointment of Professor of Economics at the VU University of Amsterdam between September 1998 and May 2000. He has taught in the Masters in Development Economics program at the University of Namur, Belgium and has also taught at the Foundation for the Advanced Study of International Development in Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on various aspects of poverty and inequality measurement as well as on rural development issues.
Publication Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
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Publication
Simulating the Impact of Geographic Targeting on Poverty Alleviation in Morocco : What Are the Gains from Disaggregation?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-09)The authors employ the recently completed "poverty map" for Morocco, referring to the year 2004, as a tool for an ex-ante evaluation of the distributional incidence of geographic targeting of public resources. They simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined sub-groups of the population according to their relative poverty status. In both rural and urban areas, the findings reveal large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as communes or districts. However, these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. The results indicate that a useful way forward might be to combine fine geographic targeting using a poverty map with within-community targeting mechanisms. -
Publication
Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries
(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2012-11)This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage and solid waste disposal. We illustrate for one country – Morocco – that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper hinge on a specific definition of “urban area”; are driven by differences in the cost of living across city-size categories; by reliance on an income-based concept of well-being; or by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level. -
Publication
Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Inverse Relationship between Poverty and City Size in Selected Developing Countries
( 2010-12-01)This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small, or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage, and solid waste disposal. The authors illustrate for one country -- Morocco -- that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. The notion of a single cleavage between slum residents and well-to-do burghers as the driver of urban inequality in the developing world thus appears to be unsubstantiated -- at least in this case. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper are driven by price variation across city-size categories, by the reliance on an income-based concept of well-being, and by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level.