Study based on a household survey conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) between September 1986 and May 1987 in three villages in the Minya governate.

Research Issues Approach and Methodology; Who Goes to Work Abroad; International Remittances and Income Inequality; International Migration, Remittances, and the Poor; The economic uses of international remittances; Conclusions and policy recommendations.

Workers' remittances have become a major source of income for developing countries. However, little is still known about their impact on poverty and inequality. Using a large cross-country panel dataset, the authors find that remittances in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have increased growth and reduced inequality and poverty. These results are robust to the use of different instruments that attempt to correct for the potential endogeneity of remittances. Household survey-based estimates for 10 LAC countries confirm that remittances have negative albeit relatively small inequality and poverty-reducing effects, even after imputations for the potential home earnings of migrants.

This paper reviews common challenges faced by researchers interested in measuring the impact of migration and remittances on income, poverty, inequality, and human capital (or, in general, "welfare") as well as difficulties confronting development practitioners in converting this research into policy advice. On the analytical side, the paper discusses the proper formulation of a research question, the choice of the analytical tools, as well as the interpretation of the results in the presence of pervasive endogeneity in all decisions surrounding migration. Particular attention is given to the use of instrumental variables in migration research. On the policy side, the paper argues that the private nature of migration and remittances implies a need to carefully spell out the rationale for interventions. It also notices the lack of good migration data and proper evaluations of migration-related government policies. The paper focuses mainly on microeconomic evidence about international migration, but much of the discussion extends to other settings as well.

Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt: Facts and Perceptions Across People, Time, and Space comprises four papers prepared in the framework of the Egypt inequality study financed by the World Bank. The first paper, by Sherine Al-Shawarby, reviews the studies on inequality in Egypt since the 1950s with the double objective of illustrating the importance attributed to inequality through time and of presenting and compare the main published statistics on inequality. The second paper, by Branko Milanovic, turns to the global and spatial dimensions of inequality. The Egyptian society remains deeply divided across space and in terms of welfare, and this study unveils some of the hidden features of this inequality. The third paper, by Paolo Verme, studies facts and perceptions of inequality during the 2000-2009 period, which preceded the Egyptian revolution. The fourth paper, by Sahar El Tawila, May Gadallah, and Enas Ali A.El-Majeed, assesses the state of poverty and inequality among the poorest villages of Egypt. The paper attempts to explain the level of inequality in an effort to disentangle those factors that derive from household abilities from those factors that derive from local opportunities. Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt provides some initial elements that could explain the apparent mismatch between inequality measured with household surveys and inequality aversion measured by values surveys. This is a particularly important and timely topic to address in light of the unfolding developments in the Arab region. The book should be of interest to any observer of the political and economic evolution of the Arab region in the past few years and to poverty and inequality specialists interested in a deeper understanding of the distribution of incomes in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. World Bank Studies are available individually or on standing order. The World Bank Studies series is also available online through the Open Knowledge Repository (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/) and the World Bank e-Library (www.worldbank.org/elibrary). Book jacket.

After a decade of slow economic growth Egypt's rate of growth recovered in the late 1990s, averaging more than five percent a year. But the effect of this growth on poverty patterns has not been systematically examined using consistent, comparable household datasets. In this paper, the authors use the rich set of unit-level data from the most recent Egyptian household surveys (1995-96 and 1999-2000) to assess changes in poverty and inequality between 1995 and 2000. Their analysis is based on household-specific poverty lines that account for the differences in regional prices, as well as differences in the consumption preferences and size and age composition of poor households. The results show that average household expenditures rose in the second half of the 1990s and the poverty rate fell from 20 percent to less than 17 percent. But, in addition to the ongoing divide in the urban-rural standard of living, a new geographical/regional divide emerged in the late 1990s. Poverty was found predominantly among less-educated individuals, particularly those working in agriculture and construction, and among seasonal and occasional workers. These groups could suffer the most from the slowing economic growth evident after 1999-2000.