Essays on *development and transition.

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of four distinct essays in the general fields of empirical development and transition economics. The first essay concerns poverty change in Indonesia over the period 1984--1996 and measures the extent to which poverty change is correlated with overall economic growth. This essay extends existing methodologies of poverty determination and suggests that there exist important and as yet unobserved factors that influence poverty change independent of influences from changes in overall income and inequality. The second essay concerns the impacts of the 1997 Indonesian currency crisis on household welfare and suggests a methodology that enables meaningful and nationally representative analysis that can be conducted soon after the onset of crisis. This essay finds that the urban poor fared worst of all during the crisis, while poor rural households were protected from the worst of the crisis by the ability to produce their own food. The third essay explores the consequences of state intervention in the labor practices of state owned enterprises in transition economies. This essay develops a model that predicts government intervention concerning the within firm distribution of wages will result in lower overall skill levels in the state sector workforce and lower state firm productivity. The model predictions are then empirically tested with matched firm and worker data from Vietnam. The final essay concerns the work and retirement decisions of older Vietnamese workers with two recent surveys of the elderly. It finds that health is the most important determinant of labor force status for Vietnamese elderly and that there are distinct patterns of work stoppage across sectors of employment that can be explained by Vietnam's recent transition to a market economy.