This study provides an introduction to this special issue of The Journal of Development Studies on economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries. In addition to providing a conceptual framework, it outlines how the contributions fit into the extant literature. A series of regularities emerge across these studies. The poor consist of those who are always poor — poor at all dates — and those who move in and out of poverty, with the latter group tending to be strikingly large. Such movements in and out of poverty are apparent when looking at poverty in either absolute or relative terms. Changes in returns to endowments can be a potent source of increased incomes. Finally, seemingly transitory shocks can have long-term consequences. The study concludes by drawing out the policy implications of these regularities.

Conventional tests for food market integration ask often misleadingly, whether prices in different locations move together. This paper develops an alternative methodology, the parity bounds model (PBM), which uses information on transfer costs in addition to food prices to assess the efficiency of spatial arbitrage. Monte Carlo experiments using data generated by a point-space spatial price equilibrium model show the PBM to be statistically reliable. An application to Philippine rice markets demonstrates that the PBM detects efficient arbitrage when other tests do not. Key words: market integration, parity bounds, switching regression model _____________The author is a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9RE, United Kingdom. He thanks Simon Maxwell, Anne Peck, Jeffrey Williams, Adrian Wood and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The support of the International Rice Research Institute during fieldwork in the Philippines is gratefully acknowledged. 1The issue of market integration lies at the heart of many contemporary debates concerning market liberalization, price policy and parastatal reform in developing country food markets.Integration of food markets is also a precondition for effective reform in many of the former centrally planned economies. Without spatial integration of markets, price signals will not be transmitted from urban food deficit to rural food surplus areas, prices will be more volatile, agricultural producers will fail to specialize according to long-term comparative advantage, and the gains from trade will not be realized. Transfer costs, however, should not be disregarded in assessing food market integration.Accurate information on the different components of transfer costs at a single point in time is usually available to the food price analyst from structure-conduct-performance studies or from interviews with traders. At this point in time, there will be little ambiguity about the arbitrage relationships connecting markets since the only element of transactions costs that cannot be measured with precision is the trader's margin. Transfer costs in other periods obviously will vary over time, so an extrapolation from observed transfers costs in one period will be subject to inaccuracies. But as long as care is taken to ensure that no significant element of transfer costs is omitted from the calculation for the single period, the extrapolation of transfer costs to other periods provides a useful starting estimate of transfer costs over the whole time series. Carlo experiments are then used to assess the statistical reliability of the PBM employing price and trade flow data generated by a point-space model of spatial price equilibrium with both production shocks and general price inflation. The PBM is shown to be able to detect violations of the spatial arbitrage conditions with a high degree of accuracy when estimated with sample sizes that are typical of the short food price series available i...

This study examines the disparities in living standards between and among the different ethnic groups in Vietnam. Using data from the Vietnam Living Standards Surveys and 1999 Census, we show that 'majority' Kinh and Hoa households have substantially higher living standards than 'minority' households from Vietnam's 52 other ethnic groups. While the Kinh, Hoa, Khmer and Northern Highland Minorities benefited from economic growth in the 1990s, the position of the Central Highland Minorities stagnated. Decompositions show that even if minority households had the same endowments as Kinh households, this would close no more than a third of the gap in their per capita expenditures. While some ethnic minorities seem to be doing well out of a strategy of assimilating with the Kinh-Hoa majority, others groups are attempting to integrate economically while retaining distinct cultural identities, and a third group is largely being left behind by the growth process.

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