Recent advances in modeling directed acyclic graphs are used to sort-out causal patterns among a set of thirteen measures deemed relevant to the incidence of world poverty. Cross-section measures of the percent of population living on one and two dollars or less per day from eighty low income countries are exposed to a battery of tests of conditional independence with respect to measures of economic and political freedom, income inequality, income per person, agricultural income, child mortality, birth rate, life expectancy, relative size of rural population, illiteracy rate, foreign aid as a percentage of national income, international trade as a percentage of national income and percentage of population that is under-nourished. Motivation for the method of analysis precedes results. Results are presented as a graph that shows our measures of economic and political freedom, income inequality, illiteracy and agricultural income to be exogenous movers of poverty when measured as the percent of the population living on two dollars or less per day. Foreign aid and international trade are not connected to the other variables in the graph. Results on our measure of extreme poverty (people living on one dollar or less per day) show that such populations are immune from improvements in economic progress of the general economy. The “rising tide lifts all boats ” argument apparently doesn’t cover the extreme poor of our sample.

Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. David A. Bessler In this thesis we study three basic issues related to international black tea markets: Are black tea markets integrated? Where is the price of black tea discovered? Are there leaders and followers in black tea markets? We use two statistical techniques as engines of analysis. First, we use time series methods to capture regularities in time lags among price series. Second, we use directed acyclic graphs to discover how surprises (innovations) in prices from each market are communicated to other markets in contemporaneous time. Weekly time series data on black tea prices from seven markets around the world are studied using time series methods. The study follows two paths. We study these prices in a common currency, the US dollar. We also study prices in each country’s local currency. Results from unit root tests suggest that prices from three Indian markets are not generated through random walk-like behavior. We conclude that the Indian markets are not weak form efficient. However, prices from all non-Indian markets cannot be distinguished from random walk-like behavior. These latter markets are weak form