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Publications (16)
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– Are China and India Re shaping the World?
Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the...
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While we know a lot about how countries become prosperous, we have only begun to understand how aid contributes to economic growth and poverty reduction. The development record is mixed and no robust association between the volume of aid and development performance has been discovered. The limits of...
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The ultimate measure of aid effectiveness is how aid affects the lives of poor people in developing countries. The huge literature on aid’s macroeconomic impact has remarkably little to say on this topic, and less still in terms of practical advice to government officials and aid administrators on...
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We argue in this paper that cancelling the debt of the poorest countries was a good thing, but that it should not imply that the debt instrument should be foregone. Debt and debt cancellations are indeed two complementary instruments which, if properly managed, perform better than either loans or...
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Are recent donor approaches compatible with a political understanding of policy processes in partner or recipient countries? This question is given increased urgency with the recent calls for and commitment to increasing financial flows, scaling-up of aid, and promoting donor coordination. Do these...
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– How to Reconcile the Two Approaches
In this paper we examine whether absorptive capacity can constitute sufficient justification for rejecting the proposal of a large aid increase to support the ‘big push’. We argue that the probability of a poverty trap exists for many countries, in particular the least developed countries (LDCs) and...
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– From Economic Growth to Conflict Prevention
The current consensus objective of development aid in the international community is to reduce poverty in general and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in particular. In addition, the dominant view identifies economic growth as the principal means to this end. But the policy...
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Determining whether well-being has improved is an important multidisciplinary task. It is important therefore to develop a multidimensional measure of well-being that reflects a wide spectrum of human needs. A new approach is presented in this paper based on multidimensional hierarchical human needs...
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– Past, Present, and Future
This paper surveys the various composite well-being indices that have been inter-country assessments over the last 40 or so years, including the well known Human Development Index (HDI). A number of issues are considered, including the choice of components, component weights, scale equivalence, non...
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This paper considers the use of participatory methods in international development research, and asks what contribution these can make to the definition and measurement of well-being. It draws on general lessons arising from the project level, two larger-scale policy research processes sponsored by...
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A plethora of what are loosely described as social and political indicators of well-being exist. Both the range and country coverage of these indicators has increased appreciably in recent years. In this paper we ask what contribution these indicators can make towards our understanding of human well...
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This essay aims at a broad, main-stream account of the literature on inequality and poverty measurement in the space of income and, additionally, deals with measures of disparity and deprivation in the more expanded domain of capabilities and functionings. In addition to an introductory and a...
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This paper deals with three questions: (1) What are ‘subjective’ measures? (2) What is ‘well-being’? and (3) Are subjective measures of well-being of use for policymaking, in particular in developing nations? The first question is answered by making a distinction between two kinds of ‘subjectivity’...
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– Concepts and Conceptualizations
Economic measures of income have ignored large areas of human well-being and are poor measures of well-being in the areas to which they attend. Despite increased recognition of those distortions, ‘GNP per capita continues to be regarded as the quintessential indicator of a country’s living standard’...
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International comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed...
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This paper discusses the rationale as well as the challenges involved when constructing gender-related indicators of well-being. It argues that such indicators are critically important but that their construction involves a number of conceptual and measurement problems. Among the conceptual issues...
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