Urbanization is the single most important transformation that the African continent will undergo this century. More than half of Africa's population will live in its cities by 2040. In the face of rapid urbanization, there is a narrow window of opportunity to harness the potential of cities as...

The East Asian miracle was real. Prior to the 1997 economic and currency crises, Asian NICs Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan achieved remarkable annual GDP growth. In these countries the overall economic performance was significantly determined by the industrial development triggered by...

Poverty reduction initiatives should be comprehensive, relational and global in their outlook even though poverty itself is always concrete and experienced in the local context. This is the major idea underlying this DIIS Report. The Report provides a brief overview of contemporary work on...

This open access volume identifies the common and specific aspects of social mechanisms that generate inequalities, through comparative analyses of different dimensions in which inequalities are expressed. It includes studies on social inequalities in 5 European and 5 Latin American countries,...

This paper uses household surveys from 13 developing countries to describe consumption choices, health and education investments, employment patterns and other features of the of the economic lives of the middle classes defined as those whose daily consumption per capita is between $2 and $4 or...