Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues...

In the past 30 years Costa Rica has grown steadily and social indicators have improved markedly. Well-being indicators are comparable or even above the OECD average in several dimensions, such as health, environment or life-satisfaction. This paper reviews the social progress that Costa Rica has...

The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) is arguably the most widely used alternative to gross domestic product for measuring national development. This is in large part due to its multidimensional nature, as it incorporates not only income, but also education and health. However, the...

We introduce an analytical framework for welfare analysis that accounts for changes in the joint distribution of prices and incomes by using parametric formulae of poverty and inequality measures. We propose statistical indicators for the levels, variabilities and a statistical link of price...

The success and failure of any democratic government is gauged in terms of how effectively it has fulfilled its constitutional obligation of enhancing social and economic well-being, particularly the common man. While developed economies use a set of indices to measure well-being, a systematic...

Previous child health evidence in Kenya has been based on uni-dimensional poverty analysis. Assessing the multiple aspects of child well-being can help, however, reveal complexities and ambiguities in the distribution of child well-being. This paper analyses multidimensional aspects of child...

Poverty analytical approaches have recently considered households deprivation in several welfare attributes in what has been tagged multidimensional poverty. This approach has been well embraced due to acceptability of human development indices as a parameter for comparing welfare across...

This paper addresses a key issue in the current debate on economic development: the impact of globalization on poverty. After having discussed the problems related to the definition and measurement of both poverty and globalization, we perform a panel analysis which adds to recent literature by...

A "poverty trap" can be understood as a set of self-reinforcing mechanisms whereby countries start poor and remain poor: poverty begets poverty, so that current poverty is itself a direct cause of poverty in the future. The idea of a poverty trap has this striking implication for policy: much...

Assessments of social welfare do not usually take into account population sizes. This can lead to serious social evaluation flaws, particularly in contexts in which policies can affect demographic growth. We develop in this paper a littleknown though ethically attractive approach to correcting...