Falling output and living standards have pushed countries in transition from the socialist system to re-consider how best to target public resources on those in need. The paper investigates the workings of a new social assistance benefit in Uzbekistan, the largest of the former Soviet Central...

This Paper claims that technical progress induces early retirement of older workers. It supports this claim both theoretically and empirically. We present a model where part of human capital is technology-specific, so that technical progress erodes some existing human capital. This affects...

Using original survey data, we examine how insecurity affects welfare. Correcting for unobserved heterogeneity and possible endogeneity, we find an effect of insecurity on incomes, school enrolment, health status, and infant mortality. Results are robust to the inclusion of various shocks...

During the nineteenth century, most Western societies extended voting rights, a decision that led to unprecedented redistributive programs. We argue that these political reforms can be viewed as strategic decisions by political elites to prevent widespread social unrest and revolution. Political...

As exemplified in the 1995 Mediterranean Declaration of the European Union, migration has become a major concern for European development policies. By enhancing socio-economic conditions through development cooperation, a reduction of South-North migration flows is envisaged. This new approach...

Mobility of workers involves flows of labour, human capital and other production factors and thus contributes to a more efficient allocation of resources. Besides these effects on allocative efficiency, migrant flows affect relative wages and also change the international and national...

We analyse general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components through Gini and Atkinson indexes. We embed these inequality-adjusted social welfare functions in a general...

We investigate the origin and evolution of the legal institution of citizenship from a political economy perspective. We compile a new data set on citizenship laws across countries of the world which documents how these institutions have evolved in the postwar period. We show that, despite a...

In this Paper, we analyse the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone's income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while people at...

By means of a descriptive survey of theoretical literature we first work out the potential determinants that may drive international migration from developing to developed countries. In addition, we look at the relationship between trade, development and migration. Empirical studies focusing on...