Is household income enough for human development or should government direct resources towards the provision of social services to improve capabilities of individuals? The former is emphasised by the World Bank, and the latter by the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP). This paper tests...

This study provides an overview of inequality in Indonesia for the period of 1984 to 2002 using several widely used measurements of inequality. Firstly, unlike previous studies, our paper uses real consumption expenditure that takes into account the high regional price disparity across regions...

Gender Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure are two gender-based indicators provided by the United Nations Development Program. Population share of the genders enter the formulation of these indicators in such a way that it favours the better performing gender. This can lead to...

The popularly known Human Development Index (HDI) is obtained through linear averaging (LA) of indices in three dimensions - health, education and standard of living. LA method assumes perfect substitutability among the indices. We question its appropriateness and propose an alternative measure,...

Using Minkowski distance function we propose a class of Human Development Index measures. Special cases of this turn out to be the popularly used linear average method as also a newly proposed displaced ideal method. Two measures of penalty are suggested. One captures the non-uniform attainment...

In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in...

When the labour supply is elastic with respect to the net wage, labour income taxation generates economic distortion and welfare loss. The substitute effect is a key determinant of the magnitude of such deadweight loss; thus, evaluating the elasticity of the labour supply has broad and...

When he labor supply is elastic with respect to the net wage rate, labor income taxation generates economic distortion and welfare loss. The substitute effect is a key determinant of the magnitude of such deadweight loss; thus, evaluating the elasticity of the labor supply has broad and...

The present study investigates the trends in inequality, welfare, and growth based on per capita household income/consumption in Pakistan, both its rural and urban areas, from 1963-64 to 2004-05. It employs Gini coefficient to measure inequalities and the Sen welfare index to estimate welfare....

Using a sufficiently long-spanning longitudinal dataset, we estimate the short and long term effects of maternal and paternal death on childrens school enrollment, educational attainment, and health in Indonesia, then compare them to the effect of chronic poverty. We also investigate whether...