When policymakers and practitioners decide that "empowerment" - usually of women or the poor - is a development goal what do they mean? And how do they determine the extent to which it has been achieved? Despite empowerment having become a widely used term in this context there is no accepted...

Since the 1990s, accelerating economic growth has regained its dominance in the anti poverty strategies. However, the rising tendency of income inequity at the global level and within the countries emphasizes the need to incorporate distributional factors to make the pro-poor growth strategies...

The paper presents an overview of the situation of women in informal employment in Latin America and their access to social protection, and examines key public policy issues in extending social protection to this group. Informal employment has risen in Latin America in the last two decades. This...

While there is growing recognition of the role of emulation in the policy process in general and in policy transfer in particular there are only limited efforts to model it in a systematic way. This paper takes this challenge through a temporal analysis of the role of contagion in the diffusion...

There is a long history to regulation in Ghana, dating back to the colonial days when the regulation of mining land was perceived to be a tool used by the colonial government to protect large mining concessionaires from the intrusive activities of indigenous small scale and informal mining...

Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) has been adopted in most OECD countries to improve regulatory decision making. RIA involves a systematic appraisal of the costs and benefits associated with a proposed new regulation and evaluation of the performance of existing regulations. Although RIA...