We investigate the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade, as two measures of globalization, on female labor force participation in a sample of 80 developing countries over the last decades. Contrary to the mainstream view in the literature, which is mainly based on country-case...

Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to accelerate poverty reduction in developing countries. The diagnostic pro-poor growth toolbox has so far focused on the income dimension as well as key non-income achievements in education and health. This article...

We document a U-shaped relationship between income inequality and carbon dioxide emissions per capita, using a newly available panel data set on income inequality (GINI) with observations for 138 countries over the period 1960-2008. Our findings suggest that, for high-income countries with high...

The Human Development Index (HDI) published in the Human Development Report (HDR) of the United Nations Development Program is calculated as a simple average of the Life Expectancy Index (LEI), the Education Index (EI) and the Gross Domestic Product Index (GDPI). This paper provides statistical...

This paper critically reviews the recent changes to the Global Poverty numbers generated by the World Bank in 2008. While they have little impact on observed poverty trends and while there are good reasons to believe that the previous numbers were on weak foundations, the new numbers on levels...

This paper looks at household consumption and financial decisions made in a matrilineal society where women are traditionally the household financial managers. This culture was strongly altered by the British in the mid-19th century through Christian missionaries who proclaimed that the role of...

Many countries spend significant resources on investment promotion agencies (IPAs) in the hope of attracting inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Despite the importance of this question for public policy choices, little is known about the effectiveness of investment promotion efforts....

In this paper, we propose to use the so-called Sen-Shorrocks poverty index (Shorrocks, 1995) to measure multidimensional deprivation when only dichotomous variables are available to assess deprivation in the various deprivation domains, the most common case in the literature, and introduce a...

This paper empirically investigates the role of nurture for the frequently reported differences in financial knowledge between women and men and uses a quasi-experimental framework comparing individuals who live in a matrilineal with those in a patriarchal environment in India. The results of...

This paper looks at household consumption and financial decisions made in a matrilineal society where women are by culture the financial household managers. This culture was strongly altered by the British in the mid-19th century in particular through christian missionaries who proclaimed that...