The hypothesis is that Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency have an aspect of sustainability in relation to inequality. The analysis finds efficient situations reached increasing inequality as diminishing in the long term effective demand in a larger measure than counterbalancing increases thanks...

This paper presents quasi-experimental impact estimates of women self-help groups on subjective well-being in Orissa, India. We find that, on average, self-help group membership does not affect subjective well-being. However, our results at the same time reveal that subjective well-being sharply...

This paper provides an overview of the political and economic context under which Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades was introduced to prelude the emergence of social assistance in Latin America. The paper identifies four distinctive features of the programme that were revolutionary in their own...

The formidable economic growth of China in the past few decades led to outstanding improvements in virtually all objective indicators of standards of life. However, these objective records are in striking contrast with subjective ones. Between 1990 and 2007, Chinese average subjective well-being...

Using the latest nationally representative household survey for Chile, this paper empirically assesses multidimensional poverty both at the national and subnational level. Based on the Alkire-Foster method and focusing on four dimensions of well-being –education, health, income and living...

The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) was presented in the 20th anniversary edition of the Human Development Reports, in 2010. In using a penalty setup for the calculations of the IHDI, however, the results overestimate the adjustments on the HDI. This paper suggests a revision...

One of the objectives of this CEM was to identify the most promising products and conduct competitiveness diagnostic. The products list is summarized in Table 1 below. Competitiveness, in this report, is seen as a combination of productivity and costs, and the second section of the CEM presents...

It is widely recognized that many developed countries have established democratic institutions, while the majority of developing countries are far from being democratic states (e.g. Acemoglu, 2008). One argument for this discrepancy is that there exists a strong relationship between democracy...

This paper provides a brief but comprehensive overview of microfinance academic literature with emphasis on recent innovations, trends and efficiency. In particular, we focus on controversial issues of microfinance, such as commercialization, regulation, interest rate policy and the balance...

The international debate on the question of whether shared and/or public sanitation facilities should be considered improved is still open. The concern is that a shared sanitation facility cannot be maintained in hygienic conditions when used by too many people. The analysis of 1’500 randomly...