This paper takes advantage of a new source of information – the Gallup World Poll 2006 – to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC estimates to those in other regions of the world. The Gallup...

Latin America has experienced an unprecedented period of macroeconomic stability and high economic growth between 2003 and 2008. The main aim of this paper is to analyse to what extent these more favourable conditions have been an opportunity for Latin American countries to recover their labour...

Microcredit, being the most unique form of antipoverty intervention in terms of its methodology and outreach, has generated considerable amount of disagreements in recent times. While there may be more serious disagreements surrounding microcredit, this article addresses whether or not...

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...

Some major trends in world income inequalities and relevant economic trends are reviewed here. In recent decades, there have been indications of a reversal of the growing income divergence between North and South after over half a millennium, especially in the last two centuries. Meanwhile,...

Despite the noble concept of equity wherein every citizen has equal right to live a decent life irrespective of their socio-economic and regional/geographic characteristics, the phenomenon of inequality is persistent in everyday life of people especially those living in developing countries such...

Safety is costly, but lack of safety can be even more expensive. This contribution considers the various dimensions of “Economics of Safety”, ranging from safety at work to road safety, terrorism and crime. Economic science helps to understand the role of safety as a (public or private) good...

The object of this paper is to complement theoretical ‘mobile penetration’ literature with empirical evidence in a dual manner: on the one hand, assess the income-redistributive effect of mobile phone penetration and; on the other hand, the instrumentality of good governance in this nexus....

The present paper is an attempt to examine the levels of deprivation of rural people in terms of their access to basic amenities like, housing, drinking water, sanitation etc. And also it evaluates the degree of relative disadvantage of rural people when compared with their urban counterparts....

Linking indegenious knowledge of the community with modern techniques to mesure, analyse and reduce disaster vulnerability is one way of engaging and moblising community capacity. This paper discuses he use of the local/ indegenious knowledge into disater management. It suggest a way to moblise...