The BRICS Grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the IBSA Dialogue Forum (India, Brazil and South Africa)represent interregional cooperative mechanisms of increasing importance in international relations. This can be attributed to the recent rise of the global South,...

Latin America has historically been considered one of the regions with the highest levels of socio-economic inequalities in the world. All countries in the region are characterised by high levels of inequality as regards the distribution of income, consumption, land, access to education and...

In 2007 the Government of Indonesia launched the Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH), the first conditional cash transfer programme in Indonesia. The programme seeks to improve the quality of human capital by providing cash transfers conditional on households accessing specified health and education...

This June sees world leaders and civil society convene for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). It will focus on reviewing progress in achieving the goals of the original 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (the 1992 Rio Earth Summit). A main issue at the heart of...

The Bolsa Família Programme (Programa Bolsa Família ? PBF) is a monthly cash transfer from the Brazilian federal government to poor and extremely poor families enrolled in the Single Registry of Social Programmes. Since 2009, transfers last for a minimum period of two years, regardless of...

The concept of inclusive growth has been broadly used in the last decade to indicate a growth strategy or result that involves both sharing the benefits of and participation in the economic process (see Ranieri and Ramos, 2013). Despite the broad reference to this concept in policy analysis and...

The social pillar?and thus social equity and social development?is critical to understanding what green growth (or making the economic patterns of development more sustainable) needs to do (that has not been done before), who it needs to serve (who has been left out) and why we have failed to do...

Noted economist Partha Dasgupta asserts that ?intergenerational well-being increases over time if and only if a comprehensive measure of wealth per capita increases? (Dasgupta, 2010). Wealth here is not defined in the narrow sense of gross domestic product (GDP) but includes natural capital...

This brief examines the social dimensions of the rapid expansion of biofuels as a key element of ?green economies? in the making. It compares three different contexts (Brazil, India and Indonesia) in the developing world, where biofuels have been often promoted under the arguments of poverty...