The vast, sprawling and densely populated province of Punjab, while predominantly agricultural, is marked by considerable regional disparities. An attempt has been made in this paper to see to what extent the differences in the human and social development in its various districts is there. The...

In 1995, a study entitled “Does Marriage Matter?” was published by Linda Waite in the journal of Demography, which was concerned with the direction of such causal relationships. While Waite’s examination of the causal relationships associated with marriage, and most other analyses of this...

This paper calculates a human Wellbeing Composite Index (WCI) for 42 countries, belonging to the European Economic Space, North Africa and the Middle East, as an alternative to the shortcomings of other well-known measures of socio-economic development (i.e. Gross Domestic Product per head and...

A new paper presents a strong case for life satisfaction scales (Diener et al. in Soc Indic Res, <CitationRef CitationID="CR3">2012</CitationRef>). However, it underestimates two important weaknesses in subjective wellbeing (SWB) measures: the contrast between individual satisfaction and social discontent; and the contradictory evidence...</citationref>

The MDGs are interlinked: acceleration in one goal is likely to speed up progress in others. Nevertheless, these synergies are not always visible, and may differ across countries. Using bivariate cluster analysis, this paper investigates whether distinct groups of developing countries can be...