This paper reviews Brazil's growth performance over the last quarter of a century and discusses the main determinants of a pick-up in growth since the mid-1990s. Emphasis is placed on the policy pay-offs associated with a consolidation of macroeconomic adjustment, which is a pre-condition for...

We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results – based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust for different estimators and financial...

The importance of supermarkets in the world food economy has increased radically since the early 1990s. They are now major sellers and buyers of food items not only in developed but also in developing countries. Urbanization and the liberalization of the services sector have been important...

Whilst traditional food security analysis offers an ex post view on who the food insecure are and why they are so, looking at food insecurity from a vulnerability perspective provides a dynamic and forward looking way of analysing causes and more importantly options for reducing food insecurity....

This paper measures the vulnerability of households in rural India, based upon the ICRISAT panel survey. We employ both ex ante and ex post measures of vulnerability. The latter are decomposed into aggregate and idiosyncratic risks and poverty components. Our decomposition shows that...

This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of wellbeing—education and health—in Africa. We expected to find, as we did in Latin America, that progress in the provision of public services and the focus of public spending in the social sector would contribute...

The literature on the economics of happiness in the developed economies finds discrepancies between reported measures of wellbeing and income measures. The ‘Easterlin paradox’, for example, shows that average happiness levels do not increase as countries grow wealthier. This article explores...

In a heterogeneous population which can be partitioned into well-defined subgroups, it is plausible that the extent of measured aggregate poverty should depend upon the distribution of poverty across the subgroups. A judgment in favour of an equal inter-group distribution of poverty could arise...

Before effective anti-poverty policy can be designed and implemented, the extent, trend and distribution of poverty must be identified. In this sense, poverty measurement is a crucial intermediate step in public policymaking and development planning. This paper asks whether the estimated...

This note points to certain similarities of orientation and outcome between Derek Parfit’s quest for a theory of beneficence and Amartya Sen’s quest for a suitable realvalued representation of poverty. It suggests that both projects, in a certain sense, have been instructive failures. Using...