The concept of convergence is extended to the human development index. Evidence of weak absolute convergence is found over 1975-2002. The results are robust and verified by various conditional -convergence models and also supported by the evidence of weak -convergence. Population weighted...

The current consensus objective of development aid in the international community is to reduce poverty in general and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in particular. In addition, the dominant view identifies economic growth as the principal means to this end. But the policy...

Adam Smith, Tom Paine, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx were all bold and outspoken about the injustices of extreme inequality, nationally and internationally. Yet by almost every standard, global inequality has grown substantially since they were writing, and national income inequality also over...

This paper provides unique evidence of the positive consequences of seasonal migration for investments in early childhood development. We analyse migration in a poor shockprone border region in rural Nicaragua where it offers one of the main household income diversification and risk coping...

This paper uses inequality decomposition techniques in order to analyse the consequences of entrepreneurial activities to household income inequality in southern Ethiopia. A uniform increase in entrepreneurial income reduces per capita household income inequality. This implies that encouraging...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has the highest growth rate in net international migration in the world. The reasons for this migration are investigated in this paper. First, a survey of the literature on the profile and determinants of international migration in SSA is given. Second, panel data on 45...

The last two decades of the twentieth century recorded a slowdown in health gains and widespread increases in health inequality across and within countries. The paper explores the causes of such trends on the basis of five main mortality models. To do so, it regresses IMR/LEB on 15 determinants...

This paper analyses the relationship between growth patterns, poverty, and inequality in Brazil during its globalization process, focusing on the role played by the labour market and social programmes. Methodologically, the paper makes two contributions to the literature. One is the proposal of...

This paper reviews Finland's growth strategy in the postwar decades. Finland was able to initiate an impressive mobilization of resources during this period, reflected mostly in a high rate of capital accumulation for manufacturing industries. This was achieved by an unorthodox combination of...

Determining whether well-being has improved is an important multidisciplinary task. It is important therefore to develop a multidimensional measure of well-being that reflects a wide spectrum of human needs. A new approach is presented in this paper based on multidimensional hierarchical human...