Local institutional and structural (meso) factors can play a role in mediating the returns to a macro-social policy. I focus on the Brazilian cash-transfer-programme Bolsa Familia and check how contextual features influence the returns to transfers. Building on Amartya Sen's work, I assess the...

This paper attempts to understand Asian Drama in the context of the development debates of its time, and in terms of the sensibilities that Gunnar Myrdal - the brilliant economic theorist and philosopher of knowledge, and Swedish politician - brought to the conceptualization of the problems and...

This paper is a short history of the Indian economy since 1968. India today is a changed country from what it was half a century ago, when Myrdal published his Asian Drama. The stranglehold of low growth has been broken, its population below the poverty line has fallen markedly, and India has...

This paper is essentially autobiographical and describes Erik Thorbecke's journey through the history of development economics between the 1950s and the present. The paper consists of four parts. First, an introduction reviews briefly his professional career as a development economist and his...

Gunnar Myrdal published Asian Drama in 1968, a work which made important analytical contributions to our understanding of development but was deeply pessimistic about Asia's future prospects. Since then, contrary to Myrdal's expectations, Asia's development has been remarkable, although...

We present a unified structural equation modelling framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with a simple ordinary least squares regression. The structural equation modelling framework forms the basis for a...

Based on China Household Income Project rural data, this paper aims to study the changes of rural household income mobility in transitional China. The results show that with the economic reform and development, income mobility between 2007 and 2009 was much stronger than before. Regarding the...

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g. the mean or the median), the amalgam...

In Sub-Saharan Africa we find some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. Nevertheless, we generally know very little about the historical development of inequality. In this paper we look at how inequality developed in colonial and post-colonial Botswana. We show that income...

The degree of choice households have over their consumption expenditure is critical in deciding their economic class. Applying our measure to Egyptian household budget surveys, we estimate the population size of the middle class in Egypt and assess their well-being in the period 1995-2011. Our...