The world’s biggest Employment Guarantee Programme, India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has been in operation in rural India since February 2006. In principle, the scheme is a self-targeted programme designed to provide 100 days of employment to rural households and to...

The paper looks at the impact of workers’ remittances on the competitiveness of the receiving economy. It extends existing research that concentrated on the exchange rate effects of remittances, the so-called Dutch disease effect, by adding labour market effects. The results show that the...

The international community is under increased pressure to show results from the money invested through aid agencies. While support for international development has been large, there has also been a forceful critique. This paper argues that much of the public debate tends to be...

In this study we contrast forestry reforms and their stated objectives against the state of the forestry sector in Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua. Once we look at the policy failures that underlie the gap between policy objectives and the state of forestry, we find that stated policies are not...

We examine the marginal effects of decentralized public health spending by incorporating estimates of behavioural responses to changes in public health spending through benefit incidence analysis. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of 207 Indonesian districts over a 4-year period from 2001...

This study addresses political participation rights from the perspective of a social movement. We focus on the case of the NO movement which emerged in Costa Rica in 2007 in the run-up to the Referendum on ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The study explores some...

This paper evaluates the domestic adjustment to recent positive external shocks in Argentina's natural resource sectors. Although there is no single, exclusive determinant of Argentina’s fast economic growth in the period 2003-2007, the paper illustrates the favourable contribution of certain...

What interpretation of human flourishing, what ideas of value does capitalism in practice embody and promote? To address this question the paper clarifies first that ‘capitalism’ must be understood as more than merely a system of private property and markets. It contains ‘the prerogative...

What do China’s dramatic transformations over the last 30 years imply for development studies and practice? China has lifted a record number of people out of poverty, and has had sustained levels of economic growth close to ten per cent per annum, albeit at well-documented environmental and...

This paper investigates the impact of economic and commercial diplomacy on the geography of international trade. We replicate a recent study by Rose (2007) extending the analysis to include the year 2006 and 63 importing and exporting countries. Using a gravity model we are able to demonstrate...