In this paper we describe the major trends in China's income inequality over the past 40 years and explain them as the outcome of four interleaved stories. The first story is a standard development story characterized by structural change, market development, labour absorption, and the Kuznets...

This paper provides a critical survey and synthesis of the recent economic literature on intergenerational mobility in developing countries, with a focus on data and methodological challenges. The attenuation due to measurement error is compounded by sample truncation resulting from co-residency...

This paper examines income mobility in developing countries. We start by synthesizing findings from the available evidence on relative mobility and poverty dynamics. We then describe evidence on economic mobility obtained via synthetic panels constructed from cross-section data. We echo earlier...

Preventable and treatable childhood diseases, notably acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases are the first and second leading causes of death and morbidity among young children in developing countries. The fact that a large proportion of child deaths are caused by these diseases is...

The issue of employer power is underemphasized in the development literature. The default model is usually one of competitive labour markets. This assumption matters for analysis and policy prescription. There is growing evidence that the competitive labour markets assumption is not valid for...

This paper discusses past and current social policy strategies in the international aid architecture. From the 1990s, aid strategy and policy shifted to put a stronger emphasis on human development. This accelerated with the Millennium Development Goals and will continue under the Sustainable...

Social engineering refers to deliberate attempts, often under the form of legislative moves, to promote changes in customs and norms that hurt the interests of marginalized population groups. This paper explores the analytical conditions under which social engineering is more or less likely to...

This paper is the first to address the challenges of measuring the labour income share of developing countries. The poor availability and reliability of national accounts data, and the fact that self-employed people, whose labour income is hard to capture, account for a major share of the...

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19's impact on global poverty in the light of the IMF's April 2020 growth forecasts. The analysis shows that the pandemic will have dramatic consequences, eroding many of the gains recorded over the last decade in terms of poverty reduction....

Migration decisions affect those left-behind in ways that are partly taken into account by market forces (e.g., wage effects on labour markets) and for the most part these can be seen as pure externalities. Diasporas are an example of such an externality. This paper reviews the recent economic...