Debates about the potential poverty alleviation impacts of global carbon markets are far from settled. We extend this debate by examining the impacts of a project in Mozambique that pays local people for carbon forestry activities. We conduct before-and-after project comparison using household...

This paper explores welfare dynamics among households in rural Mozambique. Using household panel data, we test whether an asset-based poverty trap exists. Findings indicate that all rural households converge to one stable equilibrium in the medium term, which is close to the poverty line. This...

A novel approach to the assessment of literacy is used to tackle the issue of effectiveness of years of schooling. The dichotomy inherent in the literacy rate is rejected in favor of a “practice-based” approach, which considers literacy as a multifaceted phenomenon as advocated in...

In the capability approach to poverty, wellbeing is threatened by both deficits of wealth and deficits of agency. Sen describes that “unfreedom,” or low levels of agency, will suppress the wellbeing effects of higher levels of wealth. We introduce another condition, “frustrated freedom,”...

Existing foreign aid databases – the OECD’s CRS data and now AidData – are project-based. And yet nearly all empirical analyses using these data aggregate to the country-year level, thereby losing project-specific information. In this paper, we introduce new data on the geographic location...

We develop an approach for making welfare comparisons between populations with multidimensional discrete well-being indicators observed at the micro level. The approach is rooted in the concept of multidimensional first order dominance. It assumes that, for each indicator, the levels can be...

In recent times, social security has been one of the most popular instruments for promoting human development worldwide. Nearly all countries of the world have implemented some kind of social security legislation. While the emergence of social security in the OECD-world has been extensively...

The belief in occult forces is still deeply rooted in many African societies, regardless of education, religion, and social class of the people concerned. According to many Africans its incidence is even increasing due to social stress and strain caused (among others) by the process of...