This dissertation focuses on the relationship between gender equality and economic development, broadly defined. Since the seminal work of Ester Boserup (1970), gender equality is widely understood as being both an instrument for and a consequence of economic development. The first three...

Migration continues to be a very important income diversification strategy, especially for poor populations in developing countries. However, while there has been much analysis on the economic consequences of migration for migrants and the receiving regions, whether internal migration improves...

In this paper, we critically review conceptual and empirical issues surrounding the derivation of the international poverty line, expressed in PPP-adjusted dollars and linked to various rounds of the International Comparison of Prices (ICP). We find that there are some limitations in the current...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of poverty convergence in aggregate data despite the conditional convergence of per capita income levels and the close linkage between growth and...

This thesis looks at two topics that have been prominent on the development agenda for more than five decades: migration and informal markets. To mitigate the problems of both migration and the informal sector, and harness their development potential, a clear understanding of the mechanisms at...

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have also used aggregate information and there exists no HDI at the household...