This paper contributes to literature on the process of reform in Latin America. We study political economy aspects and the policy making process of reforms in what we identify as the five critical steps through the "life cycle" of a policy reform: the Planning, Dialogue, Adoption,...

Latin America's recent development performance calls for a multidisciplinary analytical tool kit. This handbook accordingly adopts a political-economy perspective to understand Latin American economies. This perspective is not new to the region; indeed, this volume consciously follows the...

The Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base (GID-DB) is a new cross-country research tool with comprehensive measures of gender equality. It improves upon existing sources because it is the only data base...

To analyze the effect of asset inequality on cooperation within a group, we consider a two-player noncooperative model of conservation of a common-pool resource (CPR): a fishery. We give necessary and sufficient conditions such that conservation is a Nash equilibrium, and we show that increasing...

In November 2005, Glenys Kinnock, Co-President of the ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, reported that “there are more nurses from Malawi in Manchester than in Malawi and more doctors from Ethiopia in Chicago than Ethiopia.”1 These Africans had been lured North by work permits targeted at...

The tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004, to which more than 225 000 deaths had been attributed by the United Nations’ six-month review in June 2005, elicited a worldwide humanitarian relief effort unprecedented in its scale; individuals, firms, non-governmental...

Aid and trade policies – in OECD countries and in developing countries – might reinforce each other to promote development, or they might be substitutes: the sign of the correlation between trade and aid flows depends on the context. East Asia’s rapid growth demonstrates the important...

Efforts to establish, test and analyse hypotheses regarding cross-country variations in women’s economic status are hampered by the lack of a readily accessible and easily used information resource on the various dimensions of gender inequality. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces the <a href="http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/28/36223936.xls"...</a>

Natural disasters (droughts, earthquakes, epidemics, floods, wind storms) damage wellbeing, both in their immediate and long-term aftermath, and because the insecurity of exposure to disasters is in itself harmful to risk-averse people. As such, mitigating and coping with the risk of natural...

Le 26 décembre 2004, un tsunami a déferlé sur l’océan Indien, faisant, d’après l’examen effectué par les Nations unies six mois plus tard (juin 2005), plus de 225 000 morts. Ce raz-de-marée a suscité un effort humanitaire planétaire d’une ampleur sans précédent. Particuliers,...