In this paper we analyze if an 'urban mortality penalty' exists for today's developing countries, repeating the history of industrialized nations during the 19th century. We analyze the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) of 19 Sub-Saharan African countries for differences in child and adult...

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is that it considers only average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or by population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have...

Achieving progress in education is of fundamental importance for human development. Low levels of access to the education system and in educational outcomes in developing countries are often accompanied by high inequality between countries and within countries between population subgroups. This...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries. We suggest a relatively easy and intuitive approach which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows comparisons...

While undernutrition among children is very pervasive both in Sub- Saharan Africa and South Asia, child mortality is rather low in South Asia. In contrast to that Sub-Saharan African countries suffer by far the worst from high rates of child mortality. This different pattern of child mortality...

Households in developing countries are frequently hit by severe idiosyncratic and covariate shocks resulting in high consumption volatility. A household's currently observed poverty status might therefore not be a good indicator of the household's general poverty risk, or in other words its...

One existing shortcoming of current pro-poor growth concepts and measurements is that they are completely focused on income. But growth that is declared to be pro-poor where the measure is based only on income must not automatically imply improvement in the nonincome (or social) dimension of...