While progress in developing countries as a whole, in terms of growth, poverty reduc-tion, and several MDGs, has been quite good in recent years, fragile states lag behind in levels of MDG achievement. To understand the link between fragility and MDG progress, and also to identify the most...

The fact that Stephan Klasen can always give a precise answer to very complicated or even complex questions inspired the idea for this book. We asked 50 development economists (and friends of Stephan) around the world to answer 50 (serious and not-so serious) questions about development research...

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...

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...

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 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...

Migration continues to be a very important income diversi¯cation strategy, es- pecially 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...

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...

While it is widely presumed that development progress in so-called fragile states is lagging behind, only very limited empirical analysis exists that investigates to what extent the levels and trends in the MDGs differ significantly between fragile and other developing countries, and between...

Using changes in the possession of household assets over the past 20 years, several recent papers have argued that economic performance in Arica was substantially better than suggested by national income data and income poverty statistics, who suffer from well-known weaknesses. We scrutinize...