Spurred by international commitments and expanded funding at the national and international level, attendance in education and associated years of schooling have expanded substantially in developing countries in recent years. But has this expansion in enrolments reduced existing inequalities in...

While the majority of micro studies finds that rural education increases agricultural productivity, various recent cross-country regressions analysing the determinants of agricultural productivity were only able to detect insignificant or even surprising negative effects of schooling. In this...

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...

Um Armut zu bekämpfen, muss die menschliche Entwicklung gestärkt werden. Allerdings werden heute 250 Millionen Kinder unter 5 Jahren in Ländern mit niedrigem und mittlerem Einkommen wahrscheinlich nicht ihr volles Entwicklungspotenzial erreichen. Um Hindernisse für eine optimale menschliche...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that it does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simple approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows comparison...

This dissertation contains three essays at the interface of agricultural and development economics. The motivation for this lies in the fact that various studies have shown the agricultural sector to be the main income source for the majority of the global poor and it will hence have to play a...

In this article, we survey the theoretical literature investigating the role of gender inequality in economic development. The vast majority of theories reviewed suggest that gender inequality is a barrier to development, particularly over the long run. Among the many plausible mechanisms...

Despite relatively sustained economic growth in at least parts of Sub-Saharan Africa over the past twenty years, the fertility transition has not much advanced in most countries in that region. We explore whether the lack of structural change can explain this slow transition. For this end, we...