"Quand les riches se font la guerre ce sont les pauvres qui meurent' Jean-Paul Sartre Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (1951) This paper reviews the effect of armed conflicts on development and, in particular, on the prospects of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. It explores the economic...

The paper juxtaposes the fiscal policies – and in particular the changes in social expenditures – adopted during the debt crisis of 1982-1985 and the financial crisis of 2008-2011. The paper shows that – contrary to the early 1980s - the governments’ responses in 2008-2009 were...

This paper uses Polanyi's 1944 analysis of policy change—in which there are long-term swings from state regulation to markets and back again, as the consequences of one regime lead to political reactions that in turn reverse the policies. It shows how the Polanyi analysis continued to apply...

The well-known Human Development Index (HDI) encompasses only three rather basic aspects of human welfare. This paper aims to go beyond this, by identifying 11 categories of human development. We next propose plausible candidates as indicators of these categories. We then estimate correlations...

The human development impact of decentralization is the central focus of this paper, which addresses evolving patterns of fiscal decentralization in Argentina based on health and education indicators. The authors use previously unavailable data to look at decentralization in Argentina over time,...

This paper explores the two-way links between Economic Growth and Human Development by examining the performance of some countries which have been successful in both dimensions and a few which have not. The specific aim is to examine the historical experience of six countries in order to...

This paper adopts a more expansive definition of Human Development than that encompassed by the Human Development Index in order to explore diverse country patterns of behavior in relation to these broadened dimensions. We proceed by first identifying the dimensions to be investigated and...

This paper empirically confirms the significance of various links in each of two chains over time: from economic growth (EG) to human development (HD), including EG itself, income distribution, the social expenditure ratio and female education; from HD to EG, including HD itself, along with the...

The paper reviews experience in advancing Human Development since 1970 by investigating behaviour among countries that made the largest improvements in HD, and those that made the least improvement. The three developing countries with the fastest growth in the HDI over the period are selected...