Recent advances in brain research have provided new evidence thatearly experience matters and have greatly increased interest in theeffects of early childhood interventions on outcomes for children. Thispaper reviews what is now known about the potential benefits andpotential ill effects of...

Von dem vierten Gesetz für moderne Dienstleistungen am Arbeitsmarkt (Hartz IV), das mit dem 1. Januar 2005 in Kraft trat, erhoffte sich der Gesetzgeber eine Stärkung der Anreize, Arbeit anzubieten. Dieser Aufsatz analysiert die Beschäftigungswirkungen einer Senkung staatlicher...

Regular annual studies made by the Office of National Statistics in the UK areintended to show how far taxing household incomes and giving benefits in cash andkind to households redistributes income from rich to poor. The first attempt to do thisin the UK was made by Tibor Barna for the year...

Families with disabled children are susceptible to poverty because low incomeis compounded by high costs. Combing caring with employment is extremelydifficult, so families are heavily reliant upon benefits. But do disability benefitsprovide financial security for families who are susceptible to...

This paper reviews the stylized facts regarding the levels of human capital investments and the returnsto those investments in developing countries. These returns are substantial and are pervasive acrossdemographic groups. Returns are comparable between men and women and between urban and...

In view of rising wage inequality and increasing poverty, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of the introduction of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.5 per hour on the basis of a...

Der entwicklungsökonomische Diskurs ist aktuell geprägt durch eine kontroverseDebatte zwischen Jeffrey Sachs und William Easterly. Der Beitrag rekonstruiert beide Ansätze aus ordonomischer Perspektive. Er argumentiert, dass eine auf Kooperation angelegte Semantik vergleichsweise besser...

Die internationale Entwicklungszusammenarbeit verfolgt zwei Ziele: Armutsreduzierung und Demokratisierung. Auf der Grundlage eines Rational-Choice-Modells wird gezeigt, dass diese Ziele in einem Konflikt zueinander stehen, wenn Maßnahmen westlicher Entwicklungspolitik in und auf Diktaturen...

Throughout the developing world, there is a desperate quest for a way out ofthe financial predicament confronting the rural poor. In most countries of thedeveloping regions, especially South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the ruralpopulation forms the larger proportion of the entire population and...

Using parametric formulae under lognormality for a broad family of povertymeasures, we show that when inequality measured by the Gini coeffcient isconstant, dening the poverty line as a fraction of a central tendency of theliving standard distribution restricts the evolution of the poverty...