This article uses data from the 1994-2001 waves of the European Community Household Panel to study economic inequality in Portugal. It reports data on the Portuguese distributions of income, labor earnings, and capital income, and on related features of inequality, such as age, employment...

This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income...

This text comprises chapter 13 of Marx and non-equilibrium Economics[1]. It provides a general mathematical specification of a non-equilibrium interpretation of Marx’s theory of value. It refutes the Okishio theorem and solves the transformation problem. It is a foundation work of scholarship...

Growing criticism of inefficient development aid demanded new planning instruments of donors, including international NGOs (INGOs). A reorientation from isolated project-planning towards holistic country concepts and the increasing rationality of a result-orientated planning process were seen as...

Access to finance is critical to successful development in Africa. This paper presents recent trends in various aspects of development finance and provides a critical assessment of the costs of meeting the Millennium Development Goals in the region. It also examines recent proposals for...

Rapid urbanization is a fact of live even in the least developed countries (LDCs) where the lion’s share of the population presently lives in rural areas and will continue to do so for decades to come. At the turn of the millennium 75% of the LDCs’ population still lived in rural areas and...

The holding of early parliamentary elections in Togo on October 14, 2007, most likely the first free and fair Togolese elections since decades, are considered internationally as a litmus test of despotic African regimes’ propensity to change towards democratization and economic prosperity....

Vast empirical evidence underscores that exporting firms are more productive than non-exporters. As governments accordingly pursue export-promoting policies we are interested in the firmness of these conclusions with respect to African small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and the influence...

A popular and highly politicized theme today is that US workers are falling behind as their real wages fall and income gets redistributed to the rich. The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, led by Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Roger Altman, is dedicated to the study of this...

This unique study discusses the theory of taxation in Islam and the role of Zakat in an Islamic economy. Zakat is a compulsory payment i.e. a tax in this sense paid to the government on one’s income and wealth. The Zakat rates are studied for their viability and effectiveness to fulfill fiscal...