European Enlightenment thinkers were right in stressing the political dimension of inequality, rather than referring to "natural differences" as some others did after them in the 19th or 20th centuries. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical contributions in social sciences and in...

The paper proposes an overview of the links between trade openness and international migration. Written in 1997, it is reedited here as a tribute to Geroges Tapinos, died suddendly on 20 November 2000. The paper argues that free trade policies presently proposed by developed countries to...

(english) To what extent did the colonial public policy influence the current regional inequalities in the Frenchspeaking West Africa? This paper uses the differences in development outcomes across the areas of the former French West Africa to show the existence of colonial long term effects on...

What is the kind of institutions that affect economic inequalities? Using a database on national income inequality for 73 non-European countries, we show that 'good governance' not only contributes to the level of income but also to a more equal distribution by increasing the income share of the...

I propose a personal reading of some theories of social justice at a moment when the issue of equality or equity appears to be back on the ‘development agenda’. Nowadays the term equity tends to be most often associated with the equality of opportunity principle. After having briefly...

Macroeconomic data on 45 countries are combined with microeconomic data on 4 case-study countries to reveal significant differences in the levels of education attained under the different colonial powers in Africa during the colonial period. In 1960, former British colonies exhibited higher...

(english) This last decade has seen the emergence of a new field of research in development economics: randomised control trials. This paper explores the contrast between the (many) limitations and (very narrow) real scope of these methods and their success in sheer number and media coverage....