Outside of China, despite rapid economic growth in many low and middle income countries, there has been little progress in meeting the MDG1 target of halving the incidence of global poverty by 2014. Part of the explanation for this weak poverty-reducing performance has been the historic...

Over the past decade, several Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have developed or expanded export-oriented apparel industries in the context of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quotas and preferential market access, most importantly under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)....

However pressing the distributional concerns of redressing inequality and overcoming poverty are in the short-run, in the long run meeting the development needs of humankind requires economic growth. This much is indisputable, although the composition of this growth - the weight given to...