According to western views, wealth is unambiguously good, and so human welfare is positive when wealth is in excess of needs, and negative if it is less. Islam has a substantially more sophisticated view of the relation between wealth and welfare. Excess wealth is a trial, which can bring great...

While Taiwan’s democratization and China’s continuing authoritarianism have often been attributed to the decisions of their leaders, might there, instead, be external factors which have ensured that these two polities would have walked along more or less the same route that they have so far,...

The study of international well-being and its distribution remains focused on income. This paper addresses multidimensional well-being from a capabilities perspective during the last one-and-a-half centuries. Relative inequality (population-weighted) fell in health and education since the late...