The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the effect of growth on poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but I find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less from...

The assumption of perfectly functioning labour markets is ubiquitous in growth theory, yet incompatible with equally ubiquitous poverty in developing countries' informal sectors. We argue that developing countries and high-income countries differ as in the former, induced by informal sector...

The history of the ILO is characterized by a long fight to put employment at the heart of development strategies. Cautious about the limits of the growth trickle down effect, the ILO always emphasized that the economic growth objective should be reincorporated into an integrated development...

The foreign aid landscape has undergone a paradigm shift in the last few decades, with changes in the behaviour of 'traditional' donors and a new focus on selectivity in aid disbursement, as well as 'new' donors and South-South co-operation playing an increasingly important role. Amidst these...

The informal sector (IS) plays a significant role in developing countries viz. the provision of employment, income and supplying ignored markets. However, working and employment conditions within the sector are still poor. Its expansion and changing structures have thus drawn the attention of...

This paper reviews the recent literature on the developmental effects of resource abundance, assessing likely effects and channels with respect to income inequality, poverty, education, and health. To date, this area has received less analysis although it is relevant to the Sustainable...

Empirical tests in the 1990s found little evidence of poor countries catching up with rich - unconditional convergence - since the 1960s, and divergence over longer periods. This stylized fact spurred several developments in growth theory, including AK models, poverty trap models, and the...