This presentation deals with the following issue: how poverty, poor health, nutrition and care affect child development. The author reviews a series of "capabilities approaches," including concepts such as the conversion of primary good into the person's ability to promote his/her ends. This...

Brazil is characterized by large inequalities in income, access to health care, and health status. This paper uses data from the 1998 Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios to analyze the complex relationships among health, income, health insurance and health care utilization to gain a...

A working paper summarizing the experiences of conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America, focusing on their challenges and options to improve them.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are spreading rapidly throughout the developing world. These are the subjects of this paper and include Colombia's Familias en Acción, Honduras' PRAF, Jamaica's PATH, Mexico's Progresa/Oportunidades, and Nicaragua's Red de Protección Social. While...

This report examines evidence from post-Mitch Central America and disasters in other parts of the world to identify the ways disasters affect women and to highlight women's participation in prevention, relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction efforts. This report is based on background papers...

Does early childbearing restrict women's social and economic opportunities? These questions are explored by examining the effects, first on marital status and family formation, and second on women's employment options, earnings and poverty condition. The four studies presented here (from Chile,...

This article discusses the plight of poor women around the world and the feminization of poverty. The evidence is imperfect, but current trends suggest that women account for a growing proportion of those people who are considered poor on the basis of income, not only in industrial countries,...

Much has been written on gender inequality and how it affects fertility and mortality outcomes as well as economic outcomes. What is not well understood is the role of gender inequality, embedded in the behavior of the family, the market, and society, in mediating the impact of demographic...

Much has been written on gender inequality and how it affects fertility and mortality outcomes as well as economic outcomes. What is not well understood is the role of gender inequality, embedded in the behavior of the family, the market, and society, in mediating the impact of demographic...