This paper establishes and explores the implications of a somewhat surprising empirical finding. Although civil war adversely affects the performance of social indicators in general, poorer countries lose less, in absolute and relative terms, than richer countries. It is argued that the...

In the empirical literature on minimum wage enforcement, the standard approach is to measure the number of violations, not their depth. In this paper we present a family of violation indices which, by analogy with poverty indices, can emphasize the depth of violation to different degrees. The...

The standard theory of optimal income taxation under uncertainty has been developed under the assumption that individuals maximize expected utility. However, prospect theory has now been established as an alternative model of individual behaviour, with empirical support. This paper explores the...

We investigate how vertical unity within a community interacts with horizontal class divisions of an unequal income distribution. Community is conceptualized in terms of a public good to which all those in the community have equal access, but from which outsiders are excluded. We formulate the...

While there is a general view that poverty and inequality can lead to conflict and are therefore in this sense security issues, the precise nature of the links is less well appreciated. Focusing on conflicts within states, this paper draws out the links based on the recent economics literature,...

Minimum wage legislation is central in South African policy discourse, with both strong support and strong opposition. The validity of either position depends, however, on the effectiveness of minimum wage enforcement. Using detailed matching of occupational, sectoral and locational codes in the...

The interplay between cross-border externalities, international public goods and development assistance, and the relationship between this interplay and the conventional rationales for development assistance, will be a key problematic facing aid agencies in the next decade. This note sets out a...

This paper investigates the determinants of non-compliance or violation of minimum wage legislation in South Africa, a country where violation is high, at just under 50 percent. The number of labour inspectors per capita is used as a proxy for enforcement, whilst non-compliance is measured using...