The overall purpose of this evaluation is to ensure accountability for the use of allocated resources as well as to promote a lesson-learning culture in European Commission (EC) development cooperation. The main specific objectives of the evaluation were: •to provide the relevant external...

Africa has come a long way since the economic turmoil of the 1980s, the decade of "structural adjustment". Growth has been strong, yet poverty remains high. Underlying the shortage of good livelihoods and high social inequality is the lack of diversification in Africa's economies-in contrast to...

Vietnam's development performance since the early 1990s has been one of the strongest in the world, following the introduction of its doi moi (renovation) economic reform programme in 1986. The core of Vietnam's economic strategy has been rapid integration into the world economy, with a...

The extent to which local communities benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new district-level database to investigate the local impact on socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which grew almost twentyfold in...

The authors estimate changes in the distribution of household consumption expenditure in Namibia since Independence in 1990 and the effects on poverty. To produce comparability between two household surveys, they use survey matching techniques and apply the framework of stochastic dominance to...

This paper investigates the concentration of access to safe water across income levels in Bolivia. In particular, it focuses on how privatisation has changed coverage, affordability and the concentration of access to water on the part of the poor. We compare the performance of cities in which...

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 contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...