The most limiting weakness of the human development index (HDI) is that it looks only at average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have also used...

In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of development aid in recipient countries. Specifically, we analyze the relationship between per-capita income and foreign aid for a maximum of 131 recipient countries over the 1960 to 2006 period. We employ annual data and 5-year averages and,...

One existing shortcoming of current pro-poor growth concepts and measurements is that they are completely focused on income. But growth that is declared to be pro-poor where the measure is based only on income must not automatically imply improvement in the nonincome (or social) dimension of...

In this paper we examine the mathematical relationship between growth and distributional change on absolute (i.e. percentage point) changes in FGT poverty measures assuming a log-normal distribution. We also test the empirical relationship of the derived semi-elasticities of growth and...

In many developing countries, there does not exist a time series of nationally representative household budget or income surveys, while there often are surveys of regions as well as nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) which lack information on incomes. This makes an...

There is well-known debate about the respective role of geography versus institutions in explaining the long term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity...

An increasing interest in poverty dynamics has lately also led to an extensive literature on the analysis of chronic poverty. Based on Amartya Sen?s groundbreaking work on capabilities and functionings static poverty measures have long used non-income indicators. In contrast, measures of poverty...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries. We suggest a relatively easy and intuitive approach which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows comparisons...

This paper challenges the widespread belief that FDI generally has a positive impact on economic growth in developing countries. It addresses the limitations of the existing literature and re-examines the FDI-led growth hypothesis for 28 developing countries using cointegration techniques on a...

This paper examines the relationship between measures of income poverty, undernourishment, childhood undernutrition, and child mortality in developing countries. While there is, as expected, a close aggregate correlation between these measures of deprivation, the measures generate some...