A group of development analysts – researchers, activists, and practitioners - engaged in an unusual exercise in early 2004. They had a dialogue about labor market, trade and poverty issues, but they preceded the dialogue with exposure to the realities of the lives of six remarkable women in...

This paper surveys the main income distribution implications of greater openness in the African context. It considers trade, capital flows, technology, risk, and the ethnic dimension. It argues that the central policy dilemma for African policy makers is how to take advantage ofthe undoubted...

While trade liberalization was perhaps the archetype disagreement on development strategy in the 1980s and 1990s, in the 1990s and 2000s this role has been taken over by water privatization and the passions it arouses. What are the underlying reasons for disagreements on water, among those who...

This paper adopts the “Rip Van Winkle” stratagem, of asking what differences would be noticed, in the domain of poverty and distribution, by someone who fell asleep in 1987 (the year I published my paper on poverty in the IMF Staff Papers, and woke up only in 2007 (the year I visited the IMF...

This paper raises a number of issues in thinking about and addressing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. Starting with choice subject to constraints by parents as determining outcomes for children, the paper identifies sequences of interventions to relieve “binding...