This two-volume original reference work provides a comprehensive overview of development economics and comprises contributions by some of the leading scholars working in the field. Authors are drawn from around the world and write on a wide range of topics.

We identify a group of people in Latin America that are not poor but not middle class either—namely “strugglers” in households with daily income per capita between $4 and $10 (at constant 2005 PPP). This group will account for about a third of the region’s population over the next...

The authors present a case for user charges and some privatization of health care in developing countries. They demonstrate that - consistent with public choice theory - government actions in the health sector are neither equitable nor efficient in developing countries. In general, they increase...

The authors analyze the Washington Consensus, which at its original formulation reflected views not only from Washington, but also from Latin America. Tracing the life of the Consensus from a Latin American perspective in terms of evolving economic development paradigms, they document the...

El presente informe propone un nuevo contrato social, basado en el empleo y orientado a las aspiraciones de la vasta mayoría de la región, compuesta por personas de clase media cercanas a los niveles de pobreza, cuya participación es clave para lograr el crecimiento y fortalecimiento de la...

During the 1990s, the World Bank and several donor partners provided a “surge” in external aid to support Pakistan’s social sectors. Despite the millions of donor dollars spent, the program failed. Poverty was higher in Pakistan in 2004 than it was a decade earlier when the antipoverty...

Inclusive growth is widely embraced as the central economic goal for developing countries, but the concept is not well defined in the development economics literature. Since the early 1990s, the focus has been primarily on pro-poor growth, with the “poor” being people living on less than $1...

In this Paper we focus on the question: Will the HIPC debt reduction program help in the transformation of the development assistance business and change the rules of the ‘debt game’ in Africa? We concentrate on the donor and official creditor side, by exploring how the growing debt of...