THE COMMENT BY EDWARDS AND MCGUIRK (2004) HAS numerous significant flaws. These include: (1) an incomplete understanding of the paper by Chang and Ram (2000), (2) lack of familiarity with development data sets and the vast literature on cross-country studies of inequality and growth, and (3) an...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparison of data on real (purchasing‐power‐parity – PPP) gross domestic product (GDP) per capita recently released by International Comparison Program (ICP) with the numbers reported in World Development Indicators (WDI) and Penn...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the cross‐country relation between initial levels of infant‐, child‐ and maternal‐mortality and their rates of decline so as to see whether the so‐called Matthew effect or the inverse‐care principle operates relative to these three...

Purpose – By using the World Bank's new poverty data that are based on the most recent International Comparison Program report, this research aims to revisit the response of poverty rate to increase in real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Design/methodology/approach – The response...

Purpose – In the context of a much higher infant mortality rate (IMR) among Blacks than among Whites in the USA, the purpose of this paper is to compare changes in IMR in the two groups to judge whether the rates of decline are indicative of the so‐called Matthew‐effect or the...

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to study the relation between “restrictiveness” of a country's trade policy and its socio‐economic well‐being as reflected in the indicators of human development. Design/methodology/approach – A recently‐developed...