Examining the reason for differences in adult literacy rates across countries, this study finds that colonialism exerts a long term negative economic impact on literacy rates of the colonised. Investigating in particular, the effects of the French and British colonisation policies, the results...

This article reviews the present state of the adoption of anti-corruption legal provisions usually adopted in EU (or candidate) countries in Morocco. Morocco lags behind many countries in its adoption of anti-corruption legislation and the recently established Central Agency of the Prevention of...

The design of economic instruments for the protection of ecological wealth in Latin American countries poor in financial capital, but rich in biological diversity poses very specific challenges. This article examines some of the interests, claims, discourses and values of a range of social...

This paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of: (i) an identification method ?k that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and (ii) a class of poverty measures M? that satisfies a range of desirable properties including...

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to ‘missing dimensions’ of poverty data – dimensions that are of value to poor people, but for which we have scant or no data. Amartya Sen frames development as the process of expanding the freedoms that people value and have reason to value....

This article proposes a short list of internationally-comparable indicators of individual agency and empowerment (and the corresponding survey questions). Data from these indicators would enable researchers to explore research and policy issues such as the interconnections between empowerment...

Shame and humiliation are central to the understanding of poverty yet internationally comparable data on this dimension are missing. Based on existing indicators from related fields, this article suggests eight indicators to measure specific aspects of shame and humiliation that could start an...

Employment is the main source of income for most families in the world. While it is certainly not a new dimension of well-being, it is sometimes forgotten in human development studies and poverty reduction policies or, at least, not considered in the depth it deserves. This paper proposes seven...

The central aim of this research has been to examine a particular development intervention by exposing its underlying paradigms and the discourses this generated. It was hypothesized that there is often a disjuncture between the changes explicitly pursued by such an intervention and those that...

The paper examines different strategies for the financing of health care in India, where the effect of structural adjustment has been to undermine the traditional resource base. The relative merits of user fees, insurance schemes, administrative decentralisation and partial privatisation are...