Examining panel data for more than 13,000 rural Indian households over the 12-year period 1993-94 – 2004-05 confirms on a large scale what grassroots studies have identified before: two parallel and opposite flows regularly reconfigure the national stock of poverty. Some formerly poor people...

Analysing a large sample of 1980-2004 unbalanced panel data, the current study presents comparative global evidence on the role of (income) inequality in poverty reduction. The evidence involves both an indirect channel via the tendency of high inequality to decrease the rate at which income is...

This paper investigates the effect of the devolution of power to the village level government on the household-level allocation of poverty alleviation programmes, drawing upon National Sample Survey data and the Election Commission’s election data. First, greater inequality in land-holdings...

This paper is an assessment of what we know about the political determinants of economic growth. It begins by setting out the stylized facts of economic growth. The paper suggests that there is a need to shift away from much of the previous literature's emphasis on the determinants of long-run...

This paper offers an overview of the strengths and limitations in current empirical research on the measurement of state capacity. The paper also surveys the fast emerging literature on the determinants and effects of state capacity. We argue that existing measures on governance quality used in...

The paper examines the questions of which fiscal (public expenditure and taxation) options work in terms of poverty reduction, and how they can be made implementable in practice. The point of departure is that although the poor, acting on their own, are politically weak, nonetheless there are...

This paper addresses institutional and political relationships that govern the interactions between natural resource extraction, economy and society with a focus on the mining and hydrocarbon sectors. These relationships help define the implications of resource extraction for democracy and the...

This paper focuses on four selected questions. (1) How does local political competition and the characteristics of the elected officials matter for the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS)? (2) Is there local capture of the benefits from the scheme? (3) What...

This paper explores the links between social knowledge, social policy and state forms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its central argument is that the capacities of states to establish inclusive welfare regimes (Gough et al 2004) for citizens are limited by the ways in which states themselves are...

This paper explores what we have learnt about how to instigate, negotiate or otherwise secure pro-poor government in towns and cities of the global South. With competition for scarce resources, the processes of urban development, and specifically the acquisition of land and basic services, are...