Understanding the relationship between macroeconomic policies and poverty still remains a key policy challenge. This paper develops a framework to link key macroeconomic variables with poverty and tests the effect of policies, namely the government-led channel of development spending and...

The consensus among scholars and policymakers that ‘institutions matter’ for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that ‘history matters’, since institutions clearly form and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to...

Mongolia’s transition strategy is unique in Asia and has been accompanied by very high levels of poverty. For these reasons, policy choices have been the focus of substantial national and international attention. This paper examines the relationship between these policy choices and the...

Rights-based approaches to development promise to deliver many development goals, particularly in terms of creating a political environment conducive to development. As citizens become empowered through rights-based approaches to make increased demands on the state, it is envisaged that good,...

We analyse new experimental and survey data from rural Cameroon, where the level of trust is much higher than is typical of Africa. We find the level of trust exhibited by individuals to be highly correlated with membership of Rotating Saving and Credit Associations. There is also a significant...

Affirmative action has been at the heart of public policies towards the socially disadvantaged in India. Compensatory discrimination policies which have been adopted for the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) since independence were recommended for Other Backward Classes (OBC) by...

The World Bank, alongside other development institutions and leading donors, has increasingly emphasised the importance of evidenced-based policymaking in addressing entrenched poverty. Additionally, widespread adoption of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) has necessitated establishing...

This paper explores the new politics of difference in Argentina since the 1994 constitutional reform, and its ramifications for citizenship and indigenous wellbeing. Through a comparison of land struggles among the Mbya Guaraní in Misiones and the Diaguita Calchaquí in Tucumán it is shown...

Much of what has been reported about the impact of globalization is based on macroeconomic and social analyses. There is a dearth of research on the meaning and impact of globalization at the individual level. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature. The paper is divided into two...

Brazilian slums and squatter settlements have acquired a generally unattractive public image that often obscures differences between peripheral urban situations. Based on research in a socially stigmatised neighbourhood of the city of Salvador, Bahia, this paper begins with a broad structural...