This paper looks into the relations between economic growth and poverty reduction in Jamaica. A poverty profile is constructed, based on household budget survey data, and per capita growth is decomposed into pure growth effects and changes in inequality effects. I find that growth has...

Undergraduates in Tanzania and Sweden participated in one Trust game, one Dictator game, and answered a standard set of survey questions relating to trust. In both countries we detected a strong and significant relation between Dictator donations and proportions returned in Trust games, which...

Studying the relation between economic growth and income poverty reduction without taking changes in the distribution of income into consideration is like setting up Othello without Iago in the play. Without any further references to Shakespeare, this paper examines the relations between poverty...

Undergraduates in Tanzania were exposed to one Trust game, one Dictator game and a standard set of survey questions relating to trust. We demonstrate that the survey questions neither predicts trust behavior nor trustworthiness as previously claimed by Glaeser et al. (2000). It is also shown...

This essay examines some outcomes of two decades of market-oriented reforms in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). In general, economic performance, measured by growth of per capita incomes, have not been encouraging, despite far-reaching reforms, including privatization,...

This paper summarizes some salient features of Swedish foreign aid with particular emphasis on the recent decade. We point to a number of problems – including selection of partner countries, changes induced by the EU membership, lack of an explicit development theory to guide the choice of...

The concept of surplus is a potentially valuable tool for the study of development dynamics. This paper presents a definition of surplus which is based on the national accounts and which, therefore, may be used in empirical studies.

While economic growth in Tanzania has increased in recent years, it is still much too low to have a visible impact on poverty. In fact, recent evidence suggests that aggregate levels of poverty have not changed much in the past decade. The main reason for this is that the ongoing and...

Since the economic decline in the early 1980s, most countries in Central America and the Caribbean have returned to positive growth rates. The recovery often coincided with or followed extensive neoliberal reforms. The contributors to this book address the crucial question of whether these...