This paper is motivated by the observation that type and combination of assets play a significant role in reducing incidences of shocks by asset-poor households. Asset-based strategies treat assets not just as resources, but also as an agency to transform such resources to improve livelihood...

In September 2010 world leaders will meet in New York to discuss progress in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include the promise of halving ‘extreme poverty’ between 1990 and 2015. The paper begins with a brief history of how the MDGs came into being (See Table 1...

The safety net provided by the African extended family has traditionally been the basis for the assertion that “there is no such thing as an orphan in Africa” (Foster 2000). The assumption is that even families lacking sufficient resources to properly care for existing members are...

A literature review indicates that the main problem in calculating the Gini coefficient of Chinese residents’ income is the shortcomings of the data sources. Though many studies have tried to overcome these limitations through decomposing the nationwide Gini ratio by urban and rural areas, the...

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...