China’s impressive growth has been accompanied by increasing inequality and a widening rural– urban divide. This paper identifies and examines nine major dimensions of this divide: income, consumption, education, healthcare, employment, child care, pensions, access to public services and...

Using a panel dataset of older people and their households in Brazil and South Africa, this paper provides estimates of changes in poverty among older people in Brazil and South Africa. It examines poverty status transitions of older people and their households over time. It measures the extent...

Abstract Poor urban people in Bangladesh are already experiencing numerous climate-related problems because of their multiple forms of vulnerability and multiple sources of deprivation. Their problems differ greatly, both within and across settlements and cities, and so do the practices by which...

Abstract How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a non-linear relationship between public investment and...

Abstract The caste system – a system of elaborately stratified social hierarchy – distinguishes India from most other societies. Among the most distinctive factors of the caste system is the close link between castes and occupations, especially in rural India, with Dalits or Scheduled Castes...

Abstract Aid for Trade (AfT) has gained prominence as an innovative form of donor support in the era of the ‘post’-Washington Consensus. Institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the European Commission, and the UK...

The paper argues that South Africa’s participation in the World Trade Organization since the birth of its democracy in 1994 was informed by its domestic development challenges. It claims that South Africa’s values were derived from its long struggle against apartheid and its transition to a...

The microfinance sector in India’s state of Andhra Pradesh was recently marred by a series of mishaps that occurred due to extensive lending, which resulted in over-indebtedness and ultimately, defaults. Lending institutions resorted to coercive measures for loan recovery that led to suicides...

Abstract Over time, while some countries have experienced trends of poverty and inequality moving in the same direction, others have witnessed the two developmental issues panning out in opposite directions. The latter is observed in Ghana, where in the last two decades poverty has been reducing...

Abstract This paper introduces a new volume on Adaptation, Poverty and Development: The Dynamics of Subjective Well-Being (Clark, 2012), sponsored by the ESRC Global Poverty Research Group (Universities of Manchester and Oxford) and the Brooks World Poverty Institute (University of Manchester)....