We document a U-shaped relationship between income inequality and carbon dioxide emissions per capita, using a newly available panel data set on income inequality (GINI) with observations for 138 countries over the period 1960–2008. Our findings suggest that, for high-income countries with...

This article appraises the similarities and dissimilarities between the major sources of information on the South African labour force, ie the CSS Employment Series, the Standardised Employment Series and recent household surveys. It concludes that the generally bleak picture of very high...

It has been argued that the potential gains of community-driven development (CDD) poverty programs are large as these can foster sustained poverty reduction. However, recent literature shows that community involvement can increase the risk of elite capture, particularly in more unequal...

We study the surprisingly low level and stagnation of female labor force participation rates in urban India between 1987 and 2009. Despite rising growth, fertility decline, and rising wages and education levels, women's labor force participation stagnated at around 18%. Using five large...

Although empowerment is seen as intrinsically important and instrumentally valuable to escape poverty, there is very little research on the empirical drivers of empowerment. Using custom-made household-level information and using advanced econometric techniques that also correct for endogeneity,...

While it is regularly stated that development progress in so-called fragile states is lagging behind, only very limited empirical analysis exists that investigates to what extent the levels and trends in achievements in MDG indicators differ between fragile and other developing countries, and...

Governments provide foreign aid for both political and economic reasons, as is now well documented. Conventional wisdom holds that political motivations lower the effectiveness of aid in promoting developmental objectives. We test this claim by focusing on a setting in which we observe...

There is a large number of regional agreements concerning Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, often linked to other regional integration agreements. The most successful one in making effort in reducing carbon emissions is the Emission Trading System by the European Union (EU ETS). Apart from this...