Economic vulnerability is approached from micro- and macroeconomic perspectives. While the microeconomic perspective is concerned with the impact of shocks on the well-being of individual households, the macroeconomic perspective focuses on the impact of these shocks on economic growth. This...

This paper examines the substantive pros and cons of the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) recently developed by Oxford University?s Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). It provides comparative cross-country and country-specific discussion on multidimensional poverty and...

Social policies play a critical role in the transformation of emerging economies. This paper discusses this with reference to China and India, with their very distinctive public policy approaches. Much of the economics literature either does not pay much attention to social policy or regards it...

This June sees world leaders and civil society convene for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). It will focus on reviewing progress in achieving the goals of the original 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (the 1992 Rio Earth Summit). A main issue at the heart of...

The Bolsa Família Programme (Programa Bolsa Família ? PBF) is a monthly cash transfer from the Brazilian federal government to poor and extremely poor families enrolled in the Single Registry of Social Programmes. Since 2009, transfers last for a minimum period of two years, regardless of...

The concept of inclusive growth has been broadly used in the last decade to indicate a growth strategy or result that involves both sharing the benefits of and participation in the economic process (see Ranieri and Ramos, 2013). Despite the broad reference to this concept in policy analysis and...

The social pillar?and thus social equity and social development?is critical to understanding what green growth (or making the economic patterns of development more sustainable) needs to do (that has not been done before), who it needs to serve (who has been left out) and why we have failed to do...

Noted economist Partha Dasgupta asserts that ?intergenerational well-being increases over time if and only if a comprehensive measure of wealth per capita increases? (Dasgupta, 2010). Wealth here is not defined in the narrow sense of gross domestic product (GDP) but includes natural capital...

This brief examines the social dimensions of the rapid expansion of biofuels as a key element of ?green economies? in the making. It compares three different contexts (Brazil, India and Indonesia) in the developing world, where biofuels have been often promoted under the arguments of poverty...

The current discussions about how to tackle hunger in developing countries highlight the adoption of a two-track approach as an effective framework (FAO, 2011). This strategy uses a combination of providing immediate emergency access to food for the poor people while and supporting a sustainable...