The paper evaluates the extent to which Sinapi Aba Trust has contributed to poverty reduction among rural and urban poor especially women by supporting them with small loans to expand their businesses to generate income to build up their asset base. Using a cross-sectional data from 547...

Brazilian slums and squatter settlements have acquired a generally unattractive public image that often obscures differences between peripheral urban situations. Based on research in a socially stigmatised neighbourhood of the city of Salvador, Bahia, this paper begins with a broad structural...

There has been much discussion and debate on the kind of institutions and policies that could best address poverty and vulnerability in developing countries. Financing has emerged as a key constraint on the extension of social protection. The paper considers the main sources, and key...

The Enhanced HIPC Initiative was launched in 1999 to reduce the NPV of poor country foreign debt to a sustainable threshold of 150 percent of their exports. This paper applies a simple growth-with-debt model to sixteen post-completion point HIPCs to assess whether or not this goal will be met by...

This paper looks at the history of social welfare (particularly famine relief) and political accountability in China and compares it to that in Europe. Chinese history from the 14th century to the present suggests that levels of social welfare do not always correlate with levels of democratic...

This paper develops a sociological perspective on the concept of social identities—that is relations of membership recognised as significant by members and outsiders. Social identities encompass face-to-face groups and local communities, as well as large groupings that transcend any...

This paper presents a dynamic heterogeneous panel data model in which the reaction of the real exchange rate to external finance includes interactions with the measure of the trade openness, fiscal, monetary and nominal exchange rate policies of twenty-four primary-exporting Sub-Saharan African...

The literature examining the participation of developing countries in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and International Trade Organisation (ITO) negotiations generally sees their attitudes towards these projects as having been driven exclusively by a commitment to import...

Much poverty and development research is not explicit about its methodology or philosophical foundations. Based on the extended case method of Burawoy and the epistemological standpoint of critical realism, this paper discusses a methodological approach for reflexive inductive livelihoods...

This paper reviews the political economy of development finance in Zimbabwe from the late 1980s to the present day, to see where the current sovereign debt arose from. It disaggregates initial private sector development interventions by type, provider, sector and at the firm level, to see how...