Governance and the “Karnataka Model of Development” Gopal Kadekodi, Ravi Kanbur and Vijayendra Rao; Change in Karnataka Over the Last Generation: Villages and the Wider Context James Manor; The Political Economy of Gram Panchayats in South India Timothy Besley, Rohini Pande and Vijayendra...

The standard theory of anti-poverty targeting assumes individual incomes cannot be observed, but statistical properties of income distribution in broadly defined groups are known. Targeting rules are then derived for the forms of transfers conditioned on group membership of individuals. In this...

This collection of essays honors a remarkable man and his work. Erik Thorbecke has made significant contributions to the microeconomic and the macroeconomic analysis of poverty, inequality and development, ranging from theory to empirics and policy. The essays in this volume display the same...

Certain markets evoke popular discomfort, distrust and even outrage. Trade in arms, drugs, toxic waste, child labor and body parts, for example, elicits these reactions to different degrees. This paper asks—what is it about some markets that brings about these responses? It is argued that...

The rati¯cation of ILO Labor Standards Conventions is a key explanatory variable in the empirical literature linking labor standards to economic performance. The assumption is that rati¯cation gives information on labor standards implemented in a country. This paper investigates the...

The dominant perspective in discussions of labor and environmental standards and globalization is that of North-South competition and its impact on Northern standards. This paper presents an alternative perspective, that of South-South competition to export to the North, and its impact on...

In this note we approach the question of relative poverty from a different angle. Fixing the poverty line, we ask: What is the extent of poverty relative to the resources available in the society to eradicate it? We argue that the same level of poverty is “worse” if the resources available...

Development economics nowadays is mainstream economics applied to poor countries. An examination of the core principles of mainstream economics reveals tremendous strengths, but also tremendous weaknesses. Other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology and political science, have...

In his Presidential Address to the European Economic Association, Tony Atkinson introduced the idea of a “Charitable Conservatism” position in public policy, which “exhibits a degree of concern for the poor, but this is the limit of the redistributional concern and there is indifference...

Globalization and Economic Reform have enormous potential for economic growth and poverty reduction. But there are at least three troubling features of these phenomena that have emerged over the last two decades—technical change which is biased in favor of capital and skilled labor; increased...