In response to an increasing demand for rigorous monitoring of states in meeting their human rights obligations, a growing literature has emerged on measuring human rights fulfillment. Data are increasingly used in human rights assessment and advocacy but with an ad hoc approach, with three...

For those of us working on issues of human development, signs of progress are very encouraging. The years since the first Human Development Repoert came out in 1990 have seen a sea change in the way that policymakers and the general public look at development. Issues of human development have...

This paper challenges the use of poverty incidence among female-headed households as a measure of feminization of poverty. It proposes an alternative framework of human poverty, focusing not on incomes but on human outcomes in terms of choices and opportunities that a person faces

The technological transformations of the past decade and the emergence of the global marketplace have raised the stakes for all countries to become technologically connected-to be able to create, adapt and use global technological innovations. Yet the challenges of competing in the...

This article reviews the prospects for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. It argues that these goals will not be achieved by the target date of 2015 unless new action is taken by both rich and poor countries. It shows that current trends sharply contrast countries on their way to...

This paper uses Sen’s capability approach to explore whether there are inherent contradictions between human rights and development. Sen’s capability and human development approach provides a conceptual framework within which human rights principles can be incorporated into development...

This paper summarizes findings and conclusions from our application of the Economic and Social Rights Fulfillment Index developed by Fukuda-Parr, LawsonRemer and Randolph (2009) to the states of Brazil. The key features of this methodology in assessing economic and human rights fulfillment is...

Poverty is an important human rights concern. Human rights are claims that people have for social arrangements to guarantee their substantive freedoms; poverty reflects failures in these social arrangements and in the actions of duty bearers. It is the poorest people in society --- those with...

The current consensus objective of development aid in the international community is to reduce poverty in general and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in particular. In addition, the dominant view identifies economic growth as the principal means to this end. But the policy...

This paper addresses the debate about the use of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as performance measures in three ways. First we clarify the concept; like other global goals, the MDGs are benchmarks for gauging progress toward important objectives and should not be treated as planning...