This article focuses on the capabilities of women in sex work—a sector in which a substantial number of women in developing countries find themselves. Sex workers confront important unfreedoms—violence and disease—on a daily basis. How well sex workers can manage these threats has...

Social protection has emerged as a strong policy framework addressing poverty and vulnerability in developing countries. The growing literature on social protection largely focuses on the relative effectiveness of different social protection programmes, but seldom makes a link to underlying...

There is scattered evidence suggesting a positive impact of international remittances on economic insecurity, at both a macroeconomic and household levels. However, there has not to date been a comprehensive and systematic analysis of this issue that takes into account the various complexities...

Feminist studies have developed several tools to assess the gender impact of public policy and of budgets in particular. In this paper we introduce an innovative approach to the gender auditing of public budgets inspired by the capability approach. First, we expand the scope of the assessment of...

We consider cross-border migration through the lens of the capabilities approach, with special reference to transnational migration and to implications for the approach itself. Cross-border migration has profound and diverse effects, not least because it accelerates change in the nature of...

Migration from developing to developed countries has been accompanied by growing resentment of immigrants and refugees. While xenophobic sentiment continues to be strongly entrenched in developed countries, it is increasingly prevalent in developing countries as well. This paper examines the...

In this paper, I examine high-income country motives for restricting immigration. Abundant evidence suggests that allowing labor to move from low-income to high-income countries would yield substantial gains in global income. Yet, most high-income countries impose strict limits on labor inflows...

This paper provides a framework and estimates of enrollment rates per natural and combines them with previous income and child mortality per-natural estimates to produce a Human Development Index by country of birth as opposed to country of residence (per natural). The methodology is applied for...

This paper explores the impacts of the rights of migrant workers ('migrant rights') on the human development of actual and potential migrants, their families, and other people in migrants' countries of origin. A key feature of the paper is its consideration of how migrant rights affect both the...

This paper uses Polanyi's 1944 analysis of policy change—in which there are long-term swings from state regulation to markets and back again, as the consequences of one regime lead to political reactions that in turn reverse the policies. It shows how the Polanyi analysis continued to apply...