Sen's theory of capabilities is often presented as more comprehensive than an approach in terms of achievements (functionings) because it takes account of freedom and it contains at least as much information. This paper questions the last argument and argues that both kinds of consideration...

This paper addresses the European Union's (EU) conceptual shift from a narrow income poverty perspective to a multidimensional approach that has explicitly been inspired by Amartya Sen's work. I briefly describe these changes and discuss challenges for today's EU income poverty indicators. Then...

The well-known Human Development Index (HDI) encompasses only three rather basic aspects of human welfare. This paper aims to go beyond this, by identifying 11 categories of human development. We next propose plausible candidates as indicators of these categories. We then estimate correlations...

Public education is crucial to the health of democracy. Recent educational initiatives in many countries, however, focus narrowly on science and technology, neglecting the arts and humanities. They also focus on internalization of information, rather than on the formation of the student's...

This paper emphasizes the importance of collectivities for human capabilities. Using the example of self-help, the paper demonstrates how the poor can act together to expand and exercise new 'collective capabilities'. The paper argues that the Capability Approach (CA), with its emphasis on...

Human development is about much more than growth in real income. It is about expanding the choices human beings have to lead lives that they value. The potential choices and their expansion can be captured by capability sets that consist of various functioning vectors. The standard of living is...

In the former Soviet states of Central Asia, Afghanistan and its neighboring countries, and the in the Great Lakes region of Africa, conflicts have been organized around cultural identities. These identities, however, are not sub-national but transnational. They have linked groups within a state...

The persistence of rural poverty in Guatemala since the early 1990s challenges the purported association between agricultural export growth and poverty alleviation. Lack of access to education, health and credit, and the historical legacies of land inequality, labour exploitation and ethnic...

The current global politico-security environment poses challenges to principled humanitarian action on three levels. Humanitarian actors are at pains to preserve a neutral stance in contested political environments, specifically those of occupation and counter-insurgency operations within the...

The aim of this paper is to test whether electoral systems and human development are linked. Using high-quality data and very simple panel data econometric techniques, we show that electoral systems play a critical role in explaining the difference in the levels of human development between...