Using violence to promote one's beliefs grabs the headlines. Nevertheless, today the main threat does not come from the violent few, who do get some attention in this paper, but from the growing numbers who wish coercively to impose their views on others. Most world cultures encompass such...

The quality of life of an individual is standardly regarded as having three dimensions: (i) prospective longevity, (ii) educational attainment and (iii) standard of living. An index of human development in a population should be based on the distribution of characters representing these in the...

A number of strategies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and associated cost estimates have recently been presented, most influentially by the Millennium Project and the World Bank. The models underlying the recommended strategies are flawed, as a result of their reliance on...

Considering people as agents of their own lives is central in Amartya Sen's freedom-centred approach to development. In that respect, the capability approach grants a fundamental role to the ability to participate in the life of the community, which is referred to as the exercise of political...

Improving the health of poor women is a public health priority worldwide. In this paper, we focus on microcredit — an intervention not explicitly designed to have an impact on health. Microcredit programmes aim to provide the poor with access to credit, thereby improving their opportunities to...

In recent years, sustainable development has represented one of the most important policy goals at the global level. How to design specific policy actions and how to measure performance and results continue to present a challenge. The aim of this paper is to identify a numerical measure of...

The Human Poverty Index (HPI) is a composite index of poverty that focuses on deprivations in human lives, aimed at measuring poverty as a failure in capabilities in multiple dimensions, in contrast to the conventional headcount measure focused on low incomes. The HPI was introduced in the...

This paper aims to present a theoretical survey of the capability approach in an interdisciplinary and accessible way. It focuses on the main conceptual and theoretical aspects of the capability approach, as developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. The capability approach is a...

In addressing operational challenges such as poverty or economic development, many researchers and practitioners wish to build upon insights raised by Sen's capability approach and related writings. This paper argues that the comprehensive reach and foundation of the human development and...

The contemporary, income and consumption approaches to poverty definition and measurement, which are unidimensional in nature, are unable to capture multiple dimensions of poverty. The multidimensional approach operationalized here in the structural equation framework suggests that the...