Disagreements over development arise in part from different ways of thinking about human well-being, an issue explored here with reference to two pieces of empirical research in Peru. The first is an analysis of ontological assumptions underpinning secondary literature on development policy at...

This article analyses poverty, in the light of the prevailing methodological and definitional debates, in Gujarat, one of the fastest growing states in India. We examine the divergence between the official and nutrition-based poverty lines (PLs) and analyse its possible causes. First, to study...

Reliable microdata on corrupt behavior are hard to obtain in the field, and available field data are hard to interpret. Laboratory corruption experiments have therefore recently gained in popularity, and those that shed light on gender effects are surveyed in this article. The tentative main...

In spite of 30 years of international support, the Least Developed Countries (LDC) have become increasingly marginalized. Their recent growth spurt was mainly driven by the pull-effect of the emerging Asian economies. Part of the problem is that the strategies adopted in the past to promote...

The World Bank and the IMF have not yet recognized the category of least developed countries (LDCs) nor their common structural needs. Obtaining this recognition should be made a major point for discussion and decision at the Istanbul LDC Conference in 2011 along with the analysis and...

The article argues that the question of what are the most effective policies to address the food price crisis remains largely unanswered, despite the huge analytical effort to understand its causes and consequences. Partly, this is because instruments of policy analysis are based either on a...

The article criticizes poor state performance (PSP) indexes, that is to say, cross-national data sets that mark or rank contemporary states according to their performance. In particular, I claim that current indexes provide very little genuine information about performance orderings. The...