Year-to-year economy-wide measures of income distribution, such as the Gini coefficient, are rarely available for long periods except in a few developed countries, and as a result few analyses of year-to-year changes in inequality exist. But wage and earnings data by industrial sectors are...

The pace of progress toward achievement of the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) in many sub-Saharan African countries remains too slow to reach targets by 2015, despite significant progress in the late 1990s. The MDG Africa Steering Group, convened in September 2007 by the UN Secretary-General,...

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is unleashing a human development crisis. On some dimensions of human development, conditions today are equivalent to levels of deprivation last seen in the mid-1980s. But the crisis is hitting hard on all of human development’s constitutive elements: income...

Gender disparities are a persistent form of inequality in every country. Despite remarkable progress in some areas, no country in the world—rich or poor—has achieved gender equality. All too often, women and girls are discriminated against in health, in education, at home and in the labour...

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is unleashing a human development crisis. On some dimensions of human development, conditions today are equivalent to levels of deprivation last seen in the mid-1980s. But the crisis is hitting hard on all of human development’s constitutive elements: income...

This paper studies the impact of growth fluctuation on human development indicators using country level panel data between 1980 and 2006. The evidence from mean comparison and regression analysis suggests that, globally and on average, periods of decelerating economic growth are correlated with...

The feed-in tariff (FIT) program is a popular policy for incentivizing new renewable energy projects because it establishes a long-term contract with renewable energy investors. This paper presents a novel model to analyze a FIT contract with a minimum price guarantee (i.e., a price-floor...

This paper extends the neoclassical growth model with natural capital by introducing two new concepts: allocation of natural capital and materialization. We consider that anthropogenic environmental impact is correlated with the throughput of the economy (materialisation). Materialisation is the...

In order to better understand the potential impact of the current global economic crisis on human development, we explore how human development indicators have been affected in past economic shocks. The literature on the human development impacts of short-term economic fluctuations suggest some...