This paper reviews the new debt-relief initiative for Highly-Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) designed to reduce the debt burden of potentially 36 poor countries. It finds that the HIPC initiative is not likely to make a major contribution to the problems of the world’s poor. It offers...

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...

The human development impact of decentralization is the central focus of this paper, which addresses evolving patterns of fiscal decentralization in Argentina based on health and education indicators. The authors use previously unavailable data to look at decentralization in Argentina over time,...

The paper reviews experience in advancing Human Development (HD) since 1970 by investigating behaviour among countries that made the largest improvement in HD and those that made the least improvement. The paper provides evidence on a range of indicators for the three best (and worst) performers...

Summary This paper explores the two-way relationship between economic growth (EG) and human development (HD). We develop panel data strategies to estimate the strength of these relationships and find that HD plays an essential role in determining growth trajectories (our measure of sustained...