This book deals with specific problems in Colombia as a means of exploring interrelated theoretical themes in the development process. Demographic and political as well as specifically economic variables arc given consideration in the authors' analysis of the constraints on the growth of...

The field of development economics has evolved since volume 3 of the Handbook of Development Economics was published more than a decade ago. Volume 4 takes stock of some of the newer trends and their implications for research in the field and our understanding of economic development. The...

Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policy-induced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and...

The field of economic demography has expanded in recent years because of the perceived relevance of economic constraints to family formation and to demographic behaviour. [The increased availability of household surveys from countries at all levels of development and the advances of methods for...

The chapter critically reviews the methods available for the ex post counterfactual analysis of programs that are assigned exclusively to individuals, households or locations. The emphasis is on the problems encountered in applying these methods to anti-poverty programs in developing countries,...

Good health is a determinant of economic growth and a component of the well-being of the population. This chapter discusses and synthesizes economic models of individual and household behavior, showing how the models may be used to illuminate health policy making in low-income countries. The...

In recent years, significant advances have been made in better understanding the complex relationships between health and development. This reflects the combined effects of methodological innovations at both the theoretical and empirical level, the integration of insights from the biological and...

In recent years, there has been an astonishing proliferation of empirical work on child labor. An Econlit search of keywords "child lab*r" reveals a total of 6 peer reviewed journal articles between 1980 and 1990, 65 between 1990 and 2000, and 143 in the first five years of the present decade....

This chapter considers methods for evaluating the impact of social programs in the presence of nonrandom program placement or program selection. It first presents the evaluation problem as a missing data problem and then considers various solutions proposed in the statistics and econometrics...