After a massive international campaign calling attention to the development impact of foreign debt, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is now underway. But will the HIPC Initiative meet its high expectations? Will debt relief substantially raise growth? How do we make sure...

Most Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries have accepted, in principle at least, the 50-year-old commitment of contributing 0.7 per cent of gross national income to supporting the development of countries in the Global South. But what if all countries made a universal...

This paper examines income mobility in developing countries. We start by synthesizing findings from the available evidence on relative mobility and poverty dynamics. We then describe evidence on economic mobility obtained via synthetic panels constructed from cross-section data. We echo earlier...

European official development assistance to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries increased sharply after 2011, ostensibly in support of the social, economic, and above all political changes demanded by the Arab uprisings. The subsequent turn to development policies driven by...

This paper discusses current methods for measuring and analysing occupational mobility, and the way in which methods designed for the analysis of developing countries may need to be modified when applied in other contexts. The paper discusses particular features of some developing societies,...

I analyse the evolution of the International Monetary Fund tax policy advice in three countries commonly used for tax evasion or avoidance: Panama, Seychelles, and the Netherlands. A review of loan agreements and Country Reports covering 1999 to 2017 highlights the dependence of the Fund’s...

In the presence of inequality a status-driven utility function reconciles the conflict between income-based and nutrition-based measures of poverty. Moreover, it can explain why the poor tend to save less, an established empirical fact in the developing countries. The result is independent of...

This book explores trends of inequality and poverty in China, identifies their causes and assesses their consequences, analyzing in detail the regional/personal variation in incomes, measures of human wellbeing, the gap between the coastal regions and the interior regions, and urban-rural disparity