High unemployment in many OECD countries is often attributed, at least in part, to the generosity and long duration of unemployment compensation. It is therefore instructive to examine a country where high unemployment exists despite the near complete absence of an unemployment insurance system....

In this paper we analyse household income mobility dynamics among Africans in South Africa’s most populous province, Kwazulu-Natal, between 1993 and 1998. Compared to industrialized and most developing countries, mobility has been quite high, as might have been expected after the transition in...

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is that it considers only average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or by population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have...

This paper uses the gravity model of trade to investigate the link between bilateral and multilateral foreign aid and donors exports. There are three primary findings from this approach. First, in the long term, the average return, in terms of an increase in the donors level of goods exports, is...

Institutions are a major factor explaining development outcomes. This study focuses on social institutions related to gender inequality understood as long-lasting norms, values and codes of conduct that shape gender roles, and presents evidence on why they matter for development. We derive...

This paper investigates whether different types of female?headed households in Thailand and Vietnam are disadvantaged in terms of current consumption, exposure to shocks, consumption smoothing capacities, as well as vulnerability to poverty and downside risk. Using a unique panel data set of...

This paper uses the gravity model of trade to investigate the link between foreign aid and exports in recipient countries and tests for the transmission channels between aid and exports/economic development in developing countries. Most of the theoretical work emphasizes the negative impact of...

In this paper we construct the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) and its five subindices Family code, Civil liberties, Physical integrity, Son Preference and Ownership rights using variables of the OECD Gender, Institutions and Development database. Instead of measuring gender...

This paper offers a unified framework linking two important debates: First, the debate about the respective roles of geography and institutions on economic development; Second, the literature on the role of technological change and economic development on agricultural intensification and land...

Indonesia is, what the World Development Report 2008 calls, a transforming country characterized by increasing rural-urban income disparities and high poverty rates. Bearing these facts in mind, it is striking how little is known about causes and mechanism of the underlying determinants of...