This paper provides an introduction to this special issue of Oxford Development Studies. It starts by contextualizing the measurement of vulnerability, pointing to the need to take risks on the level of households, regions and countries into account in designing poverty-reduction strategies. It...

A small but growing literature has been concerned about the economic (and environmental) vulnerability on the level of countries. Less attention is paid to the economic vulnerability of different regions within countries. By focusing on the vulnerability of subnational regions, this paper...

The paper explores the implications of the external debt-servicing constraint for public health spending in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where the health challenges have been great and debt servicing particularly burdensome. Using 1975-94 5-year panel data for 35 African countries, the study finds...

The present study employs recent World Bank data to shed light, in a global context, on the transformation of changes in income and inequality into poverty reduction for a large number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The study begins by discussing SSA's progress on poverty. Next, it...

In the light of the increasing attention on human development (HD) as well as the importance of political instability (PI) in economic performance, this paper examines the role of PI in the transformation of economic growth to HD. It finds that elite PI—the frequency of coups d'etat in...