What exactly is 'economic marginalization'? How should one conceptualize it, and what are the implications of such conceptualization? Economic marginalization can be conceptualized as outcome or as process (or structure). On outcomes, marginalization can be a static description, or a dynamic...

Textbook analysis tells us that in a competitive labor market, the introduction of a minimum wage above the competitive equilibrium wage will cause unemployment. This paper makes two contributions to the basic theory of the minimum wage. First, we analyze the effects of a higher minimum wage in...

This paper develops a framework for thinking about the policy challenge of scaling up small scale interventions, governmental and non-governmental, that address poverty reduction successfully. The framework sees scaling up as addressing different components of market failure, government failure...

In this note we approach the question of relative poverty from a different angle. Fixing the poverty line, we ask: What is the extent of poverty relative to the resources available in the society to eradicate it? We argue that the same level of poverty is “worse†if the resources...

History matters, and it matters in important and interesting ways for policy  today. But it is not just actual events in the past. It is how they are recorded, interpreted, ...

The informality discourse is large and vibrant, and is expanding rapidly. But there is a certain conceptual incoherence to the literature. New definitions of informality compete with old definitions leading to a plethora of alternative conceptualisations. While some individual studies may apply...

This essay examines the evolution of thinking on development and development policy, with a special focus on economic issues, in the last fifty years. In particular, it explores the interaction between ideology and experience in determining the course of economic thinking and policy on...

There is a glaring paradox in all commonly used measures of poverty. The death of a poor person, because of poverty, reduces poverty according to these measures. This surely violates our basic intuitions of how poverty measures should behave. It cannot be right in concept that differentially...

So what’s social policy got to do with economic growth? Quite a lot, it would appear, if one takes the results of cross-country growth regressions at face value, as they are by many social policy analysts, even as they criticize the findings of the economic policy part of the very same...

Spatial inequality is a dimension of overall inequality, but it has added significance when spatial and regional divisions align with political and ethnic tensions to undermine social and political stability.The UNU-Wider project on ‘Spatial disparities in development’, directed by...