The paper looks at the impact of migration and workers’ remittances on the competitiveness of the home economy. It extends existing research that concentrated on the exchange rate effects of remittances, the so-called Dutch disease effect, by adding labor market effects. The results show that...

Summary In response to growing health concerns, the Philippine government instigated a suite of pesticide regulatory policies and implementing guidelines and launched Integrated Pest Management as a National Program to promote a safer and an ecologically sound approach to pest control. The main...

This paper argues that Social Protection needs to be on the post-2015 agenda as a key element of the discourse. Based on a global Social Protection data set, it estimates that social protection programs are currently preventing 150 million people from falling into poverty. Even if all low-income...

This paper conducts the first analysis of the effect of armed conflict on progress in meeting the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. We also examine the effect of conflict on economic growth. Conflict has clear detrimental effects on the reduction of poverty and hunger, on primary...

We apply a general equilibrium model to quantify economic and social payoffs from investing in human development. The analysis revolves around scenarios of public spending that allow four developing countries to meet targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Public spending rises...

This paper addresses the debate about the use of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as performance measures in three ways. First we clarify the concept; like other global goals, the MDGs are benchmarks for gauging progress toward important objectives and should not be treated as planning...