States can do much to tap community-level energies and resources for development if they seek to interact more synergistically with local communities. The broader spin-off is creating a developmental society and polity. Using case studies from Asia and Latin America, Das Gupta, Granvoinnet, and...

India's cities face key challenges to improving public health outcomes. First, unequally distributed public resources create insanitary conditions, especially in slums – threatening everyone’s health, as suggested by poor child growth even among the wealthiest. Second, devolving services to...

Son preference has persisted in the face of sweeping economic and social changes in the countries studied here. We attribute this persistence to their similar family systems, which generate strong disincentives to raise daughters - whether or not their marriages require dowries - while valuing...

The apparently inexorable rise in the proportion of "missing girls" in much of East and South Asia has attracted much attention among researchers and policymakers. An encouraging trend was suggested by the case of South Korea, where child sex ratios (males to females under age 5) were the...

For years, sex ratios at birth kept rising in South Korea despite rapid development. We show that this was not an anomaly: underlying son preference fell with development, but the effect of son preference on sex ratios at birth rose until the mid-1990s as a result of improved sex-selection...

Despite the massive attention drawn to 'missing girls,' there has been no study that specifically focuses on the association between childlessness and the daughter deficit. Using a bivariate probit selection model, this article analysed the data for 6475 married women aged 15-49 years collected...