A major of focus of global development policy is the aim to achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40% (B40) of the population at a rate higher than the national average. We propose an alternative approach to assessing shared prosperity using 'inequality lines'. Analogous to poverty...

This paper reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of active labour market programmes in low- and middle-income countries with high informality, highlighting examples of interventions that have been implemented in combination with other policies including social protection measures. In...

This paper presents the first global and regional estimates of polarization and bipolarization spanning the period 1960-2020. The study relies on group data to implement a flexible parametric model to obtain the global income distribution and polarization estimates. The study introduces a...

Monitoring health is key for identifying priorities in public health planning and improving healthcare services. Life expectancy has conventionally been regarded as a valuable indicator to compare the health status of different populations. However, this measure is simply the mean of the...

This study conducts an international comparative analysis of the recent evolution of social protection systems in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions, paying particular attention to the role of foreign aid in these dynamics. It asks:...

In recent years, randomized controlled trials have become increasingly popular in the social sciences. In development economics in particular, their use has attracted considerable debate in relation to the identification of 'what works' in development policy. This paper focuses on a core topic...

This paper examines the impacts of the financial, food and fuel crises on the livelihoods of low-income households Nigeria. It uses primary household level data from Nigeria to analyse the impacts of induced price variability on household welfare. Our results indicate that aggregate shocks have...

This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico's Oportunidades programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via a bank account is found to have implications in terms of reallocation between...

This paper discusses different approaches to the measurement of global interpersonal in equality. Trends in global interpersonal inequality during 1975-2005 are measured using data from UNU-WIDER's World Income Inequality Database. In order to better understand the trends, global interpersonal...

Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper...