How much did France pay for its colonial empire? Did colonies benefit from large transfers from French taxpayers and private investors, or were they on the contrary drained of their capital? So far, Jacques Marseille (1984) was the only attempt to investigate these questions, by deducting from...

We test the effect of local geographic endowment of capital on household growth in living standards in rural Peru, using a four years unbalanced panel data set. Our theoretical model of household consumption growth allows for the effect of community variables to modify the returns to augmented...

The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers and that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results, however,...

Economic growth certainly is not a uniform process over space, especially in a country as vast and diverse as Brazil. Among the determinants of local growth, the role of externalities has been much discussed in the recent literature (Glaeser et al., 1992). These externalities not only matter for...

In this paper, we investigate the power of migration as a mechanism in the transmission of social norms, taking Mali and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a case study. Mali has a strong FGM culture and a long-standing history of migration. We use an original household-level database coupled...

More than 100 million women and girls in the world have had their genitals cut for cultural, religious, or other non-medical reasons. Even though international organizations condemn female genital mutilation (FGM), or cutting, as a violation of human rights, and most nations have banned it, it...

The purpose of our paper is to derive instructive analytics on how to account for differentials in demographic variables, in particular mortality, when performing welfare comparisons over time. The idea is to apply various ways of 'correcting' estimated income distribution measures for 'sample...

Quels sont les types d'institutions qui influencent les inégalités économiques – En utilisant une base de données sur les inégalités nationales de revenu sur un échantillon de 73 pays non européens, nous montrons que la « bonne gouvernance » contribue non seulement au niveau de...

This paper studies the impact of changes in educational opportunities on various definitions of labour market inequalities in Brazil over two decades (1976-96). Using four editions of the nationally representative PNAD survey, we analyze the evolution of overall inequalities and inequalities of...

The World Bank's World Development Report 2006 addresses Equity and Development. It defines equity as respect for equal opportunities combined with the avoidance of absolute deprivation. Even though justice theories have long been interested in equity (given that equality of opportunity is one...