Anthropometric, mortality, and population data presented by Svedberg (1990) in this journal suggested a slight anti-male bias in undernutrition in sub-Saharan Africa. This article re-analyses some of the same data and supplements them with more recent findings. In contrast to Svedberg's results,...

This paper discusses two recent controversies surrounding levels and trends in the number of "missing women" in the world. First, the impact of fertility decline on gender bias in mortality is examined. Contrary to the expectations of some authors, fertility decline has not generally led to an...

Amartya Sen started an important debate about the magnitude of the female survival disadvantage in parts of the developing world by defining the term "missing women" and estimating its number. In this paper we provide an update on the number of missing women based on most recent demographic...

We investigate empirically the impact of maternal mortality on the enrolment rate of girls and boys at the primary and secondary levels. We also examine whether the effect of maternal mortality on enrolment is strengthened or weakened by religion. Evidence shows that at both the primary and...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that it does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simple approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows comparison...