We investigate the empirical relationship between child mortality and fertility across 46 low and middle income countries. Specifically, we model the effect of mortality expectations and interdependent fertility preferences on fertility. The direct marginal effect of mortality expectations on...

Continued population growth and increasing urbanization have led to the formation of large informal urban settlements in many developing countries in recent decades. The high prevalence of poverty, overcrowding, and poor sanitation observed in these settlements—commonly referred to as...

One of the most serious weaknesses of the Human Development Index (HDI) is that it considers only average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or by population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries. We suggest a relatively easy and intuitive approach which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows comparisons...