This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We use the model to illustrate the special assumptions embedded...

This chapter considers the linkages between agricultural development and rural non-farm activities. The chapter is motivated by growing evidence that non-farm activities provide an increasingly important share of rural incomes in many low-income questions, questions about whether increasing...

Over the past 50 years, people living in developing countries have gained access to technologies, such as high yielding agricultural seed varieties and modern medicine, that have the potential to dramatically alter the quality of their lives. Although the adoption of these technologies has...

Women and men often receive the same percentage increase in their wage rates with advances in schooling. Because these returns decline with more schooling, the marginal returns for women will tend to exceed those for men, especially in countries where women are much less educated. The health and...

Regressions across countries from 1960 to 1995 are discussed to document African poor performance in terms of infant and child mortality, life expectation, and school enrollment rates, controlling for national income, women's and men's schooling, and urbanization. It is concluded that...

Estimates are reported of the consequences of health on participation in the labor force of elderly men and women in Taiwan from 1989 to 1996. Three survey indicators of individual health are examined, and two are estimated by instrumental variables (IV), using as instruments parent longevity,...

The variance in the logarithms of per capita GDP in purchasing-power-parity prices increased prices increased in the world from 1960 to 1968 and decreased since the mid 1970s. In the later period the convergence in intercountry incomes more than offset any increase in within country inequality....

Rural elderly have 40% of the income of those in urban areas, spend a larger share of their income on food, are in worse health, work later into their lives, and depend more on their children, lacking pensions and public services. The birth quota since 1980 has particularly restricted the...

Various household survey indicators of adult nutrition and health status are analyzed as determinants of individual wages. However, survey indicators of health status may be heterogeneous, or a combination of health human capital formed by investment behavior and variation due to genotype,...