This paper reviews the methods and empirical findings from economic analyses of women's contribution to social welfare and the determinants of their human capital. To understand better women's roles in agricultural households, three themes have gained prominence in the economics literature....

Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policy-induced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and...

Height is consulted as a latent indicator of early nutrition and lifetime health status. Height is observed to increase in recent decades in populations where per capita national income has increased and public health activities have grown. Height is determined by genetic make up and realized in...

Labor unions are an important economic and political force in South Africa. Inequality in wage rates is among the largest in the world in South Africa, with African and white workers receiving wages that differ by a factor of five. The complex role of unions in closing and creating this wage gap...

Life cycle savings is proposed as one explanation for much of the increase in savings and economic growth in Asia. The association between the age composition of a nation's population and its savings rate, observed within 16 Asian countries from 1952 to 1992, is re-estimated here to be less than...

A consensus has been forged in the last decade that recent periods of sustained growth in total factor productivity and reduced poverty are closely associated with improvements in a population's child nutrition, adult health, and schooling, particularly in low-income countries. Estimates of the...

This empirical study brings together data on the local timing of the rural household responsibility system (HRS) reforms in China from 1979 to 1987, and assesses the association of the local reforms with individual parity-specific fertility changes as measured in the in-depth-fertility survey....

The rural elderly in China have 40% of the income of the urban elderly, 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...