The UNU-Wider project on ‘Spatial disparities in development’, directed by Ravi Kanbur and Anthony J. Venables, has analyzed evidence on the extent of spatial inequalities in over 50 developing countries. The peer reviewed papers published under the auspices of the project find that spatial...

This paper considers a seeming disconnect between the consensus in policy circles that reducing gender inequalities is to be prioritized in strategies for reducing inequality and poverty, and a view in mainstream economics (and in some policy circles) that gender inequalities are overemphasized....

This paper establishes and explores the implications of a somewhat surprising empirical finding. Although civil war adversely affects the performance of social indicators in general, poorer countries lose less, in absolute and relative terms, than richer countries. It is argued that the...

In the empirical literature on minimum wage enforcement, the standard approach is to measure the number of violations, not their depth. In this paper we present a family of violation indices which, by analogy with poverty indices, can emphasize the depth of violation to different degrees. The...

The basic neoclassical model of migration suggests that migration is induced by real income differentials across locations and will, ceteris paribus, serve to reduce those differentials. And yet there is evidence on growing spatial inequality despite increased migration from poorer to richer...

This paper investigates the reasons why inequality, and distribution more generally, have come to the fore in the development discourse at the tum of the century, after a period of relative neglect in the 1980s. The paper considers, in particular the analysis of (a) efficiency and equity, (b)...