This paper contributes to literature on the process of reform in Latin America. We study political economy aspects and the policy making process of reforms in what we identify as the five critical steps through the "life cycle" of a policy reform: the Planning, Dialogue, Adoption,...

In November 2005, Glenys Kinnock, Co-President of the ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, reported that “there are more nurses from Malawi in Manchester than in Malawi and more doctors from Ethiopia in Chicago than Ethiopia.”1 These Africans had been lured North by work permits targeted at...

The tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004, to which more than 225 000 deaths had been attributed by the United Nations’ six-month review in June 2005, elicited a worldwide humanitarian relief effort unprecedented in its scale; individuals, firms, non-governmental...

Aid and trade policies – in OECD countries and in developing countries – might reinforce each other to promote development, or they might be substitutes: the sign of the correlation between trade and aid flows depends on the context. East Asia’s rapid growth demonstrates the important...

Efforts to establish, test and analyse hypotheses regarding cross-country variations in women’s economic status are hampered by the lack of a readily accessible and easily used information resource on the various dimensions of gender inequality. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces the <a href="http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/28/36223936.xls"...</a>

Natural disasters (droughts, earthquakes, epidemics, floods, wind storms) damage wellbeing, both in their immediate and long-term aftermath, and because the insecurity of exposure to disasters is in itself harmful to risk-averse people. As such, mitigating and coping with the risk of natural...

Decentralisation has been advocated by donors and development agencies as an important factor broadening citizen participation and improving local governance, thereby promoting poverty reduction from the bottom up. On the basis of a comprehensive review of 19 country case studies documented in...

This paper builds on a new database (PRIVMEDA) in order to assess the progress of the privatisation process in the MEDA countries of Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Malta, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. The first part of the paper offers an overview of the privatisation record from...

Les infrastructures de transport ont été dangereusement négligées ces dernières années en Afrique. Le manque d’infrastructures de transport est un frein à l’intégration économique et à la réduction de la pauvreté.

Le 26 décembre 2004, un tsunami a déferlé sur l’océan Indien, faisant, d’après l’examen effectué par les Nations unies six mois plus tard (juin 2005), plus de 225 000 morts. Ce raz-de-marée a suscité un effort humanitaire planétaire d’une ampleur sans précédent. Particuliers,...