This paper develops an international index of child welfare that can be used for comparisons across countries and over time. Values of this index for the year 1998 are presented for 118 countries. The paper is organized as follows. Sections 2 briefly discusses the importance of child welfare...

This paper examines the determinants of international variations in child health, nutrition, and education, analyzing the impacts both of government expenditures and of structural variables such as income distribution. The results suggest that fiscal reallocations can foster human capabilities...

This paper explores the distributional effects of contractionary monetary policy by race and gender in the U.S. from 1979-2008 using state-level panel data. We hypothesize that women and Blacks, as groups with less power and lower status in the social hierarchy, fare worse in the competition...

The authors demonstrate that the average state or local government worker earns higher wages than the average private-sector worker—but only because they are, on average, older and substantially better educated. More than half of state and local government employees in New England have a...

The factors that allow the launch of a speculative attack, such as those on he government debts of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy in 2010, are always multiple. In this case, they can be found in some simultaneous events (e.g. the regional German elections of the 9th of May), in some...

This background paper for the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 discusses current financing arrangements for postconflict countries and fragile states, with a focus on official development assistance. In recent years a consensus has emerged that in these “difficult environments”...

In August 2009 the African finance ministers issued the Freetown Declaration, in which they committed their governments to “implement fiscal stimulus measures” to counter the effects of the international financial crisis on their economies.  This paper analyzes the feasibility of realizing...

Current federal policies to ‘make work pay’ leave the vast majority―88%―of low-income working families in the U.S. without the guarantee of a decent living standard, even with full-time work. In their new study, Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Jeffrey Thompson advance proposals to substantially...

Grabel addresses three related questions. How is the crisis affecting the governance of the IMF and the influence that developing countries have within the institution; the policy space available to developing countries; and the prospects that alternative financial architectures will emerge as...