The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) is arguably the most widely used alternative to gross domestic product for measuring national development. This is in large part due to its multidimensional nature, as it incorporates not only income, but also education and health. However, the...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues...

In the past 30 years Costa Rica has grown steadily and social indicators have improved markedly. Well-being indicators are comparable or even above the OECD average in several dimensions, such as health, environment or life-satisfaction. This paper reviews the social progress that Costa Rica has...

Poverty analytical approaches have recently considered households deprivation in several welfare attributes in what has been tagged multidimensional poverty. This approach has been well embraced due to acceptability of human development indices as a parameter for comparing welfare across...

This paper addresses a key issue in the current debate on economic development: the impact of globalization on poverty. After having discussed the problems related to the definition and measurement of both poverty and globalization, we perform a panel analysis which adds to recent literature by...

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, and this reduced the global poverty line...

This paper evaluates poverty sensitivity to growth in mean incomes and distributional changes in Italy across its regions and over a period spanning from 1977 to 2004. We use the ®Survey on Household Income and Wealth¯ (SHIW) of the Bank of Italy to estimate the growth incidence curves and the...

This paper reviews the evidence on the efficacy of neighborhood and school interventions in improving the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We focus on studies exploiting exogenous sources of variation in neighborhoods and schools and which examine at least medium-term...

The condition of deprivation and poverty cannot be accounted for in terms of income alone. Its multidimensional nature needs be addressed with a more complex intellectual tool: here Amartya Sen’s capability approach is employed. The difference in ability to translate income into well-being...

Mobility is a significant supplementary piece of information when discussing the inequality of a society based on income distribution. To date, most of its characteristics require disambiguation and specification. In this paper, we will investigate the dependence of relative mobility on sampling...