The paper proposes a micro-macro model of labour market of a developing city, and its empirical implementation on the case of the capital town of Madagascar, Antananarivo. The model recognises the existence of measured and unmeasured heterogeneity of skills, preferences and opportunities within...

Using data covering three successive generations of Malagasy people, we construct a new semiparametric estimator of the effect of parental income on the decision to send children to school. We propose new tests of simultaneity and hereditary biases affecting the usual estimates of this effect....

European Enlightenment thinkers were right in stressing the political dimension of inequality, rather than referring to "natural differences" as some others did after them in the 19th or 20th centuries. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical contributions in social sciences and in...

What is the kind of institutions that affect economic inequalities? Using a database on national income inequality for 73 non-European countries, we show that 'good governance' not only contributes to the level of income but also to a more equal distribution by increasing the income share of the...

I propose a personal reading of some theories of social justice at a moment when the issue of equality or equity appears to be back on the ‘development agenda’. Nowadays the term equity tends to be most often associated with the equality of opportunity principle. After having briefly...

Macroeconomic data on 45 countries are combined with microeconomic data on 4 case-study countries to reveal significant differences in the levels of education attained under the different colonial powers in Africa during the colonial period. In 1960, former British colonies exhibited higher...

The paper proposes an overview of the links between trade openness and international migration. Written in 1997, it is reedited here as a tribute to Geroges Tapinos, died suddendly on 20 November 2000. The paper argues that free trade policies presently proposed by developed countries to...

How fluid are African societies? This paper uses wide-sample nationally representative surveys to set down the first comparative measurement of the extent and features of the social mobility of men in five countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Intergenerational as well as intra-generational mobility...