The negative correlation between resource endowments and GDP growth remains one of the most robust findings in the empirical growth literature, and has been coined the “resource curse hypothesis”. The policy consequences of this result are potentially far reaching. If natural resources are...

This paper explores the linkages between productivity and social development from the perspective of synthesizing the findings of projects undertaken by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards in three related areas. The first is a project exploring the linkages between productivity and...

The United Nations has set as a goal for the world community the halving of the rate of poverty between 1990 and 2015. Previous literature and empirical work provides a strong consensus that growth reduces poverty, and several recent studies have also found that the higher is income inequality...

Microfinance across the globe is being practiced as a tool to mitigate poverty and chiefly as an empowerment tool to uplift the downtrodden. The paper has uniquely established that Self Help Groups in India have been significantly successful in achieving the objective of economic development of...

Rapid urbanization is a fact of live even in the least developed countries (LDCs) where the lion’s share of the population presently lives in rural areas and will continue to do so for decades to come. At the turn of the millennium 75% of the LDCs’ population still lived in rural areas and...

This tenth issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains six articles. Topics covered are: the puzzling recent behaviour of labour productivity in Canada; an international perspective on Canada's productivity performance since the...

The ninth issue of the International Productivity Monitor published by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains six articles. Topics covered are: the magnitude of the Canada-U.S. productivity gap at the industry level; productivity puzzles facing researchers; the link between...

In developing countries poverty is generally measured with expenditure data. Such data are difficult and costly to obtain and it is generally recommended to collect them every 3-5 years. In between surveys, however, there is a clear need to provide policymakers with information for the...

We analyze the performance of kernel density methods applied to grouped data to estimate poverty (as applied in Sala-i-Martin, 2006, QJE). Using Monte Carlo simulations and household surveys, we find that the technique gives rise to biases in poverty estimates, the sign and magnitude of which...