16 September 2010
Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics
HDRO Conference Room
In light of the forthcoming UNRISD flagship report, Combating Poverty and Inequality, this seminar will focus on UNRISD research, highlighting three crucial elements of a sustainable and inclusive development strategy: sustained growth and structural change that create jobs and improved earnings for the vast majority of people; comprehensive social policies that are grounded in universal rights; and civic activism and political arrangements that ensure states are responsive to the needs of all citizens.
17 June 2010
ADePT: A STATA Software Platform for Analysis of Poverty, Inequality, Gender, Health, Education and other key topics
HDRO Conference Room
For the last three years a team of researchers in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank has been developing a software platform for automated economic analysis, ADePT. ADePT is a stand-alone program that includes seven modules: Poverty, Social Protection, Labor, Gender, Health, Education, and Inequality.
12 April 2010
Multidimensional poverty - methodology and key results
Learning Resources Centre, Conf. Room #1140, 304 East 45th Street (FF Building), 11th floor (New York)
The presentation will review the conceptual links between the capability approach and multidimensional poverty measurement, outline methodological and data issues, and highlight major findings for discussion.
18 March 2010
Human Rights Monitoring, Databases, and Knowledge
HDRO Conference Room
Human rights monitoring consists primarily of receiving information from witnesses and by conducting investigations; the resulting information is often stored in databases. However, the statistics generated from databases collected in this way may tell us more about the functioning of the organization doing the monitoring than about the violence being monitored.
9 March 2010
Economic & Social Rights Fulfillment Index
HDRO Conference Room
In response to the increasing movement towards a rights-based approach to development along with an emerging demand for rigorous monitoring of States in meeting their human rights obligations, the Economic & Social Rights Fulfillment Index has been developed through a multi-year consultative process to assess the performance of countries and sub-national units on their fulfillment of economic and social rights.
9 February 2010
Long-term Relatedness and the Diffusion of Development
HDRO Conference Room
We present and discuss a new research agenda focused on the measurement of long-term historical and cultural relatedness between populations, and on the estimation of the effects that such variables have on the diffusion of economic development and other economic and political outcomes, such as international trade and conflict.
15 December 2009
An Extended Human Development Index
HDRO Conference Room
How we measure development determines to a large extent how development priorities are formed. The indices by which we measure success in development have fallen behind the discourse and debates on development. We intend to contribute to the determination of common development objectives in two ways.
1 December 2009
Findings and Lessons Learned from the American Human Development Report
HDRO Conference Room
The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009, produced by the American Human Development Project, is modeled on the United Nations Development Programme’s global Human Development Report. The Measure of America, published by Columbia University Press and The Social Science Research Council, is the first time the human development approach has been applied in the United States or any other industrialized nation. Using official government statistics and robust peer-reviewed analysis, the American Human Development Report presents human development rankings for U.S. states, congressional districts, and ethnic groups.
30 November 2009
Power, Stupidity, and Justice: the definition of capabilities, and their use
HDRO Conference Room
The research explores three ways in which approaches that center on Amartya Sen’s notion of capabilities are importantly incomplete, and need supplementation and adjustment by reference to other kinds of considerations. Although it has been noted that Sen’s capability approach does little to explore issues of social independence, it is insufficiently understood that this limitation is built in to his understanding of the concept of a capability and his differentiation between opportunity freedoms (including capabilities) and process freedoms.
5 November 2009
Missing Dimensions of Gender Inequality in Chile
HDRO Conference Room
This paper seeks to quantify gender inequality in Chile over a number of dimensions for which there is now information available from a new dataset commissioned by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. The new dataset contains hitherto unavailable data on employment conditions, agency and empowerment, safety and security, shame and humiliation, and life satisfaction and subjective well-being.
30 October 2009
Wealth, Health, and Democracy in East Asia and Latin America
HDRO Conference Room
Why have some societies done better than others at reducing the risk of early death? The research to be presented in this seminar indicates that the public provision of basic health care and other inexpensive social services has reduced mortality rapidly even in tough economic circumstances, and that political democracy has contributed to the provision and utilization of such social services, in a wider range of ways than is sometimes recognized.
24 September 2009
Human Development, MDGs and the International Development Agenda
HDRO Conference Room
What should the strategic focus of HDRs be in 2010 and beyond to promote development for, by and of the people - to create an environment in which all people can fulfill their potential? This lecture will analyse the dynamics of intellectual, policy, and political factors that have influenced the policy and normative shifts in the international development agendas since 1990.
25 August 2009
Child poverty and disparities in Kiribati, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu: Analysis geared for policy responses
HDRO Conference Room
Per capita economic growth in the Pacific has been slower than other similar countries, and population growth rates in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu outstrip economic growth rates. Many children in the PICs suffer from malnutrition, lack access to and support for education, improved water supply and sanitation. This paper discusses the preliminary results of a benchmark study of child poverty and disparities carried out by the University of New South Wales.
25 July 2009
Counting & Multidimensional Poverty Measurement Identification Axioms and Examples
HDRO Conference Room
Measuring poverty as the lack of capabilities and freedoms is intrinsically a difficult endeavor. One empirically feasible approach to the measurement of freedom might be to construct a set of ordered pairs of functionings and agency measures pertaining to each of the basic functionings relevant to the evaluative purpose, where those functionings have also been argued to be basic by virtue of their 1) special importance and 2) socially influenceability.
8 October 2008
International Measures of Subjective Well-Being Are Needed by Policy Makers
HDRO Conference Room
The United Nations should publish data on the subjective well-being of nations, since these figures capture many aspects of quality of life that are not assessed by existing social and economic indicators such as the HDI. These include crime, corruption, trust, and pollution that influence people’s quality of lives, and have strengths that complement the conventional indicators of quality of life.
6 October 2008
Rethinking Human Development
HDRO Conference Room
It has been nearly twenty years since the launch of the first global Human Development Report. What has changed in the world since the first HDR?
