• Empowerment of the poor is one ingredient in effective poverty reduction. • A demand-driven participatory approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency. • Accountability is the central lever for participatory governance. • Capacity building is necessary for making participatory governance a reality. In its research activities, the Development Centre aims to identify and analyse problems whos...

The United States has a mortality disadvantage relative to its political and economic peer group of other rich democracies. Recently it has been suggested that there could be a role for social policy in explaining this disadvantage. In this paper, we test this "social policy hypothesis" by presenting a time-series cross-section analysis from 1970 to 2010 of the association between welfare state...

This article tests the subset of public choice models for social security that have empirical implications. The data, collected from OECD countries for the years 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990, provide some support for each of the theories. Higher median voter age, more income heterogeneity, greater similarity in family size, and variables that make a public pension program more profitable are all ...

The aim of this research is to identify the transformative role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in transition economies (TEs). We investigated how ICT spending influences the socioeconomic and sociopolitical changes in TEs belonging to two regional groups (Central and Eastern European and Latin American) from 2004 to 2010. Moreover, we compare the effects of ICT in TEs to th...

This paper provides what we believe to be the first collection of data on social capital in the transition countries of central/eastern Europe and of the former Soviet Union. Using data from the World Values Survey 1990 and 1995 we document the degree of trust and of civic participation and find that these indicators of social capital are significantly lower than in OECD countries (Organisation...

Redistributive Preferences, Redistribution, and Inequality: Evidence from a Panel of OECD Countries This paper describes individuals’ inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences in a panel of OECD countries, primarily focusing on the association between these subjective measures and the effective level of inequality and redistribution. Not surprisingly, the effe...

The paper examines the role of collective bargaining systems as a determinant of the inter-industry wage structure. It compares wage patterns of six countries: Austria, Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the U.S.. We use comparable wage regressions from micro cross-sections data to calculate inequality in pay across sectors. Our findings suggest the following: First, high (low) wage sectors in...

During the last three decades, the stock of government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period, we also observe a significant liberalization of international financial markets and an increase in income inequality in several industrialized countries. In this paper we propose a multicountry political economy model with incomplete markets and endogenous government bo...

Governments in the OECD note rising immigration with alarm and grapple with policies aimed at selecting certain migrants and keeping out others. Economists appear to be well armed to advise governments since they are responsible for an impressive literature that examines the characteristics of individual immigrants, their absorption and the consequences of their migration on both sending and re...

During 1990’s and early 2000’s income inequality in Italy has been higher than that observed in many other OECD countries, but has not displayed any significant trend, upward or downward. For the most part, this evidence relies on summary measures of inequality. By their very nature, summary indices of inequality may not capture aspects such as multi-modalities and polarization. This paper appl...