The global geography of poverty has changed over the last two decades. More than 70 percent of the world’s poor at US$1.25 a day now live not in low-income countries, but in middle-income countries (Kanbur and Sumner 2011). This raises a number of big questions. Is economic growth not sufficient to pull everybody out of poverty? Can middle-income countries or parts thereof suffer from poverty t...

The conventional wisdom, since at least the writings of John Dewey (1916), views high levels of educational attainment as a prerequisite for democracy. Education is argued to promote democracy both because it enables a “culture of democracy” to develop and because it leads to greater prosperity, which is also thought to cause political development. The most celebrated version of this argument i...

In a longitudinal study of civil servants, 1422 men were classified according to their average daily alcohol intake. Over 10 years of follow-up, the mortality rate was lower in men reporting moderate alcohol intake than in either non-drinkers or heavier drinkers (greater than 34 g alcohol per day). Cardiovascular mortality was greater in non-drinkers and non-cardiovascular mortality was greater...