Nutritional status is the best global indicator of well-being in children. Although many surveys of children have been conducted since the 1970s, lack of comparability between them has made it difficult to monitor trends in child malnutrition. Cross-sectional data from 241 nationally representative surveys were analysed in a standard way to produce comparable results of low height-for-age (stun...

*This paper was prepared for the American Enterprise Institute monograph series on Prosperity and Economic Inequality. We would like to thank Steve Davis and seminar participants at the American Enterprise Institute, the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice Workshop on Measuring Material Well-Being, and the Wharton School for their comments and Charlie Jiang and Julieta Yung for excellent ...

This paper reviews trade policy reform and performance in Africa since the 1980s. African countries have implemented significant trade liberalisation in this period, in particular reducing tariffs. This has usually resulted in an increase in imports, but export growth has often been sluggish so that in many countries the trade deficit has increased. The paper documents trends and performance an...

We have applied an inverse model to 20 years of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements to infer yearly changes in the regional carbon balance of oceans and continents. The model indicates that global terrestrial carbon fluxes were approximately twice as variable as ocean fluxes between 1980 and 1998. Tropical land ecosystems contributed most of the interannual changes in Earth's carbon balance...

This paper examines whether Taiwan’s economic inequality has worsened as Taiwan has evolved into an information economy, a transformation which began around 1980. The paper explores this relationship by investigating three specific research questions. First, has there been a rise in wage inequality in Taiwan since 1980; and if so, what are the sources of this rise in inequality? Second, has the...

Over the last 20 years, women's sexuality has become one of the most written about and intensely debated subjects in sexology, sociology and women's studies in mainland China. From these studies, one can trace the development of academic discourse on women's sexuality through three distinct phases: from a predominantly medical discourse, to the use of survey methods to investigate women's real ...