Much controversy has developed recently over capital formation and the claim that the eocial security system has reduced savings and a3 a reeult the potential for economic growth in this country. Concerned that there was much misunderstanding with respect to the subject, the Comm483ioner of Social Security asked the Ofice of Reeearch and Statietics to make a presentation to top-level stag to cl...

BACKGROUND Adolescent pregnancy exposes female adolescents to medical, social and economic risks. In Ghana, adolescent mothers are more likely to experience complications during pregnancy and delivery as compared to older mothers. This study examined the competencies of adolescent girls to either proactively prevent teenage pregnancy or reactively cope effectively with it. METHODS A cross-sec...

The far-reaching institutional change and societal transformation occurring in former state-socialist societies have attracted new social science interest in transition economies. This chapter reviews recent research on China, highlighting the theoretical arguments and findings of general interest to social scientists. The paper argues that a paradigm shift is taking place within research on Ch...

A working group held at the Santa Fe Institute May 28-30, 2013, produced a set of consensus answers to questions about Cahokia, an urban place dating to the 12 and 13 centuries and located in what is today the greater Saint Louis region of Missouri and Illinois. Cahokia is an important urban place for theories of social complexity, as it appears to have emerged in the absence of a supporting re...

UNRISD’s recent publication, Combating Poverty and Inequality, attempts to explain how poverty reduction depends crucially on the interconnections among economic development, social policy and politics. It emphasizes that poverty and inequality cannot be addressed by narrow approaches to social protection or by economic growth alone. Instead, there is a need for new directions in macroeconomic ...

After around twenty years of neglect, inequality has been brought out of the cold. Inequality has re-entered the mainstream development policy agenda by featuring prominently in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/01. Inequality matters in its own right (see Inequality Briefing No 1) and it is key to reducing poverty. This paper draws on recent research to explore in what ways inequa...

The paper revisits the debate on trickle-down growth in view of the widely discussed evolution of the earnings and income distribution that followed a massive expansion of higher education. We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model to dynamically evaluate whether economic growth triggered by an increase in public education expenditure on behalf of those with high learning ability eventuall...

There has been a growing concern with the adverse impacts of economic development upon the environment in recent years and a concomitant response in terms of policy initiatives. The policy discourse of sustainable development proposes that economic development and the environment can be integrated to give rise to “win-win” outcomes. Many policy initiatives have been developed at the urban, regi...

The non-Marxist, or neo-Malthusian, approach to the study of population problems is criticized, with particular reference to the situation in Africa. An alternative Marxist approach is proposed in which the solution to population problems is sought either in revolution or radical improvements in social welfare involving the maximum egalitarian distribution of the benefits of social and economi...

This paper uses an encompassing framework developed by Murphy et al. (1991, 1993) to study corruption and how it affects income distribution and growth. We find that (1) corruption affects income distribution in an inverted U-shaped way, (2) corruption alone also explains a large proportion of the Gini differential across developing and industrial countries, and (3) that even after correcting f...