beyond gdp the quest for a measure of social welfare this paper critically examines the various approaches to the measurement of individual well being and social welfare that have been considered for the construction of alternatives to gdp special attention is devoted to recent developments in the analysis of sustainability in the study of happiness in the theory of social choice and fair allocation and in the capability approach it is suggested in the conclusion that although convergence toward a consensual approach is not impossible for the moment not one but three alternatives to gdp are worth developing jel i31 e23 e01

the housing market macroeconomic activity and financial innovation an empirical analysis of u s data the relationship between macroeconomic activity and residential expenditure over the period 1959 i to 1991 i has been examined the analysis is conducted using varriance decompostions vdcs and historical decompostions hds the vdcs indicate that shocks to the money stock output and interest rates have significant impact on residental expenditure the hds indicate that shocks to macroeconomic variable are relatively unimportant in the determination of residential expenditure in the period following the extensive fiancial deregulation in the early 1980s

economic growth and poverty reduction measurement issues using income and non income indicators summary this paper first reviews the debate on the definition of pro poor growth and argues that a relative definition has merits when defining the state of pro poor growth while an absolute definition is most suitable when analyzing the rate of pro poor growth the second contribution is to extend the pro poor growth toolbox to non income indicators the analysis applied to bolivia shows that this extension greatly improves our understanding of the distribution of change in non income indicators of the linkages between progress in income and non income dimensions of poverty and on the incidence of progress in non income outcomes along the income distribution

for better or for worse till the human development index do us part abstract this paper describes the results of research intended to explore the volatility inherent in the united nations development programme s undp human development index hdi the hdi is intended to be a simple and transparent device for comparing progress in human development and is an aggregate of life expectancy education and gdp per capita values of the hdi for each country are presented in the human development reports hdrs the first being published in 1990 however while the methodology is consistent for all countries in each year there are notable differences between years that make temporal comparisons of progress difficult the paper presents the results of recalculating the hdi for a simplified sample of 114 countries using various methodologies employed by the undp the results are a set of deviations of recalculated hdi ranks compared to the original ranks given in the hdrs the volatility that can result from such recalculation is shown to be substantial 10 15 ranks yet reports in the popular press are frequently sensitive to movements of only a few ranks such movement can easily be accounted for by changes in the hdi methodology rather than genuine progress in human development while the hdrs often carry warnings about the inadvisability of such year on year comparisons it is argued that the existence of such a high profile index and the overt presentation within league tables do encourage such comparison assuming that the hdi will be retained as a focal point within the hdrs then it is suggested that greater focus be upon more meaningful and robust categories of human development e g low medium and high rather than league tables where shifts of a few places perhaps as a result of nothing more than a methodological or data artefact may be highlighted in the press and by policy makers

troubling tradeoffs in the human development index the 20th human development report has introduced a new version of its famous human development index hdi the hdi aggregates country level attainments in life expectancy schooling and income per capita each year s rankings by the hdi are keenly watched in both rich and poor countries the main change in the 2010 hdi is that it relaxes its past assumption of perfect substitutability between its three components however most users will probably not realize that the new hdi has also greatly reduced its implicit weight on longevity in poor countries relative to rich ones a poor country experiencing falling life expectancy due to say a collapse in its health care system could still see its hdi improve with even a small rate of economic growth by contrast the new hdi s valuations of the gains from extra schooling seem unreasonably high many times greater than the economic returns to schooling these troubling tradeoffs could have been largely avoided using a different aggregation function for the hdi while still allowing imperfect substitution while some difficult value judgments are faced in constructing and assessing the hdi making its assumed tradeoffs more explicit would be a welcome step

social indicators and comparisons of living standards abstract construction of an international index of standards of living incorporating social indicators and economic output typically involves scaling and weighting procedures that lack welfare economic foundations revealed preference axioms can be used to make quality of life comparisons if we can estimate the representative household s production technology for the social indicators this method is applied to comparisons of gross domestic product gdp and life expectancy for 58 countries neither gdp rankings nor the rankings of the human development index hdi are consistent with the partial ordering of revealed preference a method of constructing a utility consistent index incorporating both consumption and life expectancy is suggested

a human development index by income groups summary one of the most frequent critiques of the hdi is that it does not take into account inequality within countries we suggest a methodology which allows to compute the three components and the overall hdi for quintiles of the income distribution this allows comparisons of the level in human development of the poor and non poor within and across countries an empirical illustration shows large discrepancies in human development within the countries especially in africa these discrepancies are lower the higher the hdi is but only weakly so inequality in income is generally higher than inequality in education and life expectancy

measurement of social well being alternatives to gross domestic product abstract gross domestic product gdp is widely acknowledged to be a poor measure of social well being this paper surveys several substitutes for and modifications of gdp which have been offered as measures of society s welfare the index of sustainable economic welfare a measure endorsed by many ecological economists is found to possess a variety of virtues but also several imperfections the search for a social welfare measure has not yet ended

pure strategy nash equilibrium in a group formation game with positive externalities abstract this paper identifies a domain of payoff functions in no spillover noncooperative games with positive externality which admit a pure strategy nash equilibrium since in general a nash equilibrium may fail to exist in order to guarantee the existence of an equilibrium we impose two additional assumptions anonymity and order preservation the proof of our main result is carried out by constructing for a given game g a potential function over the set of strategy profiles in such a way that the maximum of yields a nash equilibrium in pure strategies of g journal of economics literature classification numbers c72 d62 h73

interrelationships between income health and the environment extending the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis abstract this paper examines the link between the health indicators and the environmental variables for a cross section of countries widely dispersed on the economic development spectrum while environment and income are seen to have an inverted u shaped relationship environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis it is also well established that environment and health are positively related our study focuses on the implications of this for the relationship between health and income in the early phases of income growth the gains in health and the losses in environmental quality could cancel each other out and this challenges the idea that as incomes increase health would always improve to empirically analyse these issues we estimate a two stage least squares model that focuses on the impact of income and the environment on health status with environment being an endogenous variable our results show that the environmental stress variable has a significant negative effect on health status at the same time gross national product gnp levels are shown to vary positively with health status variables we find that the health gains obtained through improved incomes can be negated to a significant extent if the indirect effect of income acting via the environment is ignored research findings in this regard would be a useful policy instrument towards maximising both the environmental and health gains that come with economic growth and development

undp s gender related indices a critical review abstract this paper critically reviews the two gender related indices proposed by undp in the 1995 human development report the gender related development index gdi and the gender empowerment measure gem while supporting the need to develop indicators that reliably track women s empowerment gem as well as the impact of gender inequality on overall human development gdi we argue that the particular ways in which these indices were constructed and the assumptions made to overcome data gaps severely limit their usefulness and result in very misleading international comparisons wherever appropriate we suggest remedies for some of the shortcomings identified

multidimensional measures of well being standard of living and quality of life across countries summary using sen s capability approach we propose to measure two components of well being standard of living and quality of life unlike the undp human development index the two indices do not mix measures of resource availability and of functioning and capability the empirical results for 170 countries are based on two multidimensional analyses the totally fuzzy analysis and the factorial analysis of correspondences the paper also compares our results with the hdi and gdp per capita it focuses on africa presents policy implications and discusses aggregation and redundancy in multidimensional indices

on measuring aggregate social efficiency abstract cross country comparisons of social indicators controlling for income and or social spending have been widely used to measure and explain social efficiency analogously to technical efficiency in production the article argues that these methods are clouded in ambiguities about what is being measured standard methods of measuring technical efficiency require assumptions that are unlikely to hold for social indicators in the context of a simple parametric model of life expectancy conditions are identified under which there will be a systematic pattern of bias in estimates of efficient public health spending

making development simple the genetic deterministic hypothesis for economic development abstract this paper discusses the dangers inherent in attempting to simplify something as complex as development it does this by exploring the lynn and vanhanen theory of deterministic development which asserts that varying levels of economic development seen between countries can be explained by differences in national intelligence national iq assuming that intelligence is genetically determined and as different races have been shown to have different iq then they argue that economic development measured as gdp capita is largely a function of race and interventions to address imbalances can only have a limited impact the paper presents the lynne and vanhanen case and critically discusses the data and analyses linear regression upon which it is based it also extends the cause effect basis of lynne and vanhanen s theory for economic development into human development by using the human development index hdi it is argued that while there is nothing mathematically incorrect with their calculations there are concerns over the data they employ even more fundamentally it is argued that statistically significant correlations between the various components of the hdi and national iq can occur via a host of cause effect pathways and hence the genetic determinism theory is far from proven the paper ends by discussing the dangers involved in the use of over simplistic measures of development as a means of exploring cause effect relationships while the creators of development indices such as the hdi have good intentions simplistic indices can encourage simplistic explanations of under development

expenditures and receipts in state and local government finances comment the aim of this note has been to show that marlow and manage s 1987 paper suffers from serious methodological problems due to the non stationary data series used and the arbitrary lag lengths employed use of appropriate stationarity tests and optimal lag lengths of the variables change some of the basic conclusions of their paper contrary to their suggestion the presence of a feedback between local tax receipts and expenditures imply that local governments should be concerned with the implication of their spending and revenue enhancing decisions on their budget decisions to increase current expenditures may lead to higher future taxes similarly efforts to impose higher taxes to reduce budget deficits at the local government level may be futile due to a subsequent increase in spending

a modified human development index abstract this paper discusses a modified index for measuring human development the suggested index is based on the components of the human development index hdi developed by the united nations development programme undp since 1990 it discusses two categories of technical issues related to the hdi for 1995 those related to the components and those relevant to the structure of the index the data from the human development report 1995 for 174 countries are used to test the robustness of the suggested index and the results are compared to those of the hdi the new index is then used to delineate with some justification different groups of countries at various levels of human development

growth and poverty evidence for developing countries in the 1980s abstract measures of consumption poverty for a sample of developing countries in the 1980s respond elastically to changes in mean consumption although there is a high variance in poverty outcomes at a given rate of growth there is no sign of systematic effects of growth on inequality

causality analysis and multivariate autoregressive modelling with an application to supermarket sales analysis abstract this paper describes a modelling methodology for multivariate stochastic processes the concept of multiple causality is discussed and a procedure to detect multiple causality is suggested the data of a major canadian supermarket is analyzed and a multivariate autoregressive model for this supermarket is constructed and estimated several empirical findings are reported

improving human development a long run view abstract the pessimistic flavour of the human development reports appears to be in contradiction with their own numbers as developing countries fare comparatively better in human development than in per capita gdp terms this paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing a new improved human development index ihdi informed by welfare economics the ihdi is presented here alongside the united nations development programme s undp hdi for the world and its main regions since the late 19th century social dimensions in the ihdi are derived following kakwani journal of development economics 41 1993 pp 307 336 with a convex achievement function whereas a geometric average is employed to combine its dimensions longevity knowledge and income thus the ihdi does not conceal the gap between rich and poor countries and casts a much less optimistic view than the conventional undp index while it fits with the undp concern for international differences the paper s findings highlight main weaknesses in human development dimensions of present day developing countries

how are we doing on poverty and hunger reduction a new measure of country performance abstract the paper presents a new composite indicator the poverty and hunger index phi to measure countries performance toward achieving millennium development goal no 1 mdg1 on halving poverty and hunger by 2015 building on the statistical structure of the human development index the phi combines all five official mdg1 indicators thereby generating insights on a country s net progress towards its own goal as opposed to progress measured by a single yardstick nonparametric analysis on the phi components provides further evidence on the nature of the relationship between poverty and hunger measures while cross country results show significant variance in progress between and within regions an extension of the phi allows for consideration of the rate of progress made by each country in its own terms that is based on where it needs to be to attain all 5 mdg1 targets by 2015 countries needing priority attention are identified as well as areas for future research and recommendations for post 2015 initiatives

the human development index a critical review since 1990 the united nations development programme undp has published a series of annual human development reports hdrs in which the human development index hdi is computed for each country this index has become an important alternative to the traditional unidimensional measure of development i e the gross domestic product although the index still fails to include any ecological considerations it has broadened the discussion surrounding the evaluation of development unfortunately over the years the hdrs seem to have become stagnant repeating the same rhetoric without necessarily increasing the hdi s utility this paper evaluates how well these reports have lived up to their own conceptual mandate and assesses the ability of the hdi to further the development debate we find that the reports have lost touch with their original vision and the index fails to capture the essence of the world it seeks to portray in addition the index focuses almost exclusively on national performance and ranking but does not pay much attention to development from a global perspective we propose the incorporation of three simple modifications for the index as a first step to overcome these shortcomings 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

inflation and government deficits there is a pronounced positive correlation of inflation andgovernment deficits in the united states since world war ii the purpose of this paper is to test the three leading explanationsof this correlation these three explanations are a a deficitincreases prices through a wealth effect b a deficit results inthe federal reserve purchasing debt thus increasing the moneysupply and prices and c expected inflation increases the deficit which is the change in the nominal value of bonds no supportis found for either of the first two hypotheses the results indi cate that expected government deficits have no significance forfuture inflation since world war ii the united states has experienced large federal government deficits and a sustained peacetime inflation three differentconnections between the deficits and inflation are prominent in theliterature the most direct connection between government deficits and inflationis that by increasing the real value of outstanding bonds and perceived netwealth a deficit can raise total spending and the price level this connec tion is also the most long standing and is suggested by metzler 1951 andpatinkin 1965 for example monetarists generally and buchanan and wagner 1977 in particularhave emphasized a different link between deficits and inflation they sug gest that the federal reserve purchases government bonds when the trea sury sells bonds thus increasing high powered money the money supply and the price level the federal reserve might behave this way for exam ple because it is attempting to hold down interest rates on governmentsecurities when deficits occur recently barro 1978 1979 has put forward a hypothesis that deficitsare a result of inflation rather than inflation being a result of deficits thegovernment deficit is the change in the nominal value of outstanding gov ernment bonds if the anticipated inflation rate increases then the nomi nal value of bonds must increase i e the government will run a deficit tokeep the same anticipated real amount of bonds all three of these possible connections between government deficitsand inflation are consistent with the observed positive correlation of defi cits and inflation the implications however are strikingly different con

maximizing human development the human development index hdi is widely used as a measure of well being we examine the allocations implied by the maximization of this index using a standard growth model maximization leads to consumption excluding education and health expenditures being pushed to minimal levels it also leads to the overaccumulation of education and or health capital and possibly physical capital relative to the standard golden rule we propose an alternative specification for the hdi where consumption replaces income as a proxy for decent standard of living maximization of this alternative implies a human development golden rule which balances consumption education and health expenditure we advocate the method of optimization subject to constraints for revealing the policy implications of taking an achievement measure and its underlying philosophy seriously

stable coalition structures with externalities this paper argues that the sign of external effects of coalition formation provides a useful organizing principle in examining economic coalitions in many interesting economic games coalition formation creates either negatie externalities or posi tie externalities for nonmembers examples of negative externalities are research coalitions and customs unions examples of positive externalities include output cartels and public goods coalitions i characterize and compare stable coalition structures under the following three rules of coalition formation the open

human development means and ends from growth to basic needs sometimes the change in the fashions of thinking about development appears like a comedy of errors a lurching from one fad to another economic growth employment creation jobs and justice redistribution with growth basic needs bottom up development participatory development sustainable development market friendly development liberation liberalisation human development thus goes the carousel of the slogans but this would not be a correct record there has been an evolution in our thinking about development both internal logic and new evidence have led to the revision of our views previous and partly discarded approaches have taught us much that is still valuable and our current approach will surely be subject to criticisms a brief survey of the evolution of our thinking may be helpful the discussion started in the 1950s influenced by arthur lewis 1955 and others who emphasised economic growth as the key to poverty eradication even at this early stage sensible economists and development planners were quite clear in spite of what is now often said in caricature of past thought that economic growth is not an end in itself but a performance test of development arthur lewis defined the purpose of development as widening our range of choice exactly as the human development reports of the united nations development programme do today three justifications were given for the emphasis on growth as the principal performance test one justification assumed that through market forces such as the rising demand for labour rising productivity rising wages lower prices of the goods bought by the people economic growth would spread its benefits widely and speedily and that these benefits are best achieved through growth even in the early days some sceptics said that growth is not necessarily so benign they maintained that in certain conditions such as increasing returns restrictions to entry monopoly power unequal distribution of income and assets growth gives to those who already have it tends to concentrate income and wealth in the hands of the few this is where the second assumption came in it was that governments especially democratic ones are concerned with the fate of the poor therefore progressive taxation social services and other government interventions would

a comment on growth and equity in developing countries a reinterpretation of the sri lankan experience by bhalla and glewwe the inaugural issue of this journal contained an article by bhalla and glewwe which addresses some problems that arise in attempting to assess the relative success or failure of policies in different countries or policy regimes bhalla and glewwe 1986 p 36 their conceptual framework contrasts two approaches to raising economic welfare the direct or basic needs approach and the indirect or economic growth approach p 61 from 1960 to 1977 sri lanka is seen as approximating the first regime while the subsequent period following the change of government in 1977 is cast as having a closer correspondence to the second the general conclusion invited by the paper is that the change in policy orientation has been for the better the evidence suggests that the post 1 977 policies have not been detrimental to equity objectives and may offer more promise than those which they replaced p 62 in what follows i will suggest that bhalla and glewwe have exceeded the interpretations which their data will support accordingly their case cannot be sustained much as one would like to have answers to the questions they raise for my own part i share the majority view that sri lanka s system of food subsidies was and to some extent remains inefficient but it is surprising to find that bhalla and glewwe also question performance in the social field between 1960 and 1977 and that they totally ignore sri lanka s current state of disruption in their optimistic prognosis

measuring sustainable development some empirical evidence for france from eight alternative indicators abstract this paper presents results from a time series analysis of eight measures of development and or sustainability for france the measures chosen are green national net product genuine savings ecological footprint indicator of sustainable economic welfare genuine progress indicator pollution sensitive human development indicator sustainable human development indicator and french dashboard on sustainable development a theoretical description of each index highlights their advantages and drawbacks underlining the fact that no indicator is perfect and no one can give an exhaustive view of sustainable development therefore the analysis of various indicators is necessary to evaluate sustainable development with accuracy empirical results of measures of well being show that french development was improving between 1990 and 2000 concerning sustainability indicators support different conclusions it seems that french development was weakly sustainable but unsustainable in the strong sense over the period examined

privatization and renationalization what went wrong in bolivia s water sector summary this paper investigates the impact of water service privatization in bolivia it compares the performance of cities in which the service was privatized la paz and el alto with a city in which it is managed as a cooperative santa cruz de la sierra and one where the service is publicly provided cochabamba we find that access to water by low income consumers increased under private provision however the concessionaire failed to meet the targets stipulated in the contract the tariff increases required for full cost recovery eventually led to public outrage that forced the government to renationalize the company

the evolution of world inequality in well being in this paper we use the tools offered by the recent literature on multidimensional inequality measurement to investigate the evolution of the inequality in well being across different countries during 1975 2000 we focus on three important dimensions of life standard of living health and education inequality in the three dimensions shows a different trend during 1975 2000 we propose a flexible measure of well being to quantify the evolution of overall intercountry well being inequality the empirical results are sensitive to different normative choices on the trade offs between the different dimensions especially the concave transformation of income turns out to be decisive for the evolution of world inequality in well being

good and bad growth the human development reports abstract the 1996 human development report undp 1996 is about economic growth and human development in keeping with past reports in the series it emphasizes the diversity of country performance in improving human development indicators at given rates of growth this article reviews what the human development reports have said on this topic looking at how well the main messages have been supported by data and analysis and how compelling they are as a basis for public action

human development in poor countries on the role of private incomes and public services development is often taken to mean rising incomes discussions of the goals of development now often emphasize the reduction of poverty rather than raising average incomes per se the role of social services particularly basic health and education has also received greater emphasis in the 1980s viewed mainly as instruments for raising the incomes of the poor but in all these approaches income growth of one sort or another is what development is all about a rather different view of the meaning of development has recently found expression in the 1990 human development report hrd produced by the united nations development programme a conceptual underpinning for this approach can be found in the work of amartya sen the essence of this view is that human development what people can actually do and be is the overriding purpose of economic development underdevelopment is viewed as the lack of certain basic capabilities rather than lack of income per se we do not aim here to advocate one of these approaches over the other but rather to explore their implications for development policy for instance what does the human development approach imply about the role of economic growth and in particular about reducing income poverty should development priorities shift toward the provision of public services in poor countries even if such a shift is at the expense of income growth

coalition formation in non democracies we study the formation of a ruling coalition in non democratic societies where institutions do not enable political commitments each individual is endowed with a level of political power the ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources a ruling coalition needs to contain enough powerful members to win against any alternative coalition that may challenge it and it needs to be self enforcing in the sense that none of its subcoalitions should be able to secede and become the new ruling coalition we present both an axiomatic approach that captures these notions and determines a generically unique ruling coalition and the analysis of a dynamic game of coalition formation that encompasses these ideas we establish that the subgame perfect equilibria of the coalition formation game coincide with the set of ruling coalitions resulting from the axiomatic approach a key insight of our analysis is that a coalition is made self enforcing by the failure of its winning subcoalitions to be self enforcing this is most simply illustrated by the following example with majority rule two person coalitions are generically not self enforcing and consequently three person coalitions are self enforcing unless one player is disproportionately powerful we also characterize the structure of ruling coalitions for example we determine the conditions under which ruling coalitions are robust to small changes in the distribution of power and when they are fragile we also show that when the distribution of power across individuals is relatively equal and there is majoritarian voting only certain sizes of coalitions e g with majority rule coalitions of size 1 3 7 15 etc can be the ruling coalition copyright 2008 wiley blackwell

poverty alleviation and tropical forests what scope for synergies abstract this paper explores the state of the art of the two way causal links between poverty alleviation and natural tropical forests microimpacts of rising poverty can increase or slow forest loss at the macrolevel poverty also has an ambiguous effect but it is probable that higher income stimulates forest loss by raising demand for agricultural land the second question is what potential forest led development has to alleviate a country s poverty in terms of producer benefits consumer benefits and economy wide employment natural forests widely serve as safety nets for the rural poor but it proves difficult to raise producer benefits significantly urban consumer benefits from forest an important target for pro poor agricultural innovation are limited and seldom favor the poor absorption of poor unskilled labor is low in forestry which tends to be capital intensive natural forests may thus lack comparative advantage for poverty alleviation there are few win win synergies between natural forests and national poverty reduction which may help to explain why the loss of tropical forests is ongoing this may have important implications for our understanding of sustainable forest development and for the design of both conservation and poverty alleviation strategies

policy inference using var models policy inference using var models i introduction macroeconomics has a long tradition of examining the response of macroeconomic variables to shocks in alternative policy measures much recent work in this area has been based on the empirical regularities between variables found in vector autoregressive var models the var results in turn have been used to investigate the impact of changes in different policy variables var modeling procedures have been used to test the relative effects of changes in money interest rates broad credit measures and fiscal actions on economic activity 1 moreover because var analysis does not require the specification of an underlying theoretical model it also has been used to study the linkages among macroeconomic variables across national borders 2 although debate over the alleged atheoretical nature of vars continues for example see cooley and leroy 1985 leamer 1985 and braun and mittnik 1985 var models are frequently used for policy analysis how the dynamic specification of a var model is generated and how the dynamics may influence the resulting policy recommendation is the subject of this study while modeling the dynamic relationship among macro variables is a longstanding subject relatively few studies have tested for the effects of alternative lag structures on a given model to our knowledge there has been little systematic analysis of the sensitivity of policy effects to changes in the lag structure of a given var model 3 in this paper we investigate this specification problem using a simple four variable var model similar in spirit to sims s 1980b 4 this model consists of quarterly observations for money real output prices and nominal short term interest rates for the period 1960 through 1985 in selecting this model we opt to focus on the impacts of lag specification on policy inferences derived from a given var model in doing so we ignore the effects of altering the specification in terms of variables included or excluded this approach seems reasonable however since our purpose is to investigate the effects of lag structure not specification problems in general to compare the policy conclusions derived from the alternative dynamic structures we use six different lag selection criteria these criteria briefly described in section ii vary the bias efficiency tradeoff inherent in such statistical procedures section iii discusses the estimation of the var model using the alternative dynamic structures comparison of policy recommendations derived from the models is presented in section iv using variance decompositions anticipating that discussion the evidence from our model suggests that policy recommendations are very sensitive to changes in the dynamic structure conclusions close the paper in section v ii lag length selection procedures many previous researchers have chosen to impose equal lag lengths on each of the variables in their models 5 this approach produces parameter estimates that may suffer from bias or inefficiency depending on whether the model is under or over parameterized we use six different approaches to determine the lag specification five are based on statistical criteria with the exact criteria listed in table i for comparability we also employ the nonstatistical ad hoc procedure of arbitrarily fixing the maximum lag on all variables to be four quarters one of the statistical approaches used is the standard f test 6 the f test imposes zero restrictions on lags beyond some point and tests this restricted model against a more general lag structure the f statistic is calculated sequentially until adding another lag does not statistically improve the fit of the model two of the selection procedures use a mean squared error criterion these are mallows s 1973 c sub p statistic and akaike s 1970

the inequality adjusted human development index a constructive proposal abstract this paper proposes a method to incorporate a concern for distributional inequalities of income education and longevity into the framework of the human development index hdi as it is presently designed by the united nations development programme the paper constructs gini coefficients for a set of 20 developing countries measuring inequalities in annual income educational attainment and life span attainment these calculations are combined with data from the hdi to produce an inequality adjusted human development index iahdi the implications of this proposed index for evaluating and promoting development are considered

what can new survey data tell us about recent changes in distribution and poverty it has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground both relatively and absolutely even when average levels of living have risen this article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981 94 it finds that changes in inequality and polarization were uncorrelated with changes in average living standards distribution improved as often as it worsened in growing economies and negative growth was often more detrimental to distribution than positive growth overall there was a small decrease in absolute poverty although with diverse experiences across regions and countries almost always poverty fell with growth in average living standards and rose with contraction

paths to success the relationship between human development and economic growth summary this paper explores the two way relationship between economic growth eg and human development hd we develop panel data strategies to estimate the strength of these relationships and find that hd plays an essential role in determining growth trajectories our measure of sustained growth not only is hd a final product in the sense that it measures basic human well being but it is also a critical input into eg our findings illustrate the empirical relevance of endogenous growth and are consistent with threshold effect models our results imply that successful policy requires an early focus on hd not only because of its direct impact but also because of its feedback effect on sustaining eg

poverty human development and growth an emerging consensus this paper considers several issues relevant to the debate on the extent to which poverty or development progress in general should be measured by income or by a broader set of objectives issues covered here are practical implications of the two approaches for poverty reduction efforts the impact of growth on basic social indicators and how national achievement on social indicators is best measured sri lanka and pakistan countries often cited in this debate are used as examples

basic human needs the plateau curve abstract the satisfaction of basic human needs in developing countries follows a nonlinear curve relative to per capita income asymptotically approaching a limiting level within this general relationship some countries are more efficient than others in improving basic needs at lower per capita income levels infant mortality rates in 116 countries from 1950 to 1980 are analyzed to identify factors affecting a country s efficiency in reaching infant mortality targets relative to its gross domestic product per capita the determinants of efficiency include export structure internal distribution late development and access to education implications for development policy are discussed

infant and child mortality in developing countries analysing the data for robust determinants is development best achieved by going for growth or does specific attention need to be paid to directly improving human welfare in contrast to the human development reports of the undp the world bank has stressed the growth approach recent work has reinforced this position by arguing that health spending is extremely ineffective in reducing infant or child mortality which is mainly explained by a country s income per capita this article contests this position through testing the robustness of determinants of infant and child mortality we have estimated over 420 000 equations which show that while income per capita is a robust determinant of infant and child mortality so are indicators of health education and gender inequality some health spending such as immunisation is thus shown to be cost effective way of saving lives our results are consistent with the view that much health spending in developing countries may be poorly targeted or otherwise ineffective but do not support the position t

the stability of hedonic coalition structures we consider the partitioning of a society into coalitions in purely hedonic settings i e where each player s payoff is completely determined by the identity of other members of her coalition we first discuss how hedonic and nonhedonic settings differ and some sufficient conditions for the existence of core stable coalition partitions in hedonic settings we then focus on a weaker stability condition individual stability where no player can benefit from moving to another coalition while not hurting the members of that new coalition we show that if coalitions can be ordered according to some characteristic over which players have single peaked preferences or where players have symmetric and additively separable preferences then there exists an individually stable coalition partition examples show that without these conditions individually stable coalition partitions may not exist we also discuss some other stability concepts and the incompatibility of stability with other normative properties journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 a14 d20

performance in living standards abstract our ultimate objective is to enhance the standard of living of our societies but the standard of living has different meanings for different people a thorough investigation of the concept of the standard of living has been made only recently by sen who defines it in terms of functioning and capabilities functioning is an achievement whereas capability is the ability to achieve the main objective of the present paper is to compare achievements levels and improvement changes in the standard of living across countries using an axiomatic approach an achievement index is derived which accomodates the view that a further increase in the standard of living of a country when it is already at a higher level signifies an achievement greater than that of another with an equal increase but from a lower base the paper also tests for the statistical relationship between indicators of the countries standards of living so derived in their capita gdp the question posed is whether the aggregate income which provides people with the means to achieve a better life can be used as proxy measure of the standard living and extent to which the country s improvement in the standard of living can be explained by the levels and changes in the per capita income the analysis presented in the paper is based on the data from 80 developing countries

self selection consistent functions abstract this paper studies collective choice rules whose outcomes consist of a collection of simultaneous decisions each one of which is the only concern of some group of individuals in society the need for such rules arises in different contexts including the establishment of jurisdictions the location of multiple public facilities or the election of representative committees we define a notion of allocation consistency requiring that each partial aspect of the global decision taken by society as a whole should be ratified by the group of agents who are directly concerned with this particular aspect we investigate the possibility of designing efficient allocation consistent rules we also explore whether such rules may in addition respect the condorcet criterion journal of economic literature classification numbers d7 d71

stable coalition structures with a unidimensional set of alternatives abstract we identify a class of economic and political environments that admit an s equilibrium where both free mobility and free entry are allowed we further study the relationship between the set of s equilibria and the sets of strong and coalition proof nash equilibria in the noncooperative coalition formation game which is closely related to the one originally studied by j von neumann and o morgenstern theory of games and economic behaviour princeton univ press princeton nj 1944 we also show that the set of s equilibria induces a proper subset of the coalition structure core of the corresponding characteristic function form journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72

monetary vs credit aggregates an evaluation of monetary policy targets the past decade was characterized by increased emphasis upon monetary aggregates as intermediate targets for monetary policy although growth rate ranges were specified for both narrow and broad monetary aggegates as well as for bank credit the primary focus of the federal reserve was on the growth rate of narrow money however some policy makers 19 have recently expressed doubt about the viability of using narrow money as an intermediate target in particular it has been argued that recent financial innovations such as the introduction of the various now accounts the proliferation of money market mutual funds and the adoption of cash management techniques by both firms and consumers to name a few have distorted the ml1 gnp relationship thereby raising the question of whether broader monetary aggegates or even credit aggregates might bear a closer relationship to income furthermore the federal reserve has recently announced growth rate target ranges for a broad credit aggregate in addition to growth rate ranges for ml and m2 2 friedman 7 8 provides a general discussion of these issues while modiglianipapademos 18 provide a theoretical analysis of the conditions under which a credit aggregate is preferred to a monetary aggregate as an intermediate target however nothing conclusive can be said at the theoretical level since the choice between money and credit aggregates depends upon the true underlying structure of the macroeconomy hence the choice among money and credit aggregates is an empirical issue the aim of this paper is to provide evidence on the issue of credit aggregates versus monetary aggregates as intermediate targets for monetary policy the paper evaluates the characteristics of several monetary and credit aggregates in terms of two attributes of a

pluralism and well being indices abstract this paper advocates a variation on james griffin s prudential value theory of well being prudential value theory is consistent with various forms of pluralism it also helps us understand how we do intra and interpersonal comparisons of well being if we start from this view of well being i suggest we do not have a problem analogous to arrow s impossibility result for a social welfare function the analogous conditions are not appropiate constraints on a well being function the account of well being is brought to bear on attempts made by some particularly dasgupta and weale to make international comparisons of well being it is argued that difficulties with such attempts occur chiefly because of disanalogies between interpersonal and international comparisons of well being

formation of buyer seller trade networks in a quality differentiated product market we examine the formation of buyer seller links when exchange can take place only if such a link exists sellers produce products of different qualities and multiple sellers can form a sellers association to pool their customers setting uniform prices buyers form trade links with individual sellers or sellers associations we show which buyer seller links will form and find the set of links that are stable and show how these links influence prices we also show that a trade network mismatch may occur where a high quality good remains unsold even without an economy wide excess supply of goods jel classification d40 d51 d82

financing human development some lessons from advanced asian countries abstract this paper brings together the main conclusions of a study which has analyzed public expenditure policies pursued by today s advanced asian economies aae and their policies for financing the provision of education and health services during the high growth phase the aaes combined prudent low deficit fiscal policies with large allocations for social services this was combined with efficient public resource allocation within the social sectors for basic education and health services and reliance on the private sector for higher levels of education and expensive curative health care aae experiences with health insurance also hold useful lessons for today s developing countries

growth and equity in developing countries a reinterpretation of the sri lankan experience in the important debate between the proponents of direct basic needs and indirect economic growth measures of promoting welfare sri lanka has frequently been cited as one country which has successfully pursued the direct approach it has raised living standards without much cost in terms of reduced growth this conclusion however is based on analyses which do not account for the initial conditions of the countries being compared after methodologically incorporating these concerns neither the improvement in living standards nor the 2 0 percent per capita growth rate during the period of direct policy measures 1960 78 was exceptional in contrast during the period of more indirect growth promoting policies 1977 84 i economic growth more than doubled to an average rate of 4 3 percent per capita per annum ii expenditure inequality did not significantly change iii consumption expenditures of the population and the poor generally increased and iv several living standard indicators continued to improve