This paper revisits the relationship between human capital and income inequality, using an updated data set on human capital inequality and a novel database on earnings inequality. We find an inverted U-shaped relationship between these two inequality indicators, but with significant differences across countries regarding the turning point.…

Student well-being has emerged as a topic of considerable interest to researchers and educators. Recent work has sought to examine relationships between measures of student well-being and other constructs such as academic achievement, physical health, relationships with peers, and engagement in learning. Reading assessment and context…

In this article we present a new composite index of child health, applied to the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) of Africa, one of the areas of the planet most castigated by poverty. Our index has been constructed attending to the variables defined in the Goals of the Millennium Declaration. For this purpose we will use the P2 distance method for…

This is the first in a planned series of United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports tracking progress on the child-related indicators in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report highlights, through a data lens, the enormous task ahead for countries in meeting the 2030 Agenda for children. Through the development of projections to…

This is the executive summary of the first in a planned series of United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports tracking progress on the child-related indicators in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report highlights, through a data lens, the enormous task ahead for countries in meeting the 2030 Agenda for children. Through the…

This paper analyzes some aggregation aspects of the procedure for constructing a composite index on a multidimensional socio-economic phenomenon such as development, the main focus being on the unbalance among individual dimensions. First a theoretical framework is set up for the unbalance adjustment of the index. Then an aggregation function is…

This paper proposes a new index of governance based on the Alkire-Foster methodology and compares it with the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance. The proposed new index improves on existing measures of governance in two ways. First, it is able to incorporate both cardinal and ordinal variables without having to assign cardinal meaning to…

This paper calculates a human Wellbeing Composite Index (WCI) for 42 countries, belonging to the European Economic Space, North Africa and the Middle East, as an alternative to the shortcomings of other well-known measures of socio-economic development (i.e. Gross Domestic Product per head and Human Development Index). To attain this goal,…

Since the seminal work of Sen, poverty has been recognized as a multidimensional phenomenon. The recent availability of relevant databases renewed the interest in this approach. This paper estimates multidimensional poverty among women in fourteen Sub-Saharan African countries using the Alkire and Foster multidimensional poverty measures, whose…

A substantial literature has studied gender differences in political participation in Western industrialized democracies, but little is known about such gaps in sub-Saharan African nations. Using 2005 Afrobarometer data, this paper presents a systematic investigation of the gender gap in political participation across 18 sub-Saharan African…

World social development has arrived at a critical turning point. Economically advanced nations have made significant progress toward meeting the basic needs of their populations; however, the majority of developing countries have not. Problems of rapid population growth, failing economies, famine, environmental devastation, majority-minority…

Mobile phones are a crucial mode of communication and welfare enhancement in poor countries, especially those lacking an infrastructure of fixed lines. In recent years much has been written about how mobile telephony in Africa is rapidly reducing the digital divide with developed countries. Yet, when one examines the evidence it is not at all…

National differences in murder, rape, and serious assault were examined in 113 countries in relation to national IQ, income, skin color, birth rate, life expectancy, infant mortality, and HIV/AIDS. Data were collated from the 1993-1996 International Crime Statistics published by INTERPOL. Violent crime was found to be lower in countries with…

This report offers the first systematic analysis of out-of-school youth populations. In so doing, it estimates the youth bulge worldwide and measures key characteristics of out-of-school youth for sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. In addition, as examples of how existing data can be used for analysis at the national and subnational levels, the…

European nations are undergoing rapid and fundamental changes in response to social, political and economic events that are occurring both within and outside the region. These changes are far-reaching in scope and, ultimately, are expected to result in a redefinition of "Europe" and what it means to be "European." Using the…