Scientific knowledge and technical expertise promote the wealth of nations. The traditional view is that science allows the expansion of technology, which, in turn, promotes economic development. This chapter shows that: 1) the scientific productivity of a country correlates more strongly with gross national income per capita than its technological sophistication; 2) science is important for ec...

To characterize economic development and diagnose the economic health condition, several popular indices such as gross domestic product (GDP), industrial structure and income growth are widely applied. However, computing these indices based on traditional economic census is usually costly and resources consuming, and more importantly, following a long time delay. In this paper, we analyzed near...

This study examines empirically the impact of income polarization on economic growth in an unbalanced panel of more than 70 countries during the 1960–2005 period. We calculate various polarization indices using existing micro-level datasets, as well as datasets reconstructed from grouped data on income distribution taken from the World Income Inequality Database. The results garnered for our pr...

This paper intends to analyze the impact of Economic Development on the status of women in India and tries to study how historical perceptions, prejudices, predispositions and beliefs regarding women in society have led to perpetuation of „deprivation and discrimination‟ against the women and in result deteriorating the overall status of women even in today‟s world. For any economy, growth rela...

There are two contradictory answers to the question in the title. The first is the good growth hypothesis: economic growth generates higher incomes, which should make people approve of the government. Hence growth generates stability. The second is the destabilizing growth hypothesis: growth generates complex changes in society, and therefore instability. A part of the instability will be polit...

In recent decades, China has experienced double-digit economic growth rates and rising inequality. This paper implements a new decomposition approach using the China Health and Nutrition Survey (1991-2006) to examine the extent to which changes in level and distribution of incomes and in income mobility are related to health disparities between rich and poor. We find that health disparities in ...

This paper documents the magnitude of income mobility in Germany and its distribution across different income positions, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The suggested graphical approach makes it straightforward to identify the portions of the distribution that have the largest impact on aggregate ‘income movement’ indices à la Fields & Ok, and hence offers a starting point to h...

Household Choices of Child Labor and Schooling: A Simple Model with Application to Brazil This paper develops and estimates a simple structural model of household decisions regarding child labor and schooling. We argue that part of the conflicting results from the previous literature – related to the effect of improvements in economic conditions on child labor – derives from the different incom...