Sudhir Anand

Human Development and Economic Sustainability

Abstract This paper attempts to integrate the concern for human development in the present with that in the future. In arguing for sustainable human development, it appeals to the notion of ethical “universalism”—an elementary demand for impartiality of claims—applied within and between generations. Economic sustainability is often seen as a matter of intergenerational equity, but the specification of what is to be sustained is not always straightforward. The addendum explores the relationship between distributional equity, sustainable development, optimal growth, and pure time preference.

The Kuznets process and the inequality—development relationship

Abstract In his classic paper on economic growth and income inequality, Kuznets discussed the process of population shift from traditional to modern activities as the basis for a theory of distributional change during the course of development. In this paper, we present a formalization of the Kuznets process, conduct a general analysis of distributional change under this process, and derive the functional forms of, and conditions for a turning point in, the inequality—development relationship for six commonly used indices of inequality. The functional form appropriate to each index is then estimated using cross-section data on 60 developing and developed countries. Finally, some extensions to the initial formalization of the Kuznets process are considered.

Inequality and development A critique

Abstract In this paper we subject the influential cross-section estimation of the inequality-development relationship by Ahluwalia to detailed scrutiny. We investigate the robustness of his estimates to variations in functional form, and find that different functional forms - between which the data cannot choose - lead to widely differing shapes for the inequality-development relationship. We also examine his data set which consists of income distributions for 60 developing and developed countries, and find that the distributions are not comparable with respect to income concept, population unit, and survey coverage. We construct a minimally consistent data set to reestimate the relationship, and show that the preferred functional form displays a reversal of the commonly accepted U-hypothesis.

Inequality and poverty in Malaysia : measurement and decomposition

This report gives a perspective on Malaysia, by tracing the development and importance of ethnic pluralism in the country. This pluralism has led the government to show special concern for racial income, distribution and, more generally, for racial economic disparities. The income distribution data used in this study were collected through the Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) of 1970. A comparison shows that the PES is the best source of income data to date on household and individual incomes in Malaysia. The broad features of the PES household income distribution show overall inequality in Malaysia to be fairly high. The individual income distributions show large inequalities within the racial groups. These suggest that racial income disparities may be only part of a much wider problem of income inequality in the country. A profile of poverty in Malaysia is constructed, which identifies the poor in terms of socioeconomic variables such as race, location, employment status, occupation, and education. Such information is useful not only in understanding better the correlates and circumstances of poverty, but also in identifying areas of government intervention for the redress of poverty. The reports concludes if there are no data on the distribution of physical wealth among individuals in Malaysia, the breakdown of the personal income distribution by employment status does shed some light on the distribution of capital assets.

The concern for equity in health

This issue of the journal contains papers presented to the first meeting of the International Society for Equity in Health, Havana, Cuba, June 2000.

DALYs: efficiency versus equity

Abstract The Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) is a newly-developed indicator of ill-health which provided the technical foundation for the World Banks (1993) World Development Report: Investing in Health. In this paper we expose some of the value choices embodied in the DALY—those relating to disability weights, age-weighting, and discounting. We identify the equity consequences of using the efficiency criterion of aggregate DALY-minimization as a tool for healthsector planning.

Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty

The international communitys commitment to halve global poverty by 2015 has been enshrined in the first Millennium Development Goal. How global poverty is measured is a critical element in assessing progress towards this goal, and different researchers have presented widely-varying estimates. The chapters in this volume address a range of problems in the measurement and estimation of global poverty, from a variety of viewpoints. Topics covered include the controversies surrounding the definition of a global poverty line; the use of purchasing power parity exchange rates to map the poverty line across countries; and the quality, and appropriate use, of data from national accounts and household surveys. Both official and independent estimates of global poverty have proved to be controversial, and this volume presents and analyses the lively debate that has ensued. Contributors to this volume - Sudhir Anand, University of Oxford Paul Segal, University of Oxford Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University Martin Ravallion, Director of the Development Research Group, World Bank Sanjay G. Reddy, Barnard College, Columbia University Thomas W. Pogge, Australian National University and Yale University Surjit Bhalla, Oxus Research and Investments T. N. Srinivasan, Yale University Bettina Aten, Bureau of Economic Analysis Alan Heston, University of Pennsylvania Angus Deaton, Princeton University Robert Johnston Ivo Havinga Gisele Kamanou Viet Vu Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, The New School David Stewart Albert Berry, University of Toronto Carl Riskin, Queens College, CUNY and Columbia University Qin Gao, Fordham University Shaohua Chen, Development Economics Research Group, World Bank Suresh D .Tendulkar, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi K. Sundaram, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi David Sahn, Cornell University Stephen Younger, Cornell University

The Global Distribution of Income

This paper investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries. We discuss conceptual and methodological issues - including alternative definitions of the global distribution, the use of household surveys and national accounts data, the use of purchasing power parity exchange rates, and the incorporation of recently available data on top incomes from income tax records. We also review recent attempts to estimate the global distribution of income. Our own estimates combine household survey data with top income data, and we analyze various aspects of this disribution, including its within- and between-country components, and changes in relative versus absolute global inequality. Finally, we examine global poverty, which is identified through the lower end of the global distribution.This paper appears in (Eds.) A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2A, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2015.

Health workers and vaccination coverage in developing countries. Authors' reply

1are to be congratulated on their econometric analysis of health-worker density and vaccination coverage. Nevertheless, I am concerned about their conclusion that increased health-worker density, especially that of nurses and midwives, will produce higher vaccination coverage. I have done a reanalysis of the same data 1–3 using the numbers of nurses and midwives per 100 000 population as an independent variable and vaccination coverage as a dependent variable (fi gure). My analysis shows a general increase in vaccination coverage from lower to higher nurse-midwife densities, but also large variations in vaccination coverage between diff erent countries with similar nursemidwife densities. At a nurse-midwife density of less than 30 per 100 000, no suffi cient vaccination coverage seems to be achievable. At a density of 30–100 per 100 000, several countries achieve vaccination coverage close to or greater than 80%. Not all of these countries are small, and female educational levels are low in some of them (eg, Egypt, Ghana, Tanzania). 4 A