Publications

Child labour is widespread in home based manufacturing activities in the informal sector in most developing countries. This form of child labour will not attract the penal provisions of a country’s laws banning child labour. This paper draws on surveys carried out in five Asian countries – two low-income (India, Pakistan) and three middle-income countries (Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand) – where production of manufactured goods is subcontracted to home based workers widely. It examines the incidence of child work in such households, the child’s schooling, reasons why children are working, their work conditions, their health, and gender issues.

This paper compares people’s attitudes to inequality at the end of the 1990s the qualities they perceive are needed to get ahead, the role of government and rewards for employment in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Western countries. Data (from the 1999 International Social Survey Programme) suggest that overall, people in CEE express substantially more ‘egalitarian’ attitudes than those in the West, even after 10 years of economic adjustment to the market economy. The research produces important messages for policymakers, underlining the degree of support for public action concerning redistribution and warning them of the extent to which inequalities are felt in society, especially those that are perceived to be generated by ‘unfair’ means.

This paper examines the impact of the Asian crisis on children in Indonesia. School attendance dropped slightly after the onset of the crisis but has since rebounded to higher than pre-crisis levels. Fewer children are now working, although the older children who are working and are not attending school seem to be working longer hours. Several studies have examined the social impacts of the crisis. The findings can largely be summarized as showing that rather than being uniformly negative and severe, the crisis impact has been quite heterogeneous, depending on geographic location and household socio-economic status. Overwhelmingly, households have been shown to be very resilient in the face of hardship.

Within the last decade governments of donors and developing countries have committed themselves to achieving a number of International Development Targets (IDTs) to be reached by 2015. These include halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and ensuring universal primary education. While the bulk of the resources for this task will come from the national budgets of developing countries, without additional official development assistance (ODA) the task is daunting for most of the low-income countries. This paper examines the extent to which poverty alleviation through support for basic social services has become part of the official development assistance strategy of donors. It finds an alarming gap between the rethoric of poverty reduction on the one hand, and the feature of ODA, especially to basic services, on the other.

This paper discusses the possible pathways between macroeconomic change and child welfare and develops a typology of the risks that children may face at different stages of the lifecycle. Adopting a multi-dimensional view of child well-being, trends in both economic measures of poverty, based on incomes and expenditures, and in selected capability-based indicators are then examined. The indicators selected reflect the health and survival, education and personal development of children and their social inclusion/exclusion. Not all the news is bad but the data show that the human cost of economic transition has been high and children, far from being protected from its impact, have been amongst those who have suffered the most.

This paper examines the successes of ten 'high-achievers' - countries with social indicators far higher than might be expected given their national wealth. Their progress in such fields as education and health offers lessons for social policy elsewhere in the developing world. Based on UNICEF-supported studies in each country, the paper shows how, in the space of fifty years, these high-achievers have made advances in health and education that took nearly 200 years in the industrialized world. It pinpoints the policies that have contributed to this success - policies that could be replicated elsewhere.

Following the fall of the Berlin wall, every former Soviet country experienced an economic crisis of some dimension. In many countries, the end of communism also blew the lid off tensions that had been simmering for decades, if not centuries. Since the late 1980s, armed conflict has broken out in around one third of the countries in the region. The human impact of such changes has been immense. Those born into authoritarian regimes now have the freedom to elect their representatives, to voice their opinions, to chart the course for their own lives. But they find that they must compete for their slice of the pie in the new economic climate. Others have lost their homes, schools, communities and countries as a result of armed conflict. This publication, created to mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, looks back at the impact of ten years of transition. It argues for a new focus on the human aspect of transition, and a rededication to its original goals - a better quality of life for every citizen in a humane and democratic society.

How can EMU be expected to affect the children of Europe? Macroeconomics in OECD countries has tended to become a remote and abstract subject, discussed in aggregate terms which seem far removed from the everyday experience of families. Much of this paper is concerned with making the link between macroeconomic analysis and family welfare, a link which is important for all age groups, but particularly so for children. Childhood is a vulnerable stage of the life-cycle, and children may be especially sensitive to macroeconomic shocks yet the public debate about EMU has been largely divorced from the concerns of families and children. Several proposals emerge from the analysis for improvements in our monitoring of economic performance to make them more family orientated.

Despite improved economic performance in Central and Eastern Europe in 1994 and 1995, there was still no clear and comprehensive evidence that the welfare crisis was ending. This third Regional Monitoring Report confirms the social trends observed since 1989, showing in particular that children have suffered disproportionately in the fields of child care, education, adolescent protection and poverty. The Report maintains that untimely, partial, or clearly erroneous policies have contributed to this deterioration in child welfare and proposes a series of policy guidelines for a "transition with a human face". These include the promotion of an employment and self-employment based anti-poverty strategy and some important measures in the fields of health, education and child care.

Amartya Sen, the Nobel economist, explains why mortality should, or could, be an indicator of economic success. While mortality is not in itself an economic phenomenon, the influences that increase or reduce mortality often have distinctly economic causes. Consequently there is a prima facie reason for not dismissing mortality as a test of economic performance. He argues that mortality information can throw light on the nature of social inequalities, including gender bias and racial disparities; biases in economic arrangements are often most clearly seen through differential mortality information. He advises that we look beyond the standard statistics of incomes and earnings into the real information on deprivation and hardship.

Despite improved economic performance in Central and Eastern Europe in 1994 and 1995, there was still no clear and comprehensive evidence that the welfare crisis was ending. This third Regional Monitoring Report confirms the social trends observed since 1989, showing in particular that children have suffered disproportionately in the fields of child care, education, adolescent protection and poverty. The Report maintains that untimely, partial, or clearly erroneous policies have contributed to this deterioration in child welfare and proposes a series of policy guidelines for a "transition with a human face". These include the promotion of an employment and self-employment based anti-poverty strategy and some important measures in the fields of health, education and child care.

The economic crisis in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s generated fierce debate among analysts and policy-makers concerning its causes and appropriate ways out of it. This volume addresses the key policy issues in structural adjustment in Africa. Among the policies addressed are those in the spheres of agriculture, trade, exchange rates, privatization, investment, social sectors, external relations and democratization.