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Food as a human right was first laid down 50 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The last 10 years, in particular, have witnessed an increased recognition of the importance of the human rights approach for designing policies and interventions that promote food and nutrition security, as evidenced by the highly visible role given to human rights at the 1996 World Food Summit. But, given that the design of effective policies and interventions is based on good analysis and information, what are the implications of the human rights approach for the food and nutrition policy research agenda? This is the question we address in this paper. We note several implications of the human rights perspective in terms of (1) new research areas, (2) new perspectives on old issues, and (3) implications for research methods. CONTENTS Acknowledgments .................................................... iv 1. Introduction .......................................................1 2. The ...

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Description Fit a variety of latent variable models, including confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and latent growth curve models.

The effect of the distribution of political rights on income inequality has been studied both theoretically and empirically. This paper reviews the existing literature and, in particular, the available empirical evidence. Our reading of the literature suggests that formal exclusion from the political process through restrictions on the voting franchise appears to have caused a high degree of economic inequality, and democratization in the form of franchise expansion has typically led to an expansion in redistribution, at least in the small sample of episodes studied. In a less

Many political economic theories use and emphasize the process of voting in their explanation of the growth of Social Security, government spending, and other public policies. But is there an empirical connection between democracy and Social Security program size or design? Using some new international data sets to produce both country-panel econometric estimates as well as case studies of South American and southern European countries, we find that Social Security policy varies according to economic and demographic factors, but that very different political histories can result in the same Social Security policy. We find little partial effect of democracy on the size of Social Security budgets, on how those budgets are allocated, or how economic and demographic factors affect Social Security. If there is any observed difference, democracies spend a little less of their GDP on Social Security, grow their budgets a bit more slowly, and cap their payroll tax more often, than do economically and demographically similar nondemocracies. Democracies and nondemocracies are equally likely to have benefit formulas inducing retirement and, conditional on GDP per capita, equally likely to induce retirement with a retirement test vs.

Arthur Alderson and François Nielsen for allowing me to use some key variables in their data. INCOME INEQUALITY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR I challenge two conventional notions of the relationship between internal political process and distributional outcomes: one is that there is a negative linear relationship between public sector size and income inequality, and the other that there is a direct linkage between democracy and income inequality. The results based on unbalanced panel data on 64 developing and developed countries and a total of 341 observations from 1970 to 1994, reveal that (1) the size of the public sector has an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship with income inequality. Public sector growth initially increases income inequality, but from a certain threshold onwards, reduces income inequality; (2) This curvilinear relationship is explained by a shift in policy angle from growth to equity in allocating state resources by state-elites: growth-oriented regimes translate bigger public sector size into higher inequality, while equity-oriented regimes translate bigger public sector size into lower inequality; (3) Institutionalized democracy provides subordinate classes and reformist elites with better chances to channel their distributive demands through an

This paper tests the implication of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem that capital-poor individuals prefer more trade openness in poor (capital-scarce) countries and less trade in rich (labor-scarce) countries, by using a broad panel of countries and new exogenous determinants of trade openness. According to the seminal work in Mayer (1984), capital-poor individuals prefer more trade openness in poor (capital-scarce) countries and less trade openness in rich (labor-scarce) countries. We use the level of political rights as a proxy for the relative capitallabor endowment of the median voter so that an increase in political rights should have asymmetric effects in poor and rich countries: an increase in political rights should lead to more openness in capital poor countries and less openness in capital rich countries. Our results show that, while both income per capita and political rights are positively associated with import intensity, their interaction has a negative and very robust negative association with openness. Increases in political rights lead to sizeable decreases in import intensity after a given income per capita threshold has been surpassed. Our results are robust to the inclusion of structural, geography and cultural determinants of openness, different estimation methods and different proxies for country endowments.