http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/55029/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/37731/ 2012-09-01T00:00:00Z The education Millennium Development Goals have been highly influential on the priorities for education and concentrated policy efforts on numbers of girls enrolled in public sector schools offering basic education. This focus has been justified by human capital calculations of the social rates of return to basic schooling. This concern with quantities has met criticism from more qualitative researchers concerned with understanding not only why girls are not enrolled in school, but also why they may be irregular attenders and poor performers in public examinations even if they are enrolled. Alongside the efforts to achieve the education Millennium Development Goals have been initiatives to improve adult women's literacies, often combined with an empowerment objective. This paper uses Sen's capability approach to argue that improving deliberative processes is relevant for the well-being of girls and women of all ages. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/38877/ 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Arjan de Haan and his co-authors are keen to use the ISS Indicators of Social Development (hereafter the ISDs) to show how institutional structuration processes can cause improvements in human well-being, including economic growth (de Haan et al, 2011). Developing this aspiration, though not uncritically, this paper explores how the ISS ISDs might be used to stimulate thinking about causal relationships by linking the ISDs to each other and conventional measures of country-level development status. But before undertaking the task of attributing causality, it is necessary to reflect on the nature of the data being used. The challenges in using the ISDs’ data can be summarised into six problems which need diagnostic reflection before interpretation of causal relationships can be convincingly undertaken ..... http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/38483/ 2011-12-01T00:00:00Z This paper uses an applied rural case study of a safer water intervention in South Africa to illustrate how three levels of economic assessment can be used to understand the impact of the intervention on people's well-being. It is set in the context of Millennium Development Goal 7 which sets a target (7C) for safe drinking-water provision and the challenges of reaching people in remote rural areas with relatively small-scale schemes. The assessment moves from cost efficiency to cost effectiveness to a full social cost-benefit analysis (SCBA) with an associated sensitivity test. In addition to demonstrating techniques of analysis, the paper brings out many of the challenges in understanding how safer drinking-water impacts on people's livelihoods. The SCBA shows the case study intervention is justified economically, though the sensitivity test suggests 'downside' vulnerability. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/34798/ 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Purpose - In this paper, we show how the translation of a logical positivist epistemology into neoclassical economics has had profound methodological consequences which over-determine an inability to predict cusps and their associated crises. Design/methodology/approach - Based on a review of epistemological and methodological literature, we argue that the financial crises of the past 20 years ought to initiate a questioning of the epistemological foundations of the discipline. Findings - As an alternative, we suggest that an economics methodology informed by critical realism would increase the probability of a timely prediction of crises. Originality/value - It de-emphasises falsification as a key criterion for assessing the quality of knowledge, provides more space for non-quantified reflections on relationships, a thicker model of human agency, a well-specified model of collective human economic behaviour as well as an endogenous possibility of dramatic change within the economic domain.