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Gitanjali Sen
POVERTY, INEQUALITY, AND POPULATION: ESSAY IN DEVELOPMENT AND APPLIED MEASUREMENT by D. Jayaraj Oxford University Press, 2012, 298 pp., 775
May 2012, volume 36, No 5

The book presents an array of relevant issues in development studies, such as child labour, educational participation, poverty, inequality, gender issues, that have skewed sex ratio and its relation to women’s well being; and issues related to collection of data and interpretations of statistical results. Already published in well-known journals of development studies across the world, most of the articles come with solid theoretical underpinnings, validated by empirical analysis. The indices developed or produced in relation to most topics should help one to present a comparative picture. ‘Out of School and (Probably) in Work: Child Labour and Capability Deprivation in India’ starts with the fundamental issue of child labour and its relation to poverty, a topic for my own PhD thesis which supports a much accepted fact (initially published by Basu & Van, 1998), that child non-work is a luxury good (One of the authors, Van, was my own PhD advisor and I too found the same fact while doing an empirical study on child labour in Vietnam as a part of my PhD thesis). It argues that anti-child labour policy with a blanket ban on child labour cannot be a successful tool if underlying issues of access to basic amenities, and capability deprivation are not addressed.

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