Research Program in Development Studies

One in four South Africans survives on government payouts. Policymakers who doubt the benefits of South Africa's post-apartheid welfare system should meet Anna Zikhali and the remnants of her family.

Tallness has always been viewed as a desirable physical trait -- so desirable that more than a century ago, Sir Francis Galton began collecting measurements of British schoolchildren as a prelude to his dream of breeding genetically superior human beings. Although his eugenics project went nowhere, his obsession with height survives in a word that has become part of every modern parent's vocabulary: percentile.

One of the lasting effects of HIV/Aids, is the devastating impact it is having on the education of children. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, orphans - regardless of how they were orphaned - are less likely to be enrolled in school. If they are in school, they lag behind children of the same age.

HOMATAWARA, India - The sturdy little public clinic in this poor, sickly village was locked up one recent afternoon, but that is nothing remarkable. Rampant absenteeism among government doctors and nurses is an open secret across India and much of the developing world, and they virtually never get in trouble for not showing up.

Anne Case and Christina Paxson, both Professors of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, will be awarded the 11th Annual Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the Best Paper in Health Economics. They share the honor with Assistant Professor Darren Lubotsky from the University of Illinois, for their paper "Economic Status and Health in Childhood: The Origins of the Gradient." The paper was written while Professor Lubotsky was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbei

On June 26, the Woodrow Wilson School held its final Washington Seminar Series event for the 2002/03 academic year. Anne Case, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and Director of the Research Program in Development Studies, presented a lecture entitled "The Tragedy of HIV/AIDS and Africa's Forgotten Orphans" to an audience of over 100 people, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.