UNICEF produced this report card, Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, on April 10, 2013. The report card uses measures such as material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviour and risks, and housing and environment, and analyzes how recent government financial policies affect children.

Peter Orszag argues that widening gaps in college completion rates between rich and poor students not only undermines the American ideal of equal opportunity, but also misses an economic opportunity to boost productivity.

Inequality is rising across the post-industrial capitalist world. The problem is not caused by politics and politics will never be able to eliminate it. But simply ignoring it could generate a populist backlash. Governments must accept that today as ever, inequality and insecurity are the inevitable results of market operations. Their challenge is to find ways of shielding citizens from capitalism's adverse consequences -- even as they preserve the dynamism that produces capitalism's vast economic and cultural benefits in the first place.

Since their inception in 2000, The Millennium Development Goals have revolutionized the global aid business, using specific targets to help mobilize and guide development efforts. They have encouraged world leaders to tackle multiple dimensions of poverty simultaneously and provided a standard for judging performance. As their 2015 expiration looms, the time has come to bank those successes and focus on what comes next.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon argues that with the help of the private and public sector, women entrepreneurs are helping to combat global poverty, but more work is needed to overcome the challenges of access to finance, access to markets, and access to skills-building and networks.

The amount of resources the American public and private sectors commit to all forms of welfare is massive -- the fifth highest outlay in the world.

Vivek Maru and Michael Woolcock evaluate efforts of nonprofits and global development institutions to help all people exercise their rights, increase government accountability, and participate in governance.

Vivek Maru and Michael Woolcock evaluate efforts of nonprofits and global development institutions to help all people exercise their rights, increase government accountability, and participate in governance.

The United States is the only OECD country without paid maternity leave; a parent's job is not protected if he or she takes a day off to care for a sick child; and the United States still lacks affordable, high quality child care. Karen Kornbluh outlines the need to update the policies and practices that affect American families and discusses the benefits of health care reform for parents and children.

Blake Clayton says the biggest challenge of building the twenty-first century energy economy isn't just the transition from dirty fuels to cleaner, sustainable ones; it's about making the advances of the last two centuries available to the world's poorest people.

For all the differences between Democrats and Republicans that were laid bare during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, the parties' standard-bearers, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, do seem to have agreed on one thing: the importance of equal opportunity.

With the Occupy Wall Street movement now a year old, income inequality remains hotly debated globally. This Backgrounder examines the issues.

The U.S. Census Bureau released this report, "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2011", in September 2012.

This was a meeting of the roundtable series, Opportunity and Exclusion in the Global Economy.

Two recent books reveal the ugly underbelly of India's success story. A vast gulf has opened up between the rich and the poor, corruption suffuses every aspect of life, and the country's political leaders lack the vision needed to turn this would-be world power into an actual one.

Speaker

Hernando de Soto, President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, which advises heads of state and governments worldwide; Author, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World and The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else

Presider

Isobel Coleman, Senior Fellow and Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative, Council on Foreign Relations

Hernando de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, discusses how economic factors, including formal and informal markets, property rights, entrepreneurship, and access to credit, contributed to the Arab uprisings.

This meeting is cosponsored with CFR's Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative.

Hernando de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, discusses how economic factors, including formal and informal markets, property rights, entrepreneurship, and access to credit, contributed to the Arab uprisings.

This meeting is cosponsored with CFR's Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative.

Peter Orszag explains how monthly cycles of food-stamp benefits may contribute to disciplinary problems among students from low-income families.

Three new books look at poverty from the bottom up, painting a vivid portrait of the lives poor people live.