Ali Khan and Ismail Sirageldin. Research in Human Capital and Development. Vol. 2. Greenwich (Connecticut)/London (England): JAI Press Inc. 1981. pp.223.

The book under review contains a collection of papers which examine the role of human capital formation in economic development. Most of the articles included in the volume lie at the frontiers of the current research. A good review of the book requires a comprehensive discussion of a vast literature, but the concise, though terse, review contained in the introduction by the editors Khan and Sirageldin is difficult to improve upon in this context, and is therefore not attempted. The first article by Takayama and Hamda is an extension of Sen’s ordinal approach to poverty and is also an improvement over earlier efforts of Takayama to link Sen’s ordinal measures of poverty to the measure of inequality – Gini Index. The departure from Sen’s poverty measure involves a shift from poverty distribution to censored income distribution. Using censored income distribution truncated by the poverty line, Takayama and Hamda demonstrate that any ordering of inequality based on this distribution can be extended to any ordering of poverty.