The main objective of this research is to understand the complex mechanisms behind the process of human development amongst indigent individuals and households. Our focus is justified by the importance of human development for the long-term reduction and eventual elimination of poverty. By human development, or human capital, we mean the fostering of attributes such as cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and skills, nutrition and health. The process begins in early infanthood and continues right throughout the life of an individual. Being incremental in nature, this means that early choices, inputs and events have the power to either debilitate or facilitate development at more advanced stages. An understanding of this process is crucial for the design of appropriate development policies.

The approach we propose is to study the effect of some policies that have recently been implemented to foster human development. There are two main justifications for proceeding with our research agenda in this way. First, policy experiments afford us the opportunity to study individual decision making under a range of varying incentives. In the best cases, this variation is generated by randomly allocating a particular treatment to some individuals but not to others. But even when programme allocation is not genuinely random, one can often exploit the fact that incentives vary across individuals, to identify and characterize the decision mechanisms and more generally the process of accumulation of human capital. Second, the study of different policies in different contexts allows for a direct evaluation of their effectiveness. If such evaluation exercises are accompanied by the identification of the mechanisms that underlie successes and failures, one can generalise such evaluations and predict the likely effects of varying certain features of existing policies. This becomes an invaluable tool for providing advice on ways of fine-tuning policies.

We will recognise the multi-faceted nature of human development and consider its various constituents. This will, broadly speaking, involve addressing three dimensions of human capital - nutrition, health and education - although there will be natural overlap across each. For each aspect, we will consider

• (a) the determinants of the demand for a particular set of inputs.
• (b) the availability of inputs both in terms of quantity and quality
• (c) the mechanisms through which inputs shape development (such as how subsidies affect food intake, and how this affects aspects of human capital such as nutritional status and cognitive, non-cognitive and physical development) and how inputs complement each other throughout this process
• (d) how various aspects of the environment in which low-income individuals people reside (such as the natural environment, the nature of prevailing institutions, attitudes towards women, the norms governing family relationships, social capital) affect the outcomes of interest and the relative effectiveness of different policy interventions.

Our ultimate aim is that each component of our research will contribute towards piecing together a unified framework within which we can understand the process of human development and the policies that are likely to be most conducive to it, and in this way to the long-term reduction of poverty.

The specific projects that form our research agenda can be framed within four big themes: (i) the process of human development in infanthood and childhood; (ii) the process of human development in adulthood; (iii) the mechanisms and factors within which households interact and which extert an influence on the process; (iiv) the dynamics of human capital accumulation.