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Publications (19)
Blog
Evidence from Brazil shows how affirmative action students in the higher education system adjust their behaviour to catch up with initially higher-performing privileged students.Affirmative action (AA) policies, aiming to address historical inequalities and promote social justice, have sparked...
Blog
Globalization has generally coincided with a rise in work outside the formal economy, intensifying job precarization — when high-quality, formal jobs that entitle workers to benefits are replaced by jobs which may not comply with regulations and offer fewer benefits. In a recent study of the impacts...
Access to effective social insurance in Latin America is typically determined by workers’ status in the labor market – whether they have formal or informal jobs. This column explains why the separate systems constitute a bad economic and social policy. The author calls for a shift towards universal...
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is particularly difficult because of data and analytical challenges. While most middle-income countries produce comprehensive household surveys these...
Blog
What type of business destroys proportionately more jobs during times of economic recessions and hires more in booms? This simple question motivates an important ongoing debate in the economics literature that seeks to explain the factors behind the dynamics of employment creation in small and large...
Blog
– Country Comparisons and Conceptual Approaches
18 December 2014 Roger Williamson In an earlier article I reviewed a number of the high-profile contributions to the September 2014 conference on inequality. It is now time to dig deeper into the material presented at the event. This article features a few of the country case studies and...
Blog
26 September 2014 Roger Williamson Huge interest in the WIDER Inequality Conference (5-6 September) Inequality is big news. Whether you think Thomas Piketty’s book is primarily long-run economic history or a prediction of future trends for returns to capital and labour, it is still a surprise that a...
Blog
– Lessons for Africa – An Interview with Armando Barrientos and Ed Amann
24 January 2014 In this interview Armando Barrientos and Ed Amann give an introduction to their research project at the Brooks World Poverty Institute on the relevance of the Brazilian development model for Africa. Brazil and other Latin American countries emerged from the period of structural...
Blog
– The Role of Conditional Cash Transfer – An Interview with Armando Barrientos
24 January 2014 In this interview Professor Armando Barrientos reviews the recent UNU-WIDER project on inequality in Latin America which looks at the regional trend of decreasing inequality since 2000 and the reasons behind it. The current trend stands out as it goes against the historical high and...
Blog
24 September 2013 Roger Williamson Another big weekend for UNU-WIDER. The stage was well set on Thursday 19 September for a consideration of inequality and poverty in Africa, at the 17th WIDER Annual Lecture by former Finnish President Ahtisaari on 'Egalitarian Principles–the foundation for stable...
Blog
30 April 2013 Tony Addison As April closes, our thoughts turn to UNU-WIDER’s spring/summer programme. And it’s a busy one. June sees us back in Stockholm, this time to talk about aid, climate change and the environment at the ReCom results meeting. There is also our big Learning to Compete...
Blog
Tony Addison This month saw the visit of Kaushik Basu, the World Bank’s new Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics, to talk about the global crisis and the impact on emerging economies at a UNU-WIDER seminar. You can see a video interview with Kaushik here. Kaushik is an...
Blog
– Emerging Challenges for Post-2015 MDGs
Rolph van der Hoeven and Peter van Bergeijk One of the most important trends that emerged since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is the rapid growth of some large developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil. Figure 1 illustrates the shift of the economic weight of...
Blog
Tony Addison With our temperatures now well above zero, we head for the official end of the Finnish winter on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday). As reported last month, the annual bird migration is well under way. Arriving too, are UNU-WIDER’s many visitors on our PhD internship and visiting scholar...
Blog
– Lessons for Developing Countries
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan China and India have become global economic powers. Even at the market exchange rate, China overtook Japan in 2010 as the second largest economy. China’s trade and financial activities, India’s emergence as a technology and innovation hub, and both countries...
Blog
Alice Amsden, Alisa DiCaprio, and James Robinson To understand what role elites play in the process of economic development, we need to establish first who they are. Though most definitions are welfare neutral, in popular discourse elites take on a negative connotation. This conceptual confusion has...
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