Working Paper
Labour market polarization in South Africa
There is evidence from developed countries that technical change affects not only the employment intensity of production, but also the occupational composition of employment. The use of artificial intelligence, automation, and robots has changed the...
Working Paper
Productivity, structural change, and skills dynamics
This paper explores the contribution of structural change and the skill upgrading of the labour force to productivity. Our growth decomposition based on an original database we built for Tunisia and Turkey shows that productivity is mainly explained...
Working Paper
Income Risk, Coping Strategies and Safety Nets
High income risk is part of life in developing countries. Climatic risks, economic fluctuations, but also a large number of individual-specific shocks make these households vulnerable to serious hardship. For example, details are given on the various...
Working Paper
Measuring multidimensional inequality of opportunity
This paper develops a normative approach to the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity in a multidimensional setting—that is, when the individual outcome is represented by a multidimensional variable. We characterize three classes of social...
Working Paper
The impact of impact evaluation
In 2006 the Center for Global Development’s report ‘When Will We Ever Learn? Improving lives through impact evaluation’ bemoaned the lack of rigorous impact evaluations. The authors of the present paper researched international organizations and...
Working Paper
Winners and losers in industrial policy 2.0
Large-scale business subsidies tied to national industrial development promotion programmes are notoriously difficult to study and are often inseparable from the political economy of large government programmes. We use the Tunisian national firm...
Policy Brief
Transition to labour market by university students
This brief summarizes the findings and implications of a survey of the school-to-work transition by Mozambican university students. No research of this kind had previously been conducted. Over the course of a year and a half, university graduates...
Blog
Miner’s son turned mining researcher
by
Susan Villa
March 2020
Tony Addison is the first in his family not to become a miner. He has decades of experience in development economics and economic reform in developing...
Working Paper
Kuznets’ tension in India
Developing countries face a trade-off between the twin objectives of structural transformation and inclusive growth. This is the ‘developer’s dilemma’. This study analyses the dilemma as it manifested itself in the Indian context, and identifies two...
Working Paper
Leapfrogging into the unknown
This paper traces a set of major trends and future scenarios in global structural change. It argues that across multiple domains of change, developing economies are facing novel constellations of lateness and prematurity in technological and economic...
Working Paper
Moral reputation and political selection in a decentralized democracy
What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and...
Working Paper
Job spells in an emerging market
Few studies exist on job duration in developing labour markets—an important omission both in our understanding of such markets and for the job duration literature, which is mainly based on developed-country case studies, which differ in structural...
Working Paper
Measuring social mobility rates in earlier and less-documented societies
In societies where surnames are inherited from parents, we can use these names to estimate rates of intergenerational mobility. This paper explains how to make such estimates, and illustrates their use in pre-industrial England and modern Chile and...
Journal Article
Tax-motivated transfer mispricing in South Africa
This paper provides the first direct systematic evidence of profit shifting through transfer mispricing in a developing country. Using South African transaction-level customs data, the author directly tests for transfer price deviations from arm's...
Working Paper
The elasticity of taxable income
The elasticity of taxable income is a key tax policy parameter that plays an important role in the formulation of tax and transfer policy. This paper extends work by Kemp (2019) by using a new panel of individual tax returns and the phenomenon of...
Blog
Meet the women behind the Southern Africa – Towards Inclusive Economic Development programme
by
Anne Tomi
March 2020
Globally, women are under-represented in the field of economics. Only a third of all academic research staff in the field of economics in Europe are...
Blog
Solving the PhD puzzle: My experience as a visiting PhD Fellow
by
Weiwei Chen
March 2020
I am now in my fourth year as a PhD student in development studies at SOAS, University of London, working on my thesis, ‘The Dynamics of Chinese...
Blog
When COVID-19 comes to Africa
by
Arkebe Oqubay
March 2020
There is no telling how long it will take to bring the COVID-19 coronavirus under control, or how many people will be affected. But African...
Working Paper
Shifting from deductions to credits
The recent National Health Insurance White Paper proposes redirection of medical tax credits revenue towards the financing of the national health insurance.This raises critical questions about the impact on affordability for the poor as well as...
Journal Article
Multidimensional poverty of children in Mozambique
We analyse the multidimensional wellbeing of children aged 0–17 in Mozambique and find that 46.3% can be considered multidimensionally poor. A substantial divide exists between urban and rural areas and between northern and southern provinces. We...
Working Paper
Structural transformation and inclusive growth
We focus on special characteristics of the manufacturing sector, in terms of employment generation and productivity growth, that enable the rapid, resilient economic catch-up of developing countries. We consider the ‘developer’s dilemma’ and the...
Working Paper
Measuring labour earnings inequality in post-apartheid South Africa
This paper investigates the validity of household survey data published by Statistics South Africa since 1993 and later integrated into the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS). A series of statistical adjustments are proposed, compared, and...
Working Paper
Structural transformation, inequality, and inclusive growth in China
In this paper, we analyse the relationship between China’s structural transformation and the inclusiveness of its economic growth. China’s economy has undergone significant structural changes since it initiated the economic reforms in 1978. Economic...
Blog
Why is inequality in South Africa higher than in Germany?: Explaining income distributions with ‘decompositions’
by
Carlos Gradín
March 2020
The understanding of inequality requires the analysis of changes in income distributions across countries and over time as well as the identification...
Working Paper
Can Financial Markets be Tapped to Help Poor People Cope with Weather Risks?
Poor households with little or no wealth are particularly vulnerable to risks that reduce incomes and increase expenditures. This book addresses many of the risk-coping strategies for the rural poor, with a focus on micro level and household actions...
Blog
Welfare works: redistribution is the way to create less violent, less unequal societies
In his presidential address to the Royal Economic Society in 1996, the late Professor Anthony Atkinson famously called for discussion of inequality...
Working Paper
Hidden from the data
Compared with most other Indian states, women’s reported work participation rates have historically been low in West Bengal. This trend is more prominent in rural areas. Historians have tried to explain this phenomenon in terms of culture and the...
Working Paper
The developer’s dilemma
This paper discusses the ‘developer’s dilemma’—a tension emerging from the fact that developing countries are simultaneously seeking structural transformation and broad-based growth to raise incomes of the poor. Simon Kuznets originally hypothesized...
Blog
7555 km and beyond: Working together to achieve the SDGs
'It was great to have enough time to discuss each paper. I received useful and frank feedback. The topics are relevant for everyone. I noticed a...
Working Paper
Agro-processing, value chains, and regional integration in Southern Africa
Regional integration in Africa is underway but ongoing progress requires that the gains are widely spread. South Africa’s huge regional trade surplus in manufactured goods is already leading to protectionist pressures in neighbouring countries. Agro...
Working Paper
Structural transformation and inclusive growth in Ghana
This study examines the structural transformation–inclusive growth nexus for Ghana. The data cover the post-independence period for Ghana and are phased into three periods: the post-independence period to the start of the economic recovery programme...
Working Paper
Making agricultural value chains more inclusive through technology and innovation
Some entry barriers in agricultural and agro-processing value chains, particularly for smallholder farmers and small/medium-sized processors, can be overcome with innovation and technology adoption. Technologies and innovation in these sectors have...
Working Paper
Product market competition and the labour market
We study the relationship between product market competition and labour market outcomes in South Africa. We combine firm-level data from tax records with individual-level data from the labour force survey. We estimate markups across sectors, and...
Working Paper
The corporate income tax gap in South Africa
A key objective of many governments is to improve tax revenue mobilization. One way to achieve this is by improving tax compliance. This requires accurate knowledge of the tax gap, i.e. the difference between what should be paid and what is actually...
Working Paper
Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes and household welfare
Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries.We focus on one such administrative failure—the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Mozambique - MOZMOD v2.6
View the latest MOZMOD country report here. This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. The report describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions...
Journal Article
Informality and poverty in Ecuador
This paper uses national representative data from the Ecuadorian Family Expenditure survey to study the determinants of poverty and informality in the country, taking into account the two-way relationship between these two phenomena. The main...
Blog
Will COVID-19 lead to half a billion more people living in poverty in developing countries?
by
Andy Sumner, Christopher Hoy, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez
April 2020
The impacts of COVID-19 in developing countries are starting to be felt. The Economist went as far as to call it the ‘next calamity’, noting how...
Working Paper
Estimates of the impact of COVID-19 on global poverty
In this paper we make estimates of the potential short-term economic impact of COVID-19 on global monetary poverty through contractions in per capita household income or consumption. Our estimates are based on three scenarios: low, medium, and high...
Working Paper
Riots and social capital in urban India
This paper explores the relationship between household exposure to riots and social capital in urban India using a panel dataset collected by the authors in the state of Maharashtra. The analysis applies a random-effect model with lagged covariates...
Blog
To die from hunger or the virus: An all too real dilemma for the poor in India (and elsewhere)
by
Martha Chen
April 2020
On March 24, in a speech to the nation, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, announced a 21-day lockdown. With only four hours’ notice, 1.3 billion...
Blog
COVID-19 and lockdowns: Are women more affected?
by
Bina Agarwal
April 2020
Globally, governments are using lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19. This has disproportionately affected the poor, the homeless, and the...
Working Paper
Good business practices improve productivity in Myanmar’s manufacturing sector
We look into the relationship between business practices and enterprise productivity using panel data with matched employer and employee information from Myanmar. The data show that micro, small, and medium-size enterprises in Myanmar typically do...
Working Paper
Ethnicity is not public service destiny
Millions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress’s promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains...
Journal Article
The political economy of the resource curse
This article reviews the recent literature on the developmental effects of resource abundance, assessing likely effects and channels with respect to key development outcomes. To date, this area has received less analysis, although it is relevant to...
Working Paper
The Financial Deepening-Productivity Nexus in China
The financial intermediation-growth nexus is a widely studied topic in the literature of development economics. Deepening financial intermediation may promote economic growth by mobilizing more investments, and lifting returns to financial resources...
Working Paper
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the poor
In this paper, we examine the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of the poor. We use an unusually rich data set from a ‘financial diaries’ study known as the Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project. The data set tracks the economic...
Working Paper
Trade effects of the East Africa Customs Union in Tanzania
By measuring the effects of forming and joining a regional integration bloc using an augmented structural gravity model, this paper finds that the East African Community (EAC) and EAC Customs Union have significantly enhanced Tanzanian trade into EAC...
Working Paper
The asymmetric impact of economic policy uncertainty on firm-level investment in South Africa
This paper uses firm-level data and a news-based measure of economic policy uncertainty to provide empirical evidence that economic policy uncertainty has a negative impact on firm-level investment in South Africa. Firms’ investment decisions in...
Working Paper
Trade liberalization, employment, and gender in Ethiopia
This paper analyses the impact of trade liberalization on local labour markets in Ethiopia, with a focus on the gender dimension of employment. By exploiting rich micro-level data on Ethiopian workers, we evaluate the effect of the Ethiopian trade...
Blog
A ‘data revolution’ for sustainable development leaves gaps on inequality
Among the many things said about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the description by the President of the UN General Assembly’s 70th...
Blog
Sub-Saharan Africa had a manufacturing renaissance in 2010s – it’s a promising sign for the years ahead
by
Gaaitzen de Vries, Emmanuel Mensah, Hagen Kruse,
Kunal Sen
February 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the global economy, with world output contracting at 3.5% in 2020, and no recovery likely before the fourth...
Working Paper
Towards sustainable livelihood in the Tanzanian informal economy
In spite of having some intensive national strategies to address poverty, Tanzania lacks a coherent national strategy to ensure sustainable livelihoods for those working in its informal economy, of which street vending is an important sector. Based...
Blog
From the editor's desk: Focus on data
This month, a partnership between UNU-WIDER and the Groningen Growth and Development Center (GGDC) brings a new database on economic transformation...
Blog
Detecting global income inequality trends: And why it matters
by
Annalena Oppel
February 2021
More accurate estimates of inequality trends allow us to measure progress towards achieving reductions in inequality within and between countries...
Blog
Using tax data to inform economic policy in South Africa
Countries need data and evidence to create, amend, and evaluate policy. Indeed, one of the key mandates of policy makers in South Africa is to make...
Journal Article
Extending multidimensional poverty identification
In the widely-used class of multidimensional poverty measures introduced by Alkire and Foster (2011), dimension-specific weights combined with a single cut-off parameter play a fundamental role in identifying who is multidimensionally poor. This...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Tanzania - TAZMOD v2.1
View the latest TAZMOD country report here. This report documents TAZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Tanzania. This work was carried out by University of Dar es Salaam in collaboration with the project partners in the scope of the SOUTHMOD...
Blog
Technology and supermarket chains can help strengthen southern Africa’s food systems
by
Thando Vilakazi, Namhla Landani
February 2021
Agriculture and agro-processing value chains have been under pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been particularly marked where they...
Journal Article
The impact of indirect tax on income distribution and poverty in Tanzania
This study analyses the impacts of indirect tax benefits policy reforms on income distribution and poverty in Tanzania by applying a standard static microsimulation model TAZMOD v1.8. The simulations model two indirect tax reforms involving changes...
Working Paper
An economy-wide perspective on aspects of electricity supply in Myanmar
Myanmar’s economy has experienced political and economic transformations since 2011 by means of diverse economic reforms. However, the power sector is still struggling to fulfil electricity demand. This study will examine aspects of the electricity...
Working Paper
The livelihood impacts of COVID-19 in urban South Africa
This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy measures on livelihoods in urban South Africa. Using qualitative research methods, we analyse two rounds of semi-structured phone interviews, conducted between June and...
Blog
What does COVID-19 mean for Africa?: Challenges, but also opportunities
by
Maureen Were, Milla Nyyssölä
February 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an exceptional social and economic crisis all over the world, with Africa among the hardest-hit regions. What are the...
Blog
Motherhood and the gender gap in Latin America
by
Inés Berniell, Lucila Berniell, Dolores de la Mata, María Edo, Mariana Marchionni
March 2021
Gender gaps in labour supply, income, and wages are still large despite the remarkable convergence of roles of men and women in labour markets over...
Blog
Persistent gender roles in South Africa deprive women of leisure time
by
Priyanka Harrichurran
March 2021
In most countries, traditional gender roles within the household are still common due to the prevalence and persistence of patriarchal systems. These...
Working Paper
Inequality and structural transformation in the changing nature of work
This paper analyses the labour market dynamics in Indonesia from 2001 to 2015 and explores the role of the changing nature of occupational employment in explaining the rising earnings inequality during the same period. First, we find evidence of a...
Working Paper
Fiscal decentralization and efficiency of public services delivery by local governments in Ghana
In this paper, we estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data...
Working Paper
Material barriers, cultural boundaries
Data on female labour force participation in Bangladesh suggest that, despite the increase in female-intensive employment opportunities through microfinance, export garment manufacturing, and community-based services, the majority of working women...
Working Paper
The economic gains of closing the employment gender gap
The present paper sheds new light on the growth implications of gender inequalities in the Moroccan labour market. We confront two different approaches. The first one is based on firm data to estimate gender complementarity in production and uses...
Working Paper
Explaining the Poverty Difference between Inland and Coastal China
This paper proposes a decomposition framework for quantifying contributions of the determinants of poverty to spatial differences or temporal changes in poverty. This framework is then applied to address the issue why poverty incidence is higher in...
Working Paper
Female labour force participation in sub-Saharan Africa
Female labour force participation rates have stagnated in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. This paper aims to explain this aggregate pattern by decomposing it into the labour supply behaviour of different birth cohorts and age...
Blog
Infrastructure spend: insights from the effect of a bridge across the Zambezi on maize prices
Investments in infrastructure – such as roads – typically aim to reduce transport costs, stimulate trade, and make new production activities viable...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (March 2021): data selection
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). It aims at facilitating the analysis of inequality as well as progress in...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (March 2021): integrated and standardized series
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database. It aims at facilitating the analysis of inequality as well as progress in achieving the...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (March 2021): gobal income distribution
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality Database. It aims at facilitating the analysis of inequality as well as progress in...
Blog
Is sexual violence a driver of the early marriage of girls in India?
by
Sudipa Sarkar
March 2021
Marriage at a younger age, generally before the legal age of marriage, is a pervasive practice in many parts of the world. Worldwide, more than 700...
Report
How COVID-19 is affecting workers and their livelihoods in urban Ghana
This survey is a collaborative project conducted by researchers of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), University of...
Working Paper
Trends in global inequality using a new integrated dataset
This paper presents preliminary evidence of the annual global income distribution since 1950 using a new integrated dataset that aggregates standardized country income distributions at the percentile level estimated from various sources in the World...
Blog
Supply or demand? Exploring the mechanisms behind the rise of female labour force participation in Mexico
by
Sonia Bhalotra, Manuel Fernández
March 2021
At the global level, gender gaps in labour force participation have narrowed and over half a billion women have joined the workforce in the last 30...
Blog
Our project on the institutional legacies of violent conflict
One of the most critical challenges in international development today is to understand how best to support peace, security, economic recovery, and...
Blog
Why do we see boom-and-bust growth in fragile and conflict-affected states?
One of the most pressing challenges in development policy is to bring about rapid, sustained, and inclusive growth in developing countries. Apart from...
Journal Article
Birth control, family size and educational stratification
This study investigates the unexpected impact that enforcing birth control policies in China has upon the educational stratification between the Han majority, the policy target group, and ethnic minorities, a partially excluded group. Exploring...
Blog
A world of protest
by
Zachariah Mampilly
March 2021
That we are living in an era of popular protest is undeniable. A quick survey of headlines from around the world — or better yet, your social media...
Working Paper
Employment effects of joining global production networks
Is the emphasis placed in trade and industry policy-making in developing countries on the share of domestic value-added (‘value-added ratio’) in exports consistent with the objective of achieving economic development through an export-oriented...
Working Paper
Ethnic disparity in altruism towards reforestation
This paper presents a framed field experiment on ecological altruism in Mindoro, Philippines. Behavioural differences between ethnic groups in Mindoro—the Tagalogs and the Mangyans—were investigated. We designed a two-part donation task (i.e...
Working Paper
How good are manufacturing jobs in Myanmar?
The quality of people’s jobs is a fundamental determinant of their well-being, and judging the state of a labour market on the basis of job quantity alone delivers a very partial picture. This study is an attempt to place the spotlight on the working...
Blog
The paths and legacies of civil war
by
Anastasia Shesterinina
March 2021
Civil wars leave enduring legacies for social networks, political identities, preferences, and attitudes. Their impacts on public perceptions of peace...
Working Paper
Do pandemics lead to rebellion? Policy responses to COVID-19, inequality, and protests in the USA
This paper analyses how inequality across counties in the United States of America has shaped the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incidence of protests. The empirical analysis combines weekly data between January and December 2020 on levels of...
Working Paper
The gendered crisis: livelihoods and mental well-being in India during COVID-19
This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative...
Working Paper
Dynastic measures of inter-generational mobility with empirical evidence from Indonesia
We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes (continuous outcomes such as potential earnings, or discrete ones such as education groups) and captures dynastic...
Working Paper
Intergenerational mobility in occupational choices
Historically, the issue of intergenerational evolution of income, wealth, and socioeconomic status has been the subject of considerable research in the analysis of inequality. Such intergenerational linkages are anticipated to come from two sources...
Working Paper
The role of skills and tasks in changing employment trends and income inequality in Chile
Using decomposition methods, we analyse the role of the changing nature of work in explaining changes in employment, wage inequality, and job polarization in Chile from 1992 to 2017. Changes in occupational structure confirm a displacement of workers...
Research Brief
How can agro-processing value chains be developed to strengthen regional integration in Southern Africa?
Regional integration in Africa has potential for increasing regional trade and contribute towards industrialization and economic development. Agro-processing trade offers numerous opportunities for southern Africa countries and is a potential area of...
Research Brief
Monetary policy and firm size in South Africa
Monetary policy affects the real economy through various channels, including the interest rate, exchange rate, credit, and asset price channels. The credit channel has recently received considerable attention. Small firms are more sensitive to...
Blog
Changing the lives of very young children: Evidence from Rwanda
by
Patricia Justino, Marinella Leone, Pierfrancesco Rolla, Monique Abimpaye, Caroline Dusabe, Diane Uwamahoro, Richard Germond
November 2020
Globally, around 250 million children under the age of five do not meet key development milestones, which reduces their ability to reach their full...
Working Paper
Informality, labour transitions, and the livelihoods of workers in Latin America
This paper studies the incidence and heterogeneity of labour informality in six Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru. We divide workers into five work statuses: formal wage-employed, formal self-employed...
Journal Article
On the link between managerial attributes and firm access to formal credit in Myanmar
Using a survey of enterprises in Myanmar, we examine demand for formal credit and the extent to which firms are self-constrained by not applying for credit or if they apply and are constrained by bank’s rejections. We have information about firm...
Journal Article
Informal institutions, transaction risk, and firm productivity in Myanmar
In many low-income transition countries, where formal institutions such as courts do not function effectively, informal institutions are often used by firms to minimize transaction risks. We examine the role of informal institutions, in the forms of...
Working Paper
What Determines Foreign Aid to Papua New Guinea? An Inter-temporal Model of Aid Allocation
This paper models the inter-temporal allocation of foreign development aid to Papua New Guinea (PNG). A formal theoretical model of aid allocation is developed, in which aid to any one country is determined jointly with aid to all other recipient...
Journal Article
The corruption–growth relationship
Corruption is widely believed to have an adverse effect on the economic performance of a country. However, many East and Southeast Asian countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread...
Blog
Headline data suggests low-income states are coping better with the pandemic than high-income states. But is this true?
States with fragile state health systems have been commended for effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But if we take into account factors...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and trade facilitation in Southern Africa
COVID-19 has created a trade crisis in Southern Africa, with a dramatic slowdown in cross-border trade. The crisis, which exposed weaknesses and deficiencies in the trade facilitation regimes, presents an opportunity for the African Continental Free...
Working Paper
Uganda’s nascent oil sector
This paper discusses the political economy of oil in Uganda since the announcement of its discovery in 2006. It focuses on the dynamics of oil revenue generation (pre-commercial production) and expenditure, investor-stakeholder contestation (i.e...
Working Paper
Welfare and the depth of informality
This study explores the relationship between household poverty and depth of informality by proposing a new measure of informality at the household level. It is defined as the share of activities (hours worked or income earned) without social...
Working Paper
Regional and subregional analyses of macroeconomic policy strategies for growth and equality in Southern Africa
We investigate the relevance of beta (β, absolute and conditional) and sigma (σ) convergence in the economies of the Common Monetary Area of Southern Africa and in the provinces of the Republic of South Africa using panel data, allowing an...
Blog
Promoting industrialization in Africa: Global versus regional value chains
by
Julian Boys, Antonio Andreoni
November 2020
As COVID-19 ravages international trade and production, policy-makers are shifting their sights from global value chains (GVCs) to regional value...
Working Paper
Are we measuring natural resource wealth correctly?
Underlying the management of revenues from natural resource extraction is a set of assumptions about how abundant and how valuable these resources are. Nevertheless, existing approaches to measuring the value of extractive resources are seriously...
Working Paper
Secession and social polarization
Does secessionism lead to social polarization? Despite much research on independence movements, their relationship to polarization, a key mechanism theorized as increasing the chances of violent conflict, remains less understood. We argue that...
Working Paper
Scrutinizing the sticky floor/glass ceiling phenomena in the informal labour market in Cameroon
Cameroon’s informal labour market largely harbours female workers, engaged mainly in low-productivity and low-paying jobs. We investigate the sticky floor and glass ceiling phenomena in the informal labour market as a whole and across its segments.We...
Journal Article
How mobile are workers across informal and formal jobs in India?
The Indian labour market is characterized by a high level of informality, with large numbers of workers in poorly paid ‘lower-tier’ informal jobs, and somewhat better paid ‘upper-tier’ informal jobs, which do not have the same benefits and security...
Working Paper
Does connectivity reduce gender gaps in off-farm employment?
Gender gaps in labour force participation in developing countries persist despite income growth or structural change. We assess this persistence across economic geographies within countries, focusing on youth employment in off-farm wage jobs. We...
Blog
Slow death or new direction for the UN?
by
Mark Malloch-Brown
November 2020
For most of its 75-year existence, the United Nations has struggled to strike a balance between its lofty founding aspirations and realities on the...
Working Paper
Premature deindustrialization and income inequality in middle-income countries
This paper examines the income inequality implications of a ‘premature deindustrialization’ trend in middle-income countries. To identify the premature deindustrialization phase, we arrive at five conditions based on the trends in employment and...
Working Paper
Estimates of multidimensional poverty for India using NSSO-71 and -75
We measure multidimensional poverty in India using National Sample Survey Organization data from 2014–15 to 2017–18. We use income, health, education, and standard of living to measure the multidimensional poverty index (MPI). The MPI headcount...
Working Paper
The role of automatic stabilizers and emergency tax–benefit policies during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ecuador
This paper makes use of tax–benefit microsimulation techniques to quantify the distributional effects of COVID-19 in Ecuador and the role of tax–benefit policies in mitigating the immediate impact of the economic shocks. Our results show a dramatic...
Working Paper
Assessing pension-related tax expenditures in South Africa
In 2016, the South African government introduced a comprehensive reform to simplify and harmonize the pension system in order to incentivize pension savings and increase the fairness of the retirement system. Using administrative tax micro-data, we...
Working Paper
Jobs, earnings, and routine-task occupational change in times of revolution
In this paper we investigate the links between wage inequality and the changing nature of jobs in a revolution context. The methodology consists of various decompositions and regressions, including recentred influence function regressions, based on...
Working Paper
Changes in occupations and their task content
The aim of this paper is to identify the scope and patterns of the structural transformation as evidenced by changes in occupations and their task content, and their impact on employment, earnings and income distribution in Argentina during the new...
Working Paper
Illicit financial flows and the Global South
Illicit financial flows (IFFs) constitute a major challenge for development in the Global South, as domestic resource mobilization is imperative for providing crucial public services. While several methods offer to measure the extent of IFFs, each...
Working Paper
Access to microfinance and female labour force participation
Although microfinance started as a movement to improve women’s economic well-being through increased female entrepreneurship in particular, its impact on women’s attitudes toward and participation in the labour market is not fully understood. We fill...
Blog
Evidence matters for inclusive growth policy: Reflections from the annual conference of the Inclusive growth in Mozambique programme
by
Gimelgo Xirinda
December 2020
Like many developing countries, Mozambique is struggling with problems of poverty, inequality, low productivity, unemployment, and low institutional...
Working Paper
Can information campaigns reduce last mile payment delays in public works programme?
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention...
Blog
African Lions - Ghana's job creation successes and obstacles
by
Christina Golubski
June 2016
Over the past two decades, Ghana’s economy experienced an average annual growth rate of 5.8 percent, and became a low-middle income country in 2007...
Working Paper
Does aid support democracy?
This study draws on a rigorous systematic review—to our knowledge the first in this area—to take stock of the literature on aid and democracy. It asks: Does aid—especially democracy aid—have positive impact on democracy? How? What factors most...
Working Paper
The rise in women’s labour force participation in Mexico
We estimate the relative importance of alternative labour supply and demand mechanisms in explaining the rise of female labour force participation over the last 55 years in Mexico. The growth of female labour force participation in Mexico between...
Report
Effects of Swedish and international democracy aid
Democracy aid is a significant component of development cooperation. As a share of total aid, it has increased steadily since the mid-1990s. In 2018, countries in the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) devoted roughly 10 per cent of overseas...
Working Paper
Gender wage gaps in Ghana
The wage of an individual is observed only when he/she is employed. However, getting employment requires two decisions. First, an individual has to decide to participate in the labour market, and second, an employer must decide to hire that...
Working Paper
Long-run rural livelihood diversification in Kagera, Tanzania
What drives livelihood diversification among predominantly rural households in developing countries and how can welfare-enhancing patterns be established and sustained in the long run? A large literature has focused on whether income diversification...
Blog
Studying COVID-19 through the lens of microsimulation: The role of tax and benefit policies in alleviating poverty and inequality
As the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, developing nations are struggling to deliver economic assistance and public services to their...
Technical Note
Identifying foreign firms and South African multinational enterprises
The identification of foreign firms and South African multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the CIT-IRP5 panel has proved to be a challenge for many researchers. The CIT-IRP5 panel contains variables indicating different thresholds that determine...
Blog
Late development, early adoption – how new technology is reshaping the future of structural change
by
Lukas Schlogl
December 2020
Technological catch-up is bringing new asynchronies to development pathways. What does this mean for employment, globalization, and inequality? A...
Working Paper
The Determinants of Regional Manufactured Exports from a Developing Country
In this paper, the question of the location of exporters of manufactured goods within a country is investigated. Based on insights from new trade theory, the new economic geography (NEG) and gravity-equation modelling, an empirical model is specified...
Blog
The developer’s dilemma in India – the role of politics and economic ideology
by
Saon Ray, Sabyasachi Kar
December 2020
Policy makers seeking inclusive growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural transformation, which is potentially...
Blog
35 years of research for change – what's next?: Building just societies
To celebrate its 35th birthday, UNU-WIDER has looked back at some of its greatest achievements. As the year closes, Armida Alisjahbana, Kunal Sen...
Blog
Coronavirus: five ways some states have used the pandemic to curtail human rights and democracy
In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, at least 95 countries declared a national emergency, empowering governments to act in ways they would not...
Working Paper
Motherhood and flexible jobs
We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.Our...
Working Paper
Constraints on the performance and competitiveness of Tanzania’s manufacturing exports
This study sought to examine the main constraints to manufacturing export competitiveness in Tanzania. Using panel data for the period 1997–2018, the study established that supply-side factors dominate demand-side factors in explaining manufacturing...
Working Paper
Socioeconomic and cultural drivers of women’s formal work in rural Ghana
We study socioeconomic indicators of female labour force participation in off-farm formal employment in a subsistence agriculture setting in northern Ghana, where a new commercial farm provides a positive demand shock for low-skilled labour. We use a...
Working Paper
The effects of personal income tax reform on employees’ taxable income in Uganda
We evaluate a major personal income tax reform in Uganda that came into effect in 2012–13. The reform increased the tax-free lower threshold, increased tax rates for higher incomes, and introduced an additional highest tax band. Using the universe of...
Working Paper
Do tax administrative interventions targeted at small businesses improve tax compliance and revenue collection?
This paper conducts an impact evaluation of the effects of two tax administration interventions—a taxpayer register expansion and education programme, and a new electronic filing system for presumptive tax—on the number of small business taxpayers...
Working Paper
On the impact of inequality on growth, human development, and governance
Countering recent rises in many countries of inequality in income and wealth is widely recognized as a major development challenge. This is so from an ethical perspective and because greater inequality is perceived to be detrimental to key...
Working Paper
Community organization and armed group behaviour
This paper investigates how armed groups affect the organization of local communities during armed conflict in Colombia. We estimate the effect of communities’ exposure to armed groups with an econometric specification that takes into account...
Working Paper
The gender employment gap: the effects of extended maternity leave policy in Viet Nam
This study seeks to determine the effect on the gender employment gap and women’s employment of the extension of maternity leave from four months to six months in Viet Nam’s 2012 Labor Code.To identify this effect, labour market outcomes of groups of...
Working Paper
Pre-colonial centralization and tax compliance norms in contemporary Uganda
The paper examines the legacy of pre-colonial centralization on tax compliance norms of citizens in contemporary Uganda. By combining geo-referenced anthropological data on pre-colonial ethnic homelands with survey data from several rounds of the...
Working Paper
Boosting mineral revenues in Zambia
Zambia has changed its mineral tax regime repeatedly during the past decades in a bid to raise mineral revenue, but with only modest success. This paper looks at what the country needs to do to create a mining fiscal regime that could sustain...
Working Paper
No taxation without property rights
The arguments that property rights and taxation positively affect development are well established in separate literatures, but the link between property rights and taxation is under-studied.To address this gap, we theorize that formalization of...
Working Paper
Industrialization in developing countries: is it related to poverty reduction?
This paper proposes an empirical framework that relates poverty reduction to production growth. We use the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database to measure the contribution to growth of productivity improvements within sectors and...
Working Paper
Fiscal states in sub-Saharan Africa: conceptualization and empirical trends
This paper contributes to the debate on domestic revenue mobilization and state-building in the Global South by asking whether there are fiscal states in sub-Saharan Africa. To answer this question, we review the diverse understandings of the fiscal...
Working Paper
Fiscal capacity in non-democratic states: the origins and expansion of income tax
The origins of fiscal capacity have traditionally been linked to warfare and democratization. However, non-democratic states also invest in fiscal capacity, even in times of peace. In fact, the majority of income taxes—a cornerstone of government...
Working Paper
Taxless fiscal states
How do modern fiscal states arise? Perhaps the most dominant explanation, based on the European experience, is that democratic institutions that limited the extractive power of states—exemplified by the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England—paved the...
Blog
3 presentations, 9 takeaways on the long-term impact of COVID-19 on learning and how education systems can respond
by
Joseph Bullough
October 2021
On the third day of the annual UNU-WIDER Conference on 8 September, RISE presented findings from three studies on COVID-19's impact on education...
Journal Article
Bringing state-owned entities back into the industrial policy debate
Discussions on the developing world's industrial policies have largely neglected the role of state-owned entities. This paper argues that the resurgence of state capitalism has been, in part, the response of developing countries to the recent pattern...
Working Paper
Affirmative action with no major switching
Affirmative action in higher education may lead to mismatch, a situation where students benefiting from preferential admission struggle with their college-level work because of poor pre-college academic preparation. In the United States, those...
Blog
Above or below the poverty line: Three key questions for understanding shifts in global poverty
In 2010 and the following years, there was attention to the fact that much of global poverty had shifted to middle-income countries (for example here...
Working Paper
No taxation without informational foundation
This paper combines cross-national statistical analysis and in-depth historical case studies of Argentina and Chile to explore the relationship between two crucial dimensions of state capacity.We show that information capacity contributes to the...
Blog
Virtuous circles and downward spirals: The power of ideas & the limits of technocracy
by
Brian Levy
November 2021
What will it take to shake loose the distemper of our times, and initiate a virtuous spiral of renewal? In a recent UNU-WIDER webinar, Alan Hirsch and...
Working Paper
The tax-price elasticity of offshore tax avoidance
This study leverages a unique data set on the universe of transactions exiting the Ecuadorian economy to estimate the tax-price elasticity of demand for tax-sheltering activities using offshore fiscal havens. I determine this elasticity quasi...
Working Paper
Hide–seek–hide? The effects of financial secrecy on cross-border financial assets
Excessive financial secrecy facilitates illicit financial flows, which constitute a major developmental challenge for low-income economies and cause significant tax revenue losses for governments around the world. In this paper we estimate the semi...
Working Paper
The indirect costs of corporate tax avoidance exacerbate cross-country inequality
Corporate tax avoidance hampers domestic revenue mobilization and, with it, the development of lower- and middle-income countries. While a wide range of studies has shed light on the magnitude of profit shifting by multinational corporations, the...
Working Paper
Donors for tax morale
Do aid projects affect citizens’ motivation to pay taxes? We address this question by combining fine-grained data on aid projects from AidData and survey data from the Afrobarometer for 34 African countries. We first employ a subnational analysis...
Working Paper
Spillovers from extractive industries
Extractive industries form an important part of the economy for many developing countries, but their impact on growth and welfare remains understudied. With global efforts to transition to net-zero carbon emissions in the coming decades...
Blog
From sub-Saharan Africa to Viet Nam and Ecuador, how one model is used to improve social protection
Are there enough tax payers to generate the revenue needed by governments to reduce poverty? How adequate are the social security arrangements that...
Blog
Efforts to protect the poor during COVID: How five African countries fared
The number of people living in poverty around the world is estimated to have increased by half a billion people due to the COVID-19 crisis. The...
Blog
An African in Africa: New perspectives on travelling for research
Working for an international organisation presents a host of challenges, given the vast nature of tasks that one must surmount in a fast paced and...
Blog
The pandemic and Africa's social safety net
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that African tax and social-benefit systems are currently ill-equipped to protect households from sudden income losses...
Working Paper
Economic sanctions and trade flows in the neighbourhood
We investigate the effect of economic sanctions on trade flows in countries sharing a border with the sanctioned state. On the one hand, trade models suggest that trade flows should decrease as sanctions disrupt trading routes and economic ties with...
Working Paper
Approaching a Triumphal Span
With the aid of an analytical framework of the Lewis model revised to reflect the experience of China, this paper examines the country’s dualistic economic development and its unique characteristics. The paper outlines the major effects of China’s...
Working Paper
The dynamics of domestic revenue mobilization across four decades
We utilize the recently updated UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset, which covers key indicators on tax and non-tax revenues for 196 countries since the 1980s, to study the dynamics of government revenue tax collection across selected periods from...
Technical Note
Government Revenue Dataset (2021): country notes
This technical note is the third in a series based on the UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset (GRD). The preceding notes have described in detail the variables contained within the GRD and the source selection procedures. In this technical note, we...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic risks after a decade of microeconomic turbulence
This study analyses the performance of macroeconomic policy in South Africa in 2007–2020 and outlines challenges for policy in the coming decade. After remarkable economic growth in 1997–07, South Africa’s progress slowed dramatically in 2009 with...
Working Paper
Securitized reception: revisiting contexts confronting Afghan and Vietnamese forced migrants
In a 2017 UNU-WIDER project, ‘Forced migration and inequality’, one of us collaborated on a comparison of Afghan and Vietnamese refugee resettlement across four Western countries. In the light of the Taliban return to power in August 2021, we revisit...
Journal Article
Temperature shocks, rice production, and migration in Vietnamese households
This study analyses the relationship between temperature shocks and migration in rural households in Vietnam. To control for the potential endogeneity between crop production and migration we use monthly minimum temperatures in the growing season as...
Working Paper
Profit shifting by multinational corporations in Kenya
Illicit financial flows directly impact a country’s ability to raise, retain, and mobilize its own resources to finance sustainable development. Against a backdrop of a weak public financial position attributed to capital flight, tax avoidance, and...
Working Paper
Dynamic impacts of lockdown on domestic violence
We leverage staggered implementation of lockdown across Chile’s 346 municipalities, identifying dynamic impacts on domestic violence. Using administrative data, we find lockdown imposition increases indicators of distress related to domestic violence...
Working Paper
Legal opacity, narcotics laws, and drug seizures
We show that legal opacity is a strong factor in drug trafficking. We develop a new framework that illustrates how legal opacity influences countries’ seizure rates. Legal opacity reduces the detection of illicit flows and increases their volumes...
Technical Note
Ethnic conflict, tensions, and protests: taking stock of available cross-country data
This note provides an overview of available cross-country data on ethnic conflict, tensions, and protests. First, it documents the steps taken in the selection of 16 different relevant data sources, before they are briefly described, and their...
Journal Article
Income distribution and the potential of redistributive systems in Africa
Redistributive systems in Africa are still in their infancy but are expanding in order to finance increasing public spending. This study aims at characterising the redistributive potential of six African countries: Ghana, Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania...
Journal Article
Analysis of the distributional effects of COVID-19 and state-led remedial measures in South Africa
This study explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa. Using a static tax-benefit microsimulation model with input datasets that were adjusted to reflect people’s...
Working Paper
Constraints on the executive and tax revenues in the long run
We argue that tax revenues and political institutions placing constraints on the executive power may reinforce each other over time and so co-evolve in the long run. This may also bring a shift in the composition of revenues, from taxes levied on a...
Blog
Ending aid dependency: Taxation in developing countries can be improved through collaboration
Finland aims to raise the amount of its development assistance to 0.7% of GDP, and this goal has good grounds. But how can we make sure that the...
Technical Note
Feasibility study: simulating the impacts of farm subsidies on poverty and inequality in African countries
Agricultural subsidies may have significant productive and distributional consequences, and policy-makers need to be able to assess these impacts as a part of the overall tax and benefit policy. Microsimulation models offer a tool for such analysis...
Journal Article
Rural financial intermediation and poverty reduction in Ghana
The financial sector in rural areas, where most of the poor people in sub-Saharan Africa are found, has transformed massively in recent times, notably through the increased penetration of several types of rural financial intermediaries in addition to...
Policy Brief
Six sets of policy actions to promote social mobility
Promoting social mobility is an essential task of development, and a multi-faceted one. Precarious livelihoods are widespread. Containing downward mobility is an important precondition for sustaining upward mobility. Policies of human capital...
Report
Policy in the time of pandemic
This case study details the policy choices and decisions of the South African government to provide economic relief, through social grants, to vulnerable South Africans and those resident in South Africa to enable them to withstand the effects of the...
Working Paper
Inequality and growth: a review on a great open debate in economics
What is the relationship between inequality and growth? This question has occupied and fascinated social scientists for more than a century. This article critically reviews the recent empirical and theoretical literature on the complex interplay...
Working Paper
Income distribution in Uganda based on tax registers: what do top incomes say?
We use income data from tax registers at the Uganda Revenue Authority from 2011 to 2017 to estimate top income inequality, focusing on the very top—the top 1, 0.1, and 0.01 per cent of the income distribution. The focus on the extreme top is...
Journal Article
Measuring global poverty before and during the pandemic
The contribution of this study is to question the ‘official’ estimates of global monetary poverty up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue there is a political economy of overoptimism in the measurement of global poverty. Specifically, we...
Blog
Corona pandemic revealed gaps in African social security systems
by
Matti Remes
January 2022
Millions of Africans lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but state social security systems were of little help to people who lost...
Journal Article
Doing business in a deals world
The Doing Business reports have evoked an intense policy debate about whether countries should simplify regulatory rules or make them more stringent. We argue that doing business in developing countries is based on deals struck between firms and the...
Journal Article
Impact evaluation and synthesis
We examine how impact evaluation (IE) and associated syntheses contribute to evidence generation in low- and middle-income (LMIC) countries. We interviewed over 50 individuals from relevant organisations and five LMIC countries and drew on data from...
Working Paper
Domestic revenue mobilization and informality
Effective domestic revenue mobilization has gained renewed urgency, especially in the light of the need to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. In taxation debates, the ‘informal sectors’ have hitherto been assumed to be a part of the problem and...
Blog
Tools for effective tax administration
by
Janet Simbeye
September 2022
The importance of conducting high-quality analysis for policy advice cannot be understated. The UNU-WIDER Winter School for tax policy research...
Working Paper
Hidden hostility: donor attention and political violence
Political violence is a worldwide problem that has been on the rise over the past decade. The international dimension of domestic repression and dissent is a particularly relevant factor yet surprisingly understudied. In particular, governments that...
Blog
What would be the economic consequences of a military stalemate in Ukraine?
Russia’s war in Ukraine may reach a stalemate as neither side appears in reach of a military victory. Unless a settlement can be agreed, a frozen...
Working Paper
Mothers at peace: post-conflict fertility and United Nations peacekeeping
Armed conflict can shape reproductive behaviour as high child mortality and a lack of health services lead to higher fertility rates. Yet women often postpone childbearing in expectation of better times. Given the theoretical ambiguity, the extant...
Working Paper
Political representation in the wake of ethnic violence and post-conflict institutional reform
The lack of political representation often lies at the origin of identity-based violence, and, when not resolved, can re-ignite violence. We study who perceives gains and losses in political representation in Rwanda and Burundi and why. We rely on a...
Working Paper
The incursion of Leviathan: wartime territorial control and post-conflict state capacity in Peru
How do civil war dynamics affect state-building decisions in the aftermath of conflict? This paper argues that, in the post-conflict period, the state focuses its efforts to build state capacity on areas in which state power has been eroded during...
Working Paper
Rebel governance during COVID-19
As COVID-19 spread worldwide, armed groups in control of territory were called to address the health emergency. However, our knowledge in this regard is limited. Specifically, it remains poorly understood why different armed groups responded to the...
Working Paper
The effects of taxation on income inequality in sub-Saharan Africa
This paper investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use instrumental-variable two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable quantile...
Working Paper
Savings transition in Asia
This paper examines the national savings behaviour in the process of economic growth through a comparative analysis of countries in developing Asia from a historical perspective. Developing Asia provides an ideal laboratory for the study with...
Working Paper
Distributional impacts of agricultural policies in Zambia
This paper examines the distributional impacts of agricultural policies versus those of cash transfers using a tax–benefit microsimulation model for Zambia for the policy year 2020. The analysis also considers the behavioural impacts of input...
Working Paper
The role of tax–benefit systems in protecting household incomes in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected household incomes around the world. In developed economies, pre-pandemic tax–benefit policies and emergency transfers mitigated to a large extent the negative income shock. However, less is known about the...
Working Paper
Global profit shifting, 1975–2019
This paper constructs time series of global profit shifting covering the 2015–19 period, during which major international efforts were implemented to curb profit shifting. We find that (i) multinational profits grew faster than global profits, (ii)...
Working Paper
Looking ahead to COP27—from climate pledges to action
The global energy transition is happening, but too slowly to limit climate change to acceptable levels, for diverse reasons. Carbon emissions policies and measures focus too little on absolute emission targets and too much on relative measures such...
Journal Article
COVID-19 and the state
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was wealthier countries with stronger institutions that suffered the highest numbers of cases and fatalities. Many weaker countries were instead praised for more effective pandemic response. What...
Journal Article
Can information correct optimistic wage expectations?
Forward-looking expectations are central to job search but often inaccurate. To test whether public information can help correct beliefs, we embed an experiment in a longitudinal survey of Mozambican graduates. We quantify responses of own-earning...
Working Paper
Women’s Status and Children’s Food Security in Nepal
This paper focuses on gender aspects upon children’s food security. Using data from the 1995/1996 Nepal Living Standards Survey, this study attempts to find evidence to whether children are heavier for their age, taller for their age or heavier for...
Working Paper
Trust as state capacity
This paper explores the link between trust in government, policy-making, and compliance. It focuses on a specific channel whereby citizens who are convinced that a policy is worthwhile are more motivated to comply with it. This in turn reduces the...
Journal Article
The dominant role of large firms in profit shifting
Globally, the largest 0.001 per cent of frms earn one-third of all corporate profts. Nonetheless, there is little understanding of how proft shifting difers across frm size. Using the universe of South African corporate tax returns and global...
Working Paper
Marriage market responses in the wake of a natural disaster in India
This paper examines the impact of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake on age at marriage and other assortative matching outcomes. Using the 2004–05 wave of the India Human Development Survey and employing a difference-in-differences strategy, we document...
Working Paper
Can fungibility of development aid lead to more effective achievement of the SDGs?
In this paper, we explore the relationship between foreign aid fungibility and aggregate welfare. Using panel data from 35 low-income and lower-middle-income countries, we first check the presence of sectoral aid fungibility in our sample and find...
Working Paper
Elite incomes around the world
This paper analyses elite incomes around the world, and how international comparisons of elite incomes vary depending on the exchange rate and income concept used. It is well known that between-country income inequality is higher using market...
Blog
Urban poverty: cities, slums, and the need for policy action
by
Emily Rains, Anirudh Krishna
October 2022
Developing countries will be predominantly urban by 2030. While urbanization is historically associated with development and broad-based social...
Working Paper
Understanding Somalia’s social contract and state-building efforts
Building on a World Bank regional study in Africa aiming at measuring social contracts concepts and within the framework of reflecting on future donor interventions, this paper applies social contracts measurement and complements with qualitative...
Working Paper
The legacy of church–state conflict
A burgeoning literature on repression against civilians argues that exposure to violence changes victims’ identities by strengthening attachment to the in-group and creates downstream effects for political and social behaviour that persist across...
Blog
Sunshine, elephants, and boomerangs: Is a dramatic rise in global income inequality looming?
by
Ravi Kanbur, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez,
Andy Sumner
March 2022
Global Inequality 101: Global inequality is the distribution of income across all people on the planet from the poorest to the richest. It can be...
Working Paper
Climate vulnerability and government resource mobilization in developing countries
There is substantial empirical literature on the impact of climate vulnerability on economic outcomes in developing countries. However, this literature is still weak on the impact of climate vulnerability on tax revenue mobilization. To enrich the...
Working Paper
The determinants of domestic saving in Kenya
The savings–growth nexus is widely acknowledged, both in policy and in the literature. But Kenya’s numerous policy initiatives to encourage savings mobilization are yet to yield the expected outcomes. This paper identifies the key drivers of domestic...
Working Paper
A fiscal approach to the social contract in sub-Saharan African countries
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that many developing countries could not respond effectively to crises due to their limited capacity to diversify their social protection responses. Social protection systems depend mainly on government tax revenue...
Working Paper
The impact of COVID-19 on urban informal workers in Maputo
Informal self-employed traders in developing countries are vulnerable to shocks as they often lack access to social insurance or formal finance. This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these urban traders in the capital of...
Blog
Report from the WIDER Development Conference on reducing inequality
For several decades, UNU-WIDER has actively worked on pathfinding and groundbreaking research on inequalities. We host one of the most extensive...
Blog
Inequality, fiscal space, and crisis response — A matter of priority, affordability, or both?
by
Annalena Oppel
October 2022
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments financed more than 5000 fiscal support policies worldwide in 2020–21. The pandemic response is an...
Working Paper
Marine mining and its potential implications for low- and middle-income countries
After 50 years of optimistic predictions that marine mining will soon take off, it still remains to be seen if and when this will happen. In 2018 the total value of all marine mining, including both offshore mining and the so far non-existing deep...
Working Paper
Does project-level aid for water and sanitation improve child health outcomes?
Empirical studies on the effectiveness of aid to the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector (WASH aid) have focused primarily on access to these services as the benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of aid in this sector. Given the importance of...
Working Paper
Trust the hand that protects you—Does UN peacekeeping harm post-conflict governments’ legitimacy?
Rebuilding state legitimacy is a thorny challenge in the aftermath of civil wars. The international community has stepped in to support post-conflict states in rebuilding state capacity, sometimes replacing governments in providing public goods. Most...
Working Paper
Impact of school consolidation on enrolment and achievement
I study the impact of school consolidation on enrolment and achievement, using its staggered roll-out in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Across the years 2014, 2016, and 2017, Rajasthan merged many of its grade 1–5 schools with grade 6–10 schools to...
Blog
The 1918-20 influenza pandemic: A retrospective in the time of COVID-19
by
Prema-chandra Athukorala, Chaturica Athukorala
November 2022
The influenza pandemic of 1918 (the Spanish Flu) is by far the greatest humanitarian disaster caused by an infectious disease in modern history. It...
Working Paper
The evolution of inequality in Mozambique
After decades of war, ending in 1992, Mozambique embarked on a path of sustained economic growth and substantial poverty reduction. However, these positive dynamics started to revert from 2015, with per capita growth rates getting close to zero and...
Working Paper
Inequality configurations
The notion of multidimensional inequality has attracted attention lately, but mostly as a micro approach to measuring inequality in well-being in a more complete way. We argue that considering inequality in a multidimensional way from a macro...
Working Paper
Armed groups’ modes of local engagement and post-conflict (in)stability
What distinguishes post-war governments that succeed in establishing a stable political order and prevent recurring conflict from those that do not? This comparative study considers the specific threats that typically lead to the collapse of the post...
Working Paper
Civil wars and stumbling of patriarchal societies
This research project traces how women’s participation in the Liberian civil wars, as combatants and peace agents, reconstructs gender relations in the post-civil war context. The current literature examines the role of women in the governance of...
Journal Article
When the Lewisian dream sours
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. This study explores this kind of reverse transition, that is, when the...
Working Paper
Natural disasters and economic inequality
Natural disasters cause economic damages and may exacerbate disparities in income distribution among countries across the globe. This paper employs satellite data on real-time active fire locations to evaluate the short-term impact of forest fires on...
Working Paper
The link between public debt and public investment in Tanzania
In a bid to realize its development aspirations, Tanzania has made concerted efforts to increase public investment, particularly in the last decade. A significant proportion of these investments are financed by contracting debt, manifested by the...
Blog
Reducing inequality — the great challenge of our time
by
Carlos Gradín
October 2022
Early in October 2022, international and Colombian researchers gathered together for three days at the UNIANDES campus, located at the foot of the...
Working Paper
Tax–benefit responses in Uruguay during the COVID-19 pandemic
We analyse the social protection policy response to COVID-19 and its impact on household incomes in Uruguay during 2020 and 2021, based on static microsimulation methods. From the onset of the crisis, the Uruguayan government implemented adjustments...
Blog
Solving the puzzle of peace: Overcoming the curse of Finland
by
Tim Phillips
May 2022
At The puzzle of peace conference in Helsinki, Adnan Khan, Chief Economist at the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, lamented what he...
Blog
Ukraine: War, energy, and net zero
by
Alan R. Roe
May 2022
Just over seven months ago the United Nations convened its 26th Climate Change Conference (COP-26) in Glasgow, with the world nervously emerging from...
Blog
Putting it all together: Highlights from The puzzle of peace
‘Understanding how to sustain peace means understanding conflict itself. Yet conflict and peacebuilding are often addressed separately’ – Patricia...
Journal Article
An exploration of the association between fuel subsidies and fuel riots
Between 2005 and 2018, 41 countries had at least one riot directly associated with popular demand for fuel. We make use of a new international dataset on fuel riots to explore the effects of fuel prices and price regimes on fuel riots. In line with...
Working Paper
Are the effects of terrorism short-lived?
Numerous studies demonstrate that terrorism causes strong public reactions immediately after the attack, with important implications for democratic institutions and individual well-being. Yet, are these effects short-lived? We answer this question...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Uganda - UGAMOD v1.8
View the latest UGAMOD country report here. This report documents UGAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Uganda. It describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the...
Working Paper
Tax-benefit microsimulation model in Rwanda
This paper assesses the feasibility of developing a tax and benefit microsimulation model in Rwanda. Tax-benefit microsimulation can be used to explore ways in which national development goals can be achieved in a cost-effective manner, and to assess...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Tanzania - TAZMOD v2.5
View the latest TAZMOD country report here. This report documents TAZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Tanzania. It describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the...
Working Paper
Labour market effects of digital matching platforms
Can digital labour market platforms reduce search frictions in either formal or informal labour markets? We study this question using a randomized experiment embedded in a tracer study of the work transitions of graduates from technical and...
Working Paper
Peruvian response to COVID-19 pandemic
Why does a state like Peru, dedicated to fulfilling development goals and sustained good macroeconomic performance, appear incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic? Using the case of maternal mortality, this paper argues that the tremendous...
Blog
Confronting low domestic savings in Africa
by
Charles Godfred Ackah, Monica P. Lambon-Quayefio
June 2022
What are the linkages between national savings and sustainable economic growth? Why are there differences in the amounts of savings between different...
Working Paper
China in the World Economy
We analyse the business cycles in China and in selected OECD countries between 1992 and 2006. We show that, although negative correlation dominates for nearly all countries, we can also see large differences for various frequencies of cyclical...
Working Paper
How have formal firms recovered from the pandemic?
This paper examines how formal firms have been impacted by and recovered from the pandemic by drawing on two distinct but complementary data sources. This is the first attempt to use both survey and tax administrative data to measure the initial...
Blog
Decent work – discussion on working conditions in Helsinki and globally
by
Kirsi Riipinen
June 2022
How committed is Helsinki to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals? The discussion forum at the City Hall on Tuesday addressed one of the...
Working Paper
Reigniting labour productivity growth in developing countries
While the negative effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on labour productivity are still fresh in people’s minds, the COVID-19 pandemic raises concerns that productivity will continue to decline. To boost labour productivity and regain...
Working Paper
Productivity growth effects of structural reforms
Which structural reforms affect labour productivity growth in developing countries? This paper answers this question by combining the local projections method and the inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (LP-IPWRA) method. We find that...
Journal Article
Formalizing clientelism in Kenya
Why does clientelism persist? What determines how politicians signal responsiveness to voters and exert effort towards fulfilling campaign promises? This article explores how state capacity, legislative institutional strength, and established ideas...
Blog
Bootcamp for better tax policies in Africa
‘I intend to see a world in which tax policy research is based on evidence, and policy decisions are data-driven.’ This is an aspiration expressed by...
Working Paper
Law enforcement and illegal markets
I describe how monitoring and harsher law enforcement reduce the expected economic benefits of crime. I investigate the effect of shifts in legal authorities’ surveillance by focusing on junkyards, firms often associated with illegal markets and auto...
Working Paper
Financial liberalization and its implications for private savings in sub-Saharan Africa
This paper employs data from 103 developing countries between 1981 and 2012 to examine the determinants of private savings in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with a focus on the effect of financial liberalization on private savings. It also analyses why...
Working Paper
Social protection for working-age women in Tanzania
Tanzania has expanded its social protection framework significantly over the past decade, but the country continues to grapple with important gender inequalities. This paper examines, first, the evolution and effects of Tanzania’s social protection...
Blog
Want to catch up on UNU-WIDER research? Here are 10 of the most interesting papers published over the last year
In this blog, the managing editor of the WIDERAngle shares his personal view on some of the most important —and potentially overlooked— work recently...
Blog
Can the electric vehicle revolution solve the climate crisis and create opportunities for developing countries?
by
Alan R. Roe
July 2022
Electric vehicles (EVs) are confidently expected to decarbonize road transportation, contribute substantially to the net zero agenda, and so help to...
Working Paper
Can domestic institutions affect exports and innovation?
Studies show that when exports go up, innovation goes up as well. But what is the mediating effect of domestic institutions in the association between exports and innovation? If any, which institutions are more likely to improve exports and...
Journal Article
Income inequality in authoritarian regimes
In recent decades, there has been an institutional shift in the literature on authoritarian regimes, with scholars investigating the role of political institutions, such as elections and political parties, in shaping regime stability and economic...
Blog
Metals for the global energy transition: Opportunities and salutary lessons
by
Alan R. Roe
July 2022
In a series of high-level UN Roundtables, in which I participated in 2021, experts and stakeholders explored the risks and opportunities presented by...
Working Paper
Social distress and (some) relief
Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates...
Journal Article
Measures of state capacity
This study provides a systematic comparative analysis of seven common cross-national measures of state capacity by focusing on three measurement issues: convergent validity, interchangeability, and case-specifc disagreement. The author fnds that the...
Journal Article
Changing male perceptions of gender equality
In this study, we use a randomized control trial to examine whether asking Vietnamese men to reflect on gender equality can reduce their gender bias. We randomly selected two groups of married men in four rural provinces and asked the first group to...
Journal Special Issue
Women’s Work
In recent decades, trends in female labour force participation rates have been very heterogeneous across developing countries, despite widespread economic growth, fertility decline, and narrowing gender gaps in education.However, globally, gender...
Working Paper
Physical proximity and occupational employment change by gender during the COVID-19 pandemic
Previous economic downturns such as the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis disproportionately affected male employment due to greater contractions in industries typically filled by men (e.g., manufacturing). However, after the imposition of the ‘hard’...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 pandemic and poor women’s agency
Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated that poor women have been the worst sufferers in terms of pay cuts and job losses. Women are the hardest hit also at the household level. They have to bear the brunt of constrained...
Working Paper
Standardization and ethnocracy in Sri Lanka
Standardization was the scheme that replaced meritocracy in Sri Lanka education, with positive discrimination to increase the majority Sinhalese community’s university enrolment. It did so by minimizing better-qualified minority Tamils’ university...
Working Paper
Incorporating informal workers into social insurance in Tanzania
Expansion of social protection reach among workers in the large informal economy represents a persisting and thorny challenge in the development context. In Mainland Tanzania, several domestically led policy reforms have been introduced to...
Working Paper
Empowering Women Through Livelihoods Orientated Agricultural Service Provision
The paper considers the impact of livelihoods oriented agricultural service provision for smallholder farmers on gender relationships and food security. The paper contents that the democratization and liberalization of agricultural services towards...
Journal Article
The effects of corporate taxes on small firms
We study the impact of corporate taxes on firm-level investments and business activity by exploiting a 6 percentage-point reduction in the corporate tax rate in 2012–2014 in Finland. We use detailed administrative data and a difference-in-differences...
Working Paper
The pandemic and the state
COVID-19 has brought to the fore the issue of state preparedness in mitigating health emergencies. This paper problematizes the received wisdom of greater state capacity in mitigating the severity of the pandemic. Based on a case study of West Bengal...
Research Brief
Are women’s labour force participation rates improving in sub-Saharan Africa?
Several sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have achieved substantial economic growth in the past 30 years. Likewise, access to education has considerably expanded, as reflected in rising enrolment rates for both men and women. Female labour force...
Working Paper
Pension funds in sub-Saharan Africa
The population structure the world over is going through a demographic shift, and the elderly proportion is projected to increase with population growth. This change is a matter of concern for sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, where the majority...
Blog
Indonesia, the developer’s dilemma, and Vision 2045
According to the World Bank, Indonesia has reached the upper-middle income status in 2019 after spending almost two decades in the lower-middle income...
Journal Article
Gender and vulnerable employment in the developing world
This study investigates gender inequality in vulnerable employment: forms of employment typically featuring high precariousness, inadequate earnings, and lack of decent working conditions. Using a large collection of harmonized household surveys from...
Working Paper
Fintech in sub-Saharan Africa
This paper traces the development of fintech in sub-Saharan Africa, its evolution over time, and the unfolding benefits attained at each stage of its adoption and market evolution. From the onset, fintechs have revolutionized retail electronic...
Working Paper
Whose intergenerational mobility?
Various scholars have estimated levels of intergenerational mobility in OECD countries. Fewer estimates are available for developing countries, where mobility arguably matters more due to starker differences in living standards. This paper presents...
Working Paper
Corruption and crisis: do institutions matter?
While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer-term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on political and economic...
Working Paper
Countering global oil theft: responses and solutions
This second of two papers on global oil theft discusses ways to reduce oil theft, misappropriation, and fraud. At US$133 billion per year, oil is the largest stolen natural resource globally, while fuel is the most smuggled natural resource. Oil...
Working Paper
Impact of female peer composition on gender norm perceptions and skills formation in secondary school
This paper examines peer effects on students’ gender norm perceptions and skills formation. I use a Uruguayan nationally representative survey of 9th grade students and exploit the quasi-random variation in the proportion of female peers across...
Blog
Interview with Carlos Gradín on global inequality for the Conversation Weekly podcast
by
UNU-WIDER
January 2022
The following is an excerpt: mRNA vaccines, asteroid missions and collaborative robots: what to watch in science in 2022 – podcast Daniel Merino, The...
Working Paper
The social and political consequences of wartime sexual violence
Wartime sexual violence is widespread across conflict zones and thought to leave a disastrous legacy for survivors, communities, and nations. Yet, systematic studies on i) the prevalence and ii) the social and political consequences of wartime sexual...
Working Paper
Trade Expansion of China and India
By exploring the export performances and specialization patterns of China and India, we assess their trade competitiveness and complementarity vis-à-vis each other as well as with the rest of the world. Our analysis indicates that (i) India faces...
Research Brief
What do we need to know about social mobility in the Global South?
The volume, Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods and Determinants, brings together leading scholars from several disciplines to advance research practice on social mobility. Three sets of motivations guide this joint effort...
Working Paper
Two decades of Tanzanian health policy
Tanzania has undertaken important health sector reforms in the new millennium, and the most recent Health Sector Strategic Plan (2021–26) lays out ambitious targets to achieve universal health coverage. Yet, women in Tanzania continue to face...
Working Paper
Incorporation of offshore shell companies as an indicator of corruption risk in the extractive industries
We show that the incorporation of offshore entities increases when oil and gas exploration licences are awarded. We exploit leaked data on the incorporation of shell companies and detailed information on tax havens and the awarding rounds of oil...
Working Paper
Measuring illicit financial flows
Illicit financial flows have recently attracted the attention of academia, practitioners, and multilateral organizations who consider them harmful to economic development. Some observers suggest that many of these flows occur via the misinvoicing of...
Blog
The new normal: My experience in an online cohort of visiting PhD Fellows
by
Martina Querejeta
January 2022
Everyone that has been engaged in a PhD experience agrees that the whole process is a tough and sometimes lonely challenge. However, the visiting PhD...
Working Paper
Recovery with distress: unpacking COVID-19 impact on livelihoods and poverty in Bangladesh
The social and economic impact of COVID-19 has been deep, wide-ranging, and multi-dimensional. While anecdotal evidence of distress among the poor, particularly those with informal occupations, has been widespread, effective policy response has...
Working Paper
Women’s inheritance rights and time use
This paper examines the impact of the Hindu Succession Act on married women’s time use in India. The Hindu Succession Act was amended between 1976 and 2005 by giving equal inheritance rights to women for inheriting property. To estimate the effect of...
Working Paper
Aid's impact on democracy
This paper investigates the impact of foreign aid on democratic outcomes using a panel of countries for the period between 1995 and 2018. In so doing, it speaks to a major critique of foreign aid, which is that it negatively impacts democratic...
Book
Hacia la reforma del (no) sistema monetario internacional
Esta obra ofrece un análisis del sistema monetario internacional y de las reformas que es necesario emprender para que cumpla el papel activo en el siglo XXI. arte del diagnóstico según el cual no existe un sistema coherente, sino un ordenamiento ad...
Journal Article
On the impact of inequality on growth, human development, and governance
Inequality is a major international development challenge. This is so from an ethical perspective and because greater inequality is perceived to be detrimental to key socioeconomic and political outcomes. Still, informed debate requires clear...
Blog
Advancing social mobility research: Where to start
by
Patrizio Piraino
February 2022
Innovation in academic investigation and policy response is critical to addressing global challenges. That is why the most recent Nobel Prize in...
Working Paper
Does the adoption of peer-to-government mobile payments improve tax revenue mobilization in developing countries?
Developing countries need to raise sufficient tax revenue to finance development. Revenue mobilization is often hampered by limited tax compliance, weak institutions, and technical problems with tax collection. One solution to these challenges is...
Journal Article
The macroeconomic impact of COVID-19 in Mozambique
This study assesses the economic costs of COVID-19 and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique. We use a social accounting matrix multiplier analysis to estimate the effects of the pandemic on the economy. Our simulations...
Working Paper
Ethnic dominance and exclusion
It is widely accepted that the distribution of power between ethnic groups within a country plays a key role in major social, political, and economic outcomes. Researchers working on the topic have various measures of ethnic dominance and exclusion...
Working Paper
Profit-shifting behaviour of emerging multinationals from India
This paper examines the profit-shifting behaviour of emerging multinational firms from India. It is found that the before-tax profitability of subsidiaries differs according to whether they were established directly or via an Offshore Financial...
Working Paper
Female labour supply and informal employment in Ecuador
Low- and middle-income countries face a trade-off between raising tax revenue to strengthen social protection and creating incentives for the population to enter formal employment. However, empirical evidence on labour supply elasticities in the...
Technical Note
Discrete choice modelling of labour supply and informal employment using ECUAMOD
This technical note presents one of the modelling approaches used in Jara and Rattenhuber (2022) to estimate formal employment elasticities, namely the estimation of a discrete choice model of labour supply with informal employment. The approach...
Blog
Dual learning disadvantages in East Africa: And how to deal with them
Children from poorer families in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda face a double disadvantage in their opportunity to access learning: not only is the...
Working Paper
Revisiting the links between economic inequality and political violence
The main aim of this paper is to explore theoretically important mechanisms through which economic inequalities may affect the emergence of political violence given the forms of social mobilization they (may) generate. The paper identifies and...
Working Paper
The legacies of armed conflict: insights from stayees and returning forced migrants
How does conflict, displacement, and return shape trust, reconciliation, and community engagement? And what is the relative impact of exposure to violence on these indicators? In this paper we explore these questions by focusing on the legacies of...
Blog
Why women are made to rely on vulnerable work
by
Manuel Santos Silva, Maria C. Lo Bue, Tu Thi Ngoc Le,
Kunal Sen
February 2022
The gender pay-gap is one of the foremost indicators of gender inequality and thus a guide for women’s economic empowerment policies. Although there...
Working Paper
Does aid to the productive sectors cause manufacturing sector growth in Africa?
In recent decades, Africa has received a large share of official development assistance compared to other regions of the world. Using AidData for 2000–13, this paper examines the effects of aid to productive sectors on manufacturing growth in Africa...
Technical Note
The Uganda Revenue Authority firm panel
This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) firm panel, which is constructed from administrative corporate income tax (CIT) returns and firm registration data for the financial years 2013/14–2019/20. The panel dataset contains...
Working Paper
Profit shifting by multinational corporations
Research on profit shifting by multinational corporations in developing countries is limited due to a lack of data. In this paper we use, for the first time, novel administrative data on the transactions of multinational corporations operating in...
Blog
The tortoise defeats the hare: Does moderate outlast rapid growth in domestic revenue?
by
Annalena Oppel, Kyle McNabb
February 2022
The past four decades have seen marked improvements in the collection of domestic revenue (tax and non-tax revenues) in many countries of the Global...
Working Paper
Impact of teacher content knowledge on student achievement in a low-income country
This paper estimates the causal impact of teacher content knowledge on student achievement in Mozambique, a low-income country where a large share of fourth-graders fail to meet the minimum requirements of literacy and numeracy. I use nationally...
Working Paper
Monetary policy in South Africa, 2007–21
This paper reviews South Africa’s monetary policy since 2007 and makes recommendations towards improving the inflation-targeting framework currently in place. Following a surge in inflation into double digits in 2007/08, the South African Reserve...
Journal Article
The role of automatic stabilizers and emergency tax–beneft policies during the COVID-19 pandemic
By combining household survey data before and during the COVID-19 pandemic with detailed tax-benefit simulations, this paper quantifies the distributional effects of COVID-19 in Ecuador and the role of tax-benefit policies in mitigating the immediate...
Working Paper
Weathering shocks: the effects of weather shocks on farm input use in sub-Saharan Africa
There has been much discussion on climate change and its adverse effects on agriculture, including excessive loss of food production. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture is the major source of household livelihoods, shocks in...
Working Paper
Management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kerala through the lens of state capacity and clientelism
During the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Kerala, a state in southern India, successfully managed to contain the pandemic. As a result, the Kerala model of managing the COVID-19 pandemic was celebrated as a success across the globe. However, at...
Blog
Bride price or dowry?
by
Milla Nyyssölä
March 2022
Why is it that in some countries the parents of a bride pay dowry, whereas in some others the groom has to pay for the bride? What is the impact of...
Working Paper
The global inequality boomerang
This paper focuses on the past and potential future evolution of income (or consumption) inequality in the world over the period 1981–2040. Inequality in the world has fallen by most common definitions since the late 1980s, and this is largely due to...
Working Paper
Affirmative action: meaning, intentions, and impacts in the big picture
This paper provides a broad overview of the meaning of affirmative action and its intended and unintended impacts. The paper is a literature review and does not make any arguments specifically for or against affirmative action but describes the broad...
Working Paper
Enhancing Effective Utilization of Aid in Fragile States
This paper explores the macroeconomic implications of aid flows in countries with weak institutions. It argues that these countries should take into account their overall macroeconomic position, their capacity to absorb aid at the sectoral and...
Working Paper
The legal basis for affirmative action in India
The affirmative action policy in India came into practice because of the generations of struggle undergone by the untouchable castes and other backward classes, who were historically excluded from education and administration. As society changed, it...
Working Paper
Anticompetitive practices on public procurement
Using big data from the Brazilian public procurement system, this research aims to investigate what factors are associated with the occurrence of anticompetitive practices in electronic bidding. Our analysis considers all services contracted between...
Blog
A policy of longer maternity leave is not enough to protect women from disadvantage
by
Tu Thi Ngoc Le
March 2022
The length of maternity leave has direct impacts on critical gender equality outcomes such as women’s employment and lifetime earnings. However, there...
Blog
The conflict in Ukraine - the role of civilians
While there is much to discuss about the geopolitics of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, let's not forget the men, women and children of Ukraine who...
Working Paper
Exploring social policy trajectories in Mainland Tanzania
In July 2020, the United Republic of Tanzania gained the status of a lower-middle-income country. This came after two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in the country’s economic structures. This paper explores social...
Working Paper
Determinants of clove exports in Zanzibar
This paper analyses factors for the declining trend in clove exports in Zanzibar using time series data that were collected between 1980 and 2020 and analysed using the vector error correction model, complemented with qualitative analysis. Clove...
Blog
How will the Russia-Ukraine war be fought?: External support and insurgency tactics
by
Kit Rickard
March 2022
The Ukrainian state, personified by its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has been heroic and has surprised many by its 'stiff resistance'. However...
Working Paper
A model to explain the impact of government revenue on the quality of governance and the SDGs
This paper empirically investigates the link between the level of government revenue per capita and six indicators of quality of governance in an unbalanced panel data set consisting of all countries in the world (217) using data from 1980 to 2020...
Working Paper
Gender preference at birth
Investigating preference for sons is a continuing focal area of development economics and demographic research. Son preference presents a challenge in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of ‘no poverty’, ‘good health and...
Working Paper
Inequality and human development
In this paper we reassess the relationship between inequality and human development, focusing on the differential effect associated with the concentration of national income at different parts of the income distribution. To do so, we rely on a large...
Working Paper
Social protection expansions during crisis and fiscal space
This study provides a first attempt to contribute a large-scale assessment of whether crisis response as observed during the COVID-19 pandemic can serve as a feasible blueprint for creating durable solutions across countries. Adopting a lens on...
Working Paper
Fiscal consequences of corporate tax avoidance
Multinational corporations shift a large share of their foreign profits to tax havens and, due to this corporate tax avoidance, governments worldwide lose a portion of their tax revenues. In this paper we study the consequences of multinational tax...
Blog
What can the GRD do for policymakers?
by
Abrams M.E. Tagem
August 2022
A few months ago, I was asked to deliver a lecture at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies on the UNU-WIDER Government Revenue...
Working Paper
Does aid fragmentation affect tax revenue dynamics in developing countries?
There exists a burgeoning empirical literature on the impact of aid fragmentation on development outcomes in aid-receiving countries, with it being widely recognized that aid fragmentation is deleterious. This paper adds to the existing literature by...
Working Paper
Impact of the right to education on school enrolment of children with disabilities
I evaluate the impact of the right to education from the passing of the Right to Education Act in India in 2009. This Act guaranteed free education to children aged 6–14 years, including children with disabilities. Given that the school participation...
Working Paper
Measuring consumption over the phone
The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries has made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting...
Working Paper
Foreign aid and intergenerational mobility in Africa
While there is extensive literature examining the growth and development effects of foreign aid, very little attention has been paid to its potential impact on social mobility. Thus, this paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of...
Working Paper
Employer power and employment in developing countries
The issue of employer power is underemphasized in the development literature. The default model is usually one of competitive labour markets. This assumption matters for analysis and policy prescription. There is growing evidence that the competitive...
Journal Article
A manufacturing (re)naissance?
This study examines industrialization in developing countries. It introduces the GGDC-UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, which provides consistent annual data of employment, real and nominal value added by 12 sectors in 51 economies for the...
Working Paper
Capital markets in sub-Saharan Africa
Capital markets facilitate capital growth by mobilizing savings and converting them into investments, and they are therefore a stimulant of economic growth. There is evidence that countries with high savings rates tend to grow faster. Although most...
Working Paper
Household Access to Microcredit and Children’s Food Security in Rural Malawi
Using data from the 1995 Malawi Financial Markets and Food Security Survey, this study seeks to discover if women’s relative control over household resources or intra-household bargaining power in rural Malawi, gauged by their access to microcredit...
Working Paper
Humanity over economy: biopolitical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana
This study posits that pandemics should be regarded as complex, open-ended phenomena that cannot be reduced to biology and epidemiology. The research assesses Ghana’s effectiveness in governing the COVID-19 pandemic contrary to apocalyptic...
Working Paper
Rebel governance and political participation
Rebels, militias, and criminal groups all govern civilians. Governing strategies adopted by armed groups during civil war likely influence citizens’ post-conflict political participation, with consequences for democratic politics.We theorize that an...
Working Paper
Parental risk preferences, maternal bargaining power, and the educational progressions of children
We analyse the effect of parental risk preferences and a novel measure of maternal bargaining power over educational expenses—elicited via lab-in-the-field experiments in rural Côte d’Ivoire—on the educational progression of boys and girls. Data from...
Blog
Tax revenues and tax capacity in sub-Saharan Africa
by
Abrams M.E. Tagem, Oliver Morrissey
August 2022
African countries raise lower amounts of tax as a share of national income (GDP) than other countries. Researchers are interested in understanding why...
Working Paper
Forest Management, Gender, and Food Security of the Rural Poor in Africa
This paper addresses the economic impact of forest management on gender and food security of rural poor in Africa. The analyses reveal that deforestation places major demands on women and children’s time, limiting their opportunities to obtain an...
Blog
Fiscal states in developing economies: Why do they matter and where do they come from?
Modern states are complex organizations which perform a broad range of functions. They have an important role in economic and human development. The...
Blog
Are autocratic states doomed to weak fiscal capacity?
by
Per F. Andersson
August 2022
How best to increase and mobilize revenue is a key issue that confronts contemporary developing economies, but the same problems were faced —and...
Blog
State assigned property rights and revenue collection in sub-Saharan Africa
by
Marina Nistotskaya, Michelle D'Arcy
August 2022
Across sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries there are striking differences in citizen willingness to pay taxes. For example, in Mali, Senegal, and...
Working Paper
Revealing 21 per cent of GDP in hidden assets
This paper studies the effectiveness of tax amnesties and their impacts on capital taxation and public spending. We leverage rich policy variation from Argentina, where left- and right-wing governments implemented multiple programmes and achieved...
Blog
Sales recovered faster from the pandemic than employment: Evidence from tax administrative and survey data in Zambia
by
Aliisa Koivisto, Christopher Hoy, Laban Simbeye, Muhammad Malik, Mashekwa Maboshe
August 2022
Like most other countries, the government of Zambia introduced restrictions to control COVID-19, which considerably curtailed normal economic activity...
Working Paper
The effect of wage subsidies on job retention
Wage subsidies have served as a primary labour market policy used around the world to mitigate job losses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In South Africa, where unemployment is among the highest globally, the Temporary Employer–Employee Relief...
Working Paper
Who was impacted and how? COVID-19 pandemic and the long uneven recovery in India
We investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on income levels, poverty, and inequality in both the immediate aftermath and during the uneven recovery until December 2021 using high-frequency household survey data from India. We find that the...
Blog
Digital platforms and job search: Experimental evidence from Mozambique
Digital technologies can be deployed to improve job search, but their effectiveness in practice is disrupted. This column uses experimental data to...
Working Paper
The social consequences of organized crime in Italy
Organized crime affects security, development, and democracy worldwide, but not much is known about its social consequences. We study how exposure to the presence of organized crime groups shapes the social capital of Italian citizens, including...
Working Paper
Impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns and aid packages
In view of the detrimental effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on household welfare, most countries implemented economic stimulus aid packages to support households. The extent to which these packages mitigated the pandemic’s adverse effects on households...
Working Paper
Agricultural risks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and farm household welfare and diversification strategies in Africa
Agricultural activities in many African countries are bedevilled by a range of risk factors. Using micro-level household datasets from a range of countries in Africa, we examine the drivers of agricultural risks, while exploring the role of context...
Working Paper
Digital labour platforms as shock absorbers
Digital labour platforms have grown five-fold over the last decade, enabling significant expansion in gig work worldwide. We interrogate the criticism that these platforms tend to amplify aggregate economic shocks for registered users (workers)...
Working Paper
Ethnic inequality, the federal character principle, and the reform of Nigeria’s presidential federalism
The federal character principle is Nigeria’s primary formula for mitigating horizontal inequality and conflict in this chronically fractured society. Designed to guarantee inter-group inclusion in the conduct and composition of governmental...
Working Paper
Growth and inequality convergence: the role of environmentally related impacts on human capital
We examine inequality convergence over the past three decades and ask if environmentally related impacts on health, and their effect on human capital, are responsible for the slow rate of inequality reduction in countries. Though higher initial...
Working Paper
Between victory and statehood
What accounts for armed violence in the aftermath of civil war? Efforts to develop a comprehensive framework to understand this phenomenon have been made in the literature. Yet existing studies have in general looked at distinct pre-war, wartime, and...
Working Paper
So close and yet so far: the ability of mandatory disclosure rules to crack down on offshore tax evasion
We study the short-term effect of the introduction of the mandatory disclosure programme for aggressive tax arrangements by focusing on the one introduced in May 2018 under Council Directive 2018/288/EU (or DAC6). Employing bilateral data on cross...
Working Paper
Aid, taxes, and government spending
A substantial amount of aid to developing countries is given to the government, or goes through the budget, meaning it should have an impact on government fiscal behaviour (particularly on government spending). The few existing empirical studies on...
Working Paper
Unravelling Africa’s raw material footprints and their drivers
This paper applies an environmentally extended input–output analysis, leveraging the Eora database, to estimate the global raw material footprints of 51 African nations from 1995 to 2015. It employs least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and...
Working Paper
Determinants of domestic savings in Tanzania
This paper examines trends and determinants of gross domestic savings in Tanzania using data for the period 1990–2020. The autoregressive distributed lag approach is employed to empirically analyse the short-run and long-run relationships. There has...
Journal Article
Discerning trends in international metal prices in the presence of non-stationary volatility
In this study, we develop an empirical framework that allows us to trace out a time path of metal prices. This framework shows that unpredictable shifts in demand, extraction costs and discovery of reserves, make estimation of the slope of this...
Journal Article
Does the gender of the owner affect the productivity of enterprises in India’s informal economy?
We examine the patterns and correlates of the productivity gap between male- and female-owned enterprises in India’s informal sector. Female-owned firms are 45 per cent less productive than male-owned firms on average, with the greatest productivity...
Working Paper
Social protection floor gaps and pandemic relief measures: a case for universalism?
With the expansion of social protection measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, considerations both old and new have surfaced regarding targeted versus universalist approaches. This study focuses on how social protection coverage before the pandemic...
Working Paper
'It's our turn (not) to learn': the pitfalls of education reform during post-war institutional transformation
In this study, we investigate the relationship between education reform, institutional legacies of inequality, and changing political institutions in a poor, conflict-affected country. Burundi experienced a dramatic change in ethnic power relations...
Working Paper
Women’s Status and Child Labour in Nepal
This paper uses data from the Nepal Living Standards Survey 2 (2003/2004) to find evidence to whether children are less likely to work and more likely to attend school in a household where the mother has a say in the intra-family decision-making...
Blog
Electoral politics and Mexico’s COVID-19 vaccine roll-out
by
Emilio Gutiérrez, Jaakko Meriläinen, Antonio M. Ponce de León
September 2022
Government responsiveness is an integral feature of representative democracy. Its importance could be amplified in times of crisis, especially if...
Blog
Experiences from UNU-WIDER Winter School 2022: One of the best global training programmes in tax research
by
John Karangwa
September 2022
Across Africa, governments are now waking up to the fact that taxation targets or economic development goals will not be met without policies that are...
Working Paper
Other Backward Classes and the politics of reservations in India
The paper examines the existing state of reservations, more specifically, reservation policies and reservations for government jobs for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in India. It discusses the progression and ramifications of these policies and...
Blog
Lives can be improved when policymakers and researchers collaborate
by
Isabelle Beyera
September 2022
My motivation for doing economics research comes from the wish to see every human being have their basic needs met and enjoy their life. My interest...
Working Paper
A policy for the jobless youth in South Africa
This paper uses survey and tax administrative data to analyse the effects of a sizeable employer-borne payroll tax credit for young, low-wage workers in South Africa. We find limited impact of the wage subsidy on employment of young, low-wage workers...
Blog
Opportunities beyond lecture rooms – widening my career perspectives as a UNU-WIDER PhD fellow
by
Nyemwererai Matshaka
September 2022
It was surreal to take a springtime walk along the harbor in Helsinki on my way to UNU-WIDER’s headquarter offices for the first time. My initial...
Blog
Could the war in Ukraine encourage Western leaders to finally deal with shadow finance?
by
Johnny Flentø
April 2022
'I say to the Russian oligarchs and the corrupt leaders who bilked billions of dollars off this violent regime: no more… We are coming for your ill...
Blog
Do elites capture foreign aid?
by
Jørgen Juel Andersen, Niels Johannesen, Bob Rijkers
April 2022
Does foreign aid end up in the pockets of elites instead of contributing to inclusive economic development? A recently published journal article...
Blog
Seeking asylum from nowhere— how origin shapes the context of reception
by
Sarah Dean, Phi Hong Su
May 2022
Afghanistan is the world’s newest nowhere, a predicament that will shape the evacuation and resettlement prospects for millions of people for the...
Blog
Behind the scenes: Meet our tax-benefit microsimulation team in Viet Nam!
by
Anna Toppari
May 2022
How can Vietnamese policymakers improve their policy choices related to social protection and tax policies? Who are the experts providing evidence on...
Working Paper
Globalization, Literacy Levels, and Economic Development
This paper estimated models for GDP growth rates, poverty levels, and inequality measures for the period 1990–2000 using data on 54 developing countries at five-yearly intervals. Issues of globalization were investigated by analysing the differential...
Journal Article
Female labor force participation in sub-Saharan Africa
Female labor force participation rates have been stagnating despite rising female education in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. Using representative and repeated census data from a heterogeneous sample of 13 sub-Saharan African...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Zambia - MicroZAMOD v2.12
View the latest MicroZAMOD country report here. This report documents MicroZAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Zambia. This work was carried out by Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis & Research (ZIPAR) in collaboration with the project partners...
Working Paper
Identity and support for policies towards Indigenous people
This paper adds to knowledge on the role of politicians’ and voters’ identities in influencing policy-making in societies marked by ethnic inequality.The outcome we investigate is the initiatives and policies targeting Indigenous populations in the...
Working Paper
Return migration and entrepreneurship in Cameroon
In this paper, we examine the determinants of the entrepreneurial behaviour of returnees to Cameroon based on original survey data from 2012. Contrary to the existing literature, we focus on the skills received from abroad without omitting the effect...
Working Paper
The politics of affirmative action: ethnicity, equity, and state-business relations in Malaysia
Malaysia provides for interesting paradoxes. Poverty was reduced by adopting a horizontal perspective to policy planning through affirmative action targeting one ethnic group lagging economically in society. However, outcomes of affirmative action...
Working Paper
Programme-135: addressing poverty and inequality in Viet Nam
Viet Nam has achieved remarkable economic growth and poverty reduction since the Doi Moi. However, ethnic minorities and the ethnic majority do not benefit equally from the national economic progress. The proportion of poor households that are ethnic...
Working Paper
PROCEDE: a failed programme to reduce poverty and inequalities in Mexico
This paper analyses the land tenure reform that took place in Mexico in 1992 and its PROCEDE programme (Ejido Rights Certification Programme). It considers the counter-agrarian reform’s objectives, the context in which it was proposed, and the...
Working Paper
‘Delangokubona’ and the distribution of rents and opportunity
Capital spending on infrastructure presents a significant counter-cyclical tool, however contested it might be in a society as unequal as South Africa. The history of racial capitalism, race-based exclusion from economic participation, and an...
Working Paper
Illicit financial flows and country-by-country reporting in extractive industries
Economic data are important in governing the international political economy. Some of the most widely used macro statistics risk being undermined by systematic misalignment in reporting of economic activity due to illicit financial flows, as well as...
Working Paper
Inclusion amid ethnic inequality
Policy frames in Brazil have long run up against conflicting visions and understandings about the causes and consequences of group-based inequality. This paper argues that a class-based lens has dominated the social protection framework. In recent...
Blog
Reducing inequality — why working together is no longer just an option
by
Koen Doens, Remy Rioux, Antón Leis,
Kunal Sen, Jean Van Wetter, Jürgen Zattler
March 2022
The time limit to reach the goals of the 2030 Agenda is now just eight years away. It is vital to pursue a new model of partnerships, based on...
Journal Article
Multigenerational mobility among males in India
Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility...
Working Paper
Is economic development affected by the leaders’ education levels?
Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders’ quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for...
Working Paper
Employment policy in Mainland Tanzania: what’s in it for women?
Tanzania has experienced relatively strong and stable economic growth accompanied by social stability over the past two decades. The country is also pursuing an ambitious development plan with significant employment objectives. For development to be...
Technical Note
On-model adjustment of incomes during COVID-19 in SOUTHMOD tax-benefit microsimulation models
This note describes methods to derive employment-to-unemployment transition shares across industries during the COVID-19 pandemic and to use these shares in SOUTHMOD tax-benefit microsimulation models to adjust relevant labour market variables. The...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ethiopia - ETMOD v2.3
View the latest ETMOD country report here. This report documents ETMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ethiopia. Since 2020 the Ethiopian national team is based at the University of Insubria (Italy). It includes Adnan A. Shahir and Francesco Figari...
Journal Article
Promoting education under distortionary taxation
A common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision of education for equalisation of opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop a...
Blog
Can access to finance spur entrepreneurship in Indian informal sector?
by
Ira N. Gang, Rajesh Raj Natarajan,
Kunal Sen
May 2022
Credit constraints, a consequence of the widespread failure of credit markets in developing countries, are widely regarded as a key constraint to...
Book
The Job Ladder
Using a range of countries from the Global South, this book examines heterogeneity within informal work by applying a common conceptual framework and empirical methodology. The country studies use panel data to study the dynamics of worker...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ghana - GHAMOD v2.5
View the latest GHAMOD country report here. This report documents GHAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ghana. The report describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and...
Working Paper
Aid and Growth in Fragile States
The literature on aid has come a long way in recent years, and as a result we now know much more about aid effectiveness than possibly ever before. But significant gaps in knowledge remain. One such gap is the effectiveness of aid in the so-called...
Journal Article
Veto power and coalition formation in the commons
We propose a five-player common-pool resource (CPR) game with endogenous coalition formation. We show that the level of extraction from the CPR depends on the size of each coalition formed and on the final coalition structure. These predictions are...
Journal Article
Participation of charity beneficiaries
Anecdotal evidence suggests that involving beneficiaries in charity decision-making ensures better governance processes. This study provides the first experimental test of the effects of beneficiaries’ participation in the decision of how to spend a...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Viet Nam - VNMOD v2.3
View the latest VNMOD country report here. This report documents VNMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Viet Nam. This work has been carried out by the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM) in collaboration with UNU-WIDER and SASPRI. The...
Background Note
Behavioural experiments as an impactful tool in sustainable development
Introduction Only recently has the importance and potential of behavioural sciences been recognized as a critical tool to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This long-awaited recognition comes from the highest levels of the United...
Working Paper
What drove the profitability of colonial firms?
The magnitude of returns to colonial-era investments in Africa has been addressed in an extensive literature, as have the nature and legacies of extractive colonial institutions. However, the link between these institutions and the profitability of...
Working Paper
Elementary education in India versus China
This paper documents the state of elementary education in India and China since the 1960s, key lessons for India from China’s shift in focus from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’, and evidence-based guidelines for effective implementation of India’s New...
Technical Note
Government Revenue Dataset (2021): variable description
This technical note is part of a series of technical notes describing the construction of the Government Revenue Dataset (GRD). This document specifically focuses on the composition of variables in the GRD (version August 2021) and across the...
Working Paper
The guide to the CIT-IRP5 panel version 4.0
This paper presents version 4.0 of the CIT-IRP5 firm-level panel dataset. Version 4.0 is the latest edition of the firm-level component of the combined administrative data using sources from the South African Revenue Service. We show that differences...
Technical Note
Total factor productivity in South African manufacturing firms 2010–17
We update Kreuser and Newman’s (2018) total factor productivity estimates for the South African manufacturing sector using administrative data from 2009–17. We use standard implementations of the Ackerberg et al. (2015) and Wooldridge (2009)...
Working Paper
Contract clientelism
Where does the money come from to buy votes? We argue that an important source of funds for vote-buying comes from ‘contract clientelism’, or the provision of public contracts to private firms in exchange for campaign donations. Using quantitative...
Technical Note
Integration of indirect taxation to GHAMOD
This note, with emphasis on VAT and excise taxes, illustrates how indirect taxes are modelled in the context of GHAMOD, a tax-benefit microsimulation model for Ghana. GHAMOD is similar to the EUROMOD base platform, and its built-in Statistics...
Working Paper
Informed participation: the effects of information treatment on panel non-response
This paper builds on a longitudinal school-to-work transition phone survey experiment to quantify the effects on attrition of communicating with participants. Specifically, we study the impact of sending topically relevant information on job market...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Mozambique - MOZMOD v2.6a
View the latest MOZMOD country report here. This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. It describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and...
Working Paper
The relative neglect of agriculture in Mozambique
This paper explores agricultural performance of Mozambique, its institutional weaknesses, and the underlying factors that underpin an unsatisfactory performance during many decades. We point to the role of systemic political instability and violence...
Working Paper
The saga and limits of public financial management
At independence in 1975, the Frelimo government took over public administration from the colonial system and started to transform it. The public financial management (PFM) system was adapted to the central planning and management of the economy in...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ecuador - ECUAMOD v2.0
View the latest ECUAMOD country report here. This report documents ECUAMOD, the SOUTHMOD micrososimulation model developed for Ecuador. It describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model takes advantage of these...
Blog
Helping the poor to survive lockdown
by
Risto Rönkkö, Stuart Rutherford,
Kunal Sen
August 2021
The Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project has been tracking the daily spending of 60 poor households in rural Bangladesh for the last six years. Analysis...
Blog
Social protection at a crossroad
by
Annalena Oppel
August 2021
How can we ensure a resilient and inclusive recovery from COVID-19? How can we hold on to the target of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030, with...
Working Paper
Labour conditions in regional versus global value chains
We explore how decent work varies across Southern Africa apparel firms participating in global value chains (GVCs) and regional value chains (RVCs), respectively. We draw on cross-section survey data from 135 workers in 31 firms across Eswatini and...
Journal Article
Fiscal decentralization and efficiency of public services delivery by local governments in Ghana
We estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data from composite...
Journal Article
Gender priming in solidarity games
What is the effect of gender priming on solidarity behavior? We explore a two-player solidarity game where players can insure each other against risk of losses. We test this experimentally in a developing country setting, the Philippines. We consider...
Working Paper
The welfare effects of financial inclusion in Ghana
Using a nationally representative household survey data set from Ghana, this paper provides empirical evidence regarding the role of financial inclusion or financial exclusion in household welfare. We first compute a multidimensional index of...
Journal Article
Data deprivations, data gaps and digital divides
This study draws lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for the relationship between data-driven decision making and global development. The lessons are that: (i) users should keep in mind the shifting value of data during a crisis, and the pitfalls its...
Working Paper
Exchange Rates and Outward Foreign Direct Investment
The paper investigates the impact of exchange rates on US foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to a sample of 16 emerging market countries using annual panel data for the period 1990-2002. Three separate exchange rate effects are considered: the...
Working Paper
The recentered influence function and unidimensional poverty measurement
I discuss the applicability of the recentered influence function (RIF) to the analysis of poverty differentials between distributions (regression-based decomposition into composition and income structure effects). I show that the predominant approach...
Technical Note
Top income adjustments and tax reforms in Ecuador: an application of ECUAMOD
This technical note has been produced alongside a WIDER working paper assessing the effects on income inequality and income tax simulations of adjusting top incomes of employees in survey data based on administrative tax records in Ecuador. The paper...
Technical Note
Unemployment insurance and income protection in Ecuador: an application of ECUAMOD
This note has been produced alongside a WIDER working paper assessing the effect of the Unemployment Insurance benefit on income protection in Ecuador. The aim of this note is to describe the methodology used to assess the effect of the Unemployment...
Journal Article
Normalizing necessity?
Community support is a critical source to sustain livelihoods in the Global South. At the same time, these practices can exhibit unequal dynamics such as disincentives, hierarchies, or adverse inclusion of individuals. However, an understanding of...
Working Paper
The informal sector and the safety of female traders in Tanzania
This paper assesses the participation of female traders, safety factors, and existing policies and legislation in the informal sector in Tanzania. Primary data were obtained from 11 in-depth interviews, 10 focused group discussions, and 236...
Blog
Co-creation for fair and efficient taxation: Research recommendations to improve policies
by
Maria Jouste, Tina Kaidu Barugahara, Nicholas Musoke
August 2021
How can we determine the taxation of wage earners or multinational corporations in a fair manner? Will simplifying tax administration help increase...
Blog
Unlocking the mystery of domestic savings: What difference do they make?
The socioeconomic fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore discussions on domestic resource mobilization (hereafter DRM)...
Blog
Afghanistan 2021: A quickly made long tragedy
by
Lant Pritchett
August 2021
The tragedy for the Afghan people of the Taliban re-taking control of the country in August 2021 is the denouement of a process 20 years in the making...
Journal Article
Decomposing learning inequalities in East Africa
Inequalities in learning opportunities arise from both household- and school-related factors. Although these factors are unlikely to be independent, few studies have considered the extent to which sorting between schools and households might...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ghana - GHAMOD v2.3
View the latest GHAMOD country report here. This report documents GHAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ghana. The report describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and...
Working Paper
Improving young women’s working conditions in Tanzania’s urban food vending sector
In this paper, we investigate the working conditions of the young women working as assistants in the food vending sector in Tanzania using interviews and focus group discussions which are supplemented with quantitative survey. Data were collected in...
Working Paper
The mitigating role of tax and benefit rescue packages for poverty and inequality in Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemic
This paper analyses the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and related tax-benefit measures in 2020 in a cross-country comparative perspective for five African countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. We first estimate...
Technical Note
Exploring the quality of income data in two South African household surveys which underpin SAMOD
This note has set out several data processes that have been undertaken using the income data in dataset(s) that underpin SAMOD. Section 1 describes various data-cleaning steps that were undertaken when preparing the LCS 2014/15 as an underpinning...
Journal Article
The intergenerational impact of house prices on education
We investigate heterogeneous and nonlinear intergenerational transmission of education and the impact on this of house prices. Using the China Household Finance Survey, we construct household history of property pur-chases and educational investment...
Working Paper
Global oil theft: impact and policy responses
This paper, the first of two on global oil theft and fraud, discusses the prevalence, methods, and consequences of global oil theft, valued at US$133 billion per year and equivalent to 5–7 per cent of the global market for crude oil and petroleum...
Blog
Global inequality may be falling, but the gap between haves and have-nots is growing
by
Carlos Gradín,
Finn Tarp, Murray Leibbrandt
September 2021
In one of the most unequal countries in the world, South Africa, the poorest 40% have annual incomes of less than US$1,000 (£727) per person. The...
Working Paper
Component Trade and China’s Global Economic Integration
China’s engagement in the so-called international fragmentation of production – namely ‘cross-border dispersion of component production/assembly within vertically integrated manufacturing industries’ – has become an increasingly important form of its...
Book Chapter
Doubling down
Part of
Blog
Extreme poverty - the poorest are being left behind
by
James Stewart
March 2016
At our 30th Anniversary Conference we took the chance to interview Martin Ravallion of Georgetown University—we asked him to discuss his recent work...
Working Paper
Tree Plantations in the Philippines and Thailand
The area of forest plantations in the tropics has increased for many reasons, but not the least as a result of natural forest depletion. Although forest plantations cannot qualitatively substitute the timber grown in natural forests, their importance...
Book Chapter
Framework
Part of
Book Chapter
Downstream activities
Part of
Book Chapter
Conclusions
Part of
Blog
Lessons from the resettlement of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Vietnamese forced migrants in Germany
by
Phi Hong Su
June 2018
Hiếu (pseudonym) embodies the ‘good refugee’ story. In 1979, he fled Vietnam by boat and eventually resettled in the Federal Republic of (West)...
Working Paper
The Distribution of Assets in Transitional Economies
An equal distribution of assets is a crucial element in the process of economic transition from plan to market. In the socialist era most physical assets were owned by the state and private ownership was not very important for most individuals. When...
Working Paper
A Russian Puzzle
This paper seeks to explain, why Russian (and CIS) economic transformation was neither a shock therapy nor a gradual transition case, but instead followed a sort of middle ground inconsistent shock therapy path. It is argued that there were some...
Journal Special Issue
Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
The articles in the forthcoming special issue are already available online on full open access. The special issue will be officially published in March 2019, vol. 55, issue 3. Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles...
Working Paper
Dealing with Capital Inflows
We have now witnessed more than half a decade of relatively heavy capital inflows to a large group of highly heterogeneous developing countries and economies in transition in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Former Soviet Union, Latin America, and parts of...
Working Paper
Investment in Education and Income Inequality
Income inequality has risen in many parts of the world during the past decades. Rising inequality is no longer a problem of only Latin American and Sub-Saharan African countries. Some OECD countries, and recently also East Asian countries, have...
Working Paper
The Banking System and Monetary Aggregates Following Financial Sector Reforms
This paper discusses the process, problems and impacts of the financial sector reform in Indonesia, particularly since the late 1980s. The reform has encouraged a surge in private sector capital inflows to supplement the already high domestic savings...
Working Paper
Commodity Price Fluctuations and Macro-economic Adjustments in the Developed Countries
Commodity price fluctuations have been troublesome in their destabilising effects on the foreign exchange earnings of developing countries. Recently, however, attention has been drawn to their role in transmitting inflation and in inducing...
Working Paper
The Age of Humanitarian Emergencies
The Age of Humanitarian Emergencies makes an effort to define and operationalize a humanitarian emergency. After having discussed extensively definitions related to collective violence, especially genocide and civil war, the paper opts for a more...
Working Paper
Development, Aid and Conflict
Rwanda's genocide is the end-result of a combination of processes, none of which can easily be priorized or separated from the others. These processes are: extreme pauperization and reduction of life chances for a majority of the poor, especially...
Working Paper
Smoothing food price trends in Nigeria
This study reviews the political economy issues surrounding the 2008 food crisis in Nigeria; the lessons learned from management of the crisis; analyses the performance of policies aimed at stabilizing prices; and proffers policy measures for...
Working Paper
Long-Term Growth and Welfare in Transitional Economies
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
Working Paper
Country Responses to Massive Capital Flows
The emergence of a select group of developing countries as destinations for private portfolio investment in the 1990s (and the subsequent peso crisis in Mexico in 1994) has rekindled the old issues about the responsibilities and capacities public...
Blog
Mozambique: Improving our understanding of the potential of manufacturing
by
Vincenzo Salvucci
June 2018
Mozambique’s manufacturing industry is facing many challenges. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate its linkages to the rest of the economy and...
Working Paper
A Land Cursed by its Wealth?
In Angola, the availability of two abundant resources (oil and diamonds) has prolonged the conflict beyond its Cold War context. The geography and political economy of these resources were crucial to the course taken by the conflict. Matching the...
Working Paper
Selecting Priorities for Poverty Reduction and Human Development
Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. At least 45 per cent of the population cannot meet their minimum basic needs. Human development indicators are amongst Africa's worst, including a very high level of illiteracy. The country was...
Working Paper
Regional Development and Government Policy In China's Transitional Economy
This paper examines the causes and consequences of the increase in regional disparities in China during its economic transition towards a 'socialist market economy'. Part 1 seeks to explain why the 'Core' provinces in southeast China have...
Working Paper
The Change of the Financial System and Developmental State in Korea
This study examines the role of institutions and their change related to the rapid economic development and the 1997 Korean financial crisis. In Korea, the government built a state-led financial system through the 1960s and 1970s and a specific...
Blog
Development, democracy and cohesion: Critical essays with insights on Sierra Leone and wider Africa contexts
by
Yusuf Bangura
March 2016
African countries face huge challenges in building democratic and cohesive societies that will enhance the wellbeing of their citizens. Even after...
Working Paper
Rebuilding Rural Livelihoods and Social Capital
Mozambique has now enjoyed eight years of peace after a 16-year war that massively damaged the economy, caused over a million deaths, and displaced more than 3 million people. This paper aims to improve our understanding of how rural societies...
Working Paper
Regulation of Social Services in the Least Developed Countries
The privatization trend affecting the state involvement in productive sectors is also challenging the role of the state in the provision of social services. And, as private participation in social sectors increases, a regulatory framework is needed...
Working Paper
The IMF Model and Resource-Abundant Transition Economies
The IMF model of the economic transition stresses the role of macro policy reform. It concludes that rapid reform to a market economy is preferable to slow reform because late reformers experience very steep transition recessions and severe...
Working Paper
Guinea-Bissau
In June 1998, Guinea-Bissau was thrown into conflict by a military revolt. This led to 11 months of fighting, extensive loss of life, and the displacement of up to a third of the country's population. This paper discusses the political economy of the...
Working Paper
Natural Resources and Economic Growth
The paper begins by offering a quick glance of the Nordic economies and of some aspects of their economic growth performance and natural resource dependence since 1970. Thereafter, it reviews some of the main symptoms of the Dutch disease, and then...
Working Paper
Development Discountinuities
The development literature considers associations an important economic development tool that allows producers to pursue their economic welfare collectively and through participatory means. This paper comparatively analyses the experience of three...
Working Paper
A Macroeconomic Model of a Developing Country Endowed with a Natural Resource
The present paper presents a short-run theoretical macroeconomic model of the type suggested in Sachs (1996), attempting to differentiate economic development in East Asia with Latin America. Latin America, when compared to East Asia is said to...
Working Paper
Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorer countries undergoing transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. Unlike its neighbour Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan followed a rather radical reform strategy, introduced liberal macroeconomic reforms and large...
Working Paper
Lush Fields and Parched Throats
Groundwater resources in Gujarat (India) have been depleting at an darning rate in recent years. The most visible symptom of this phenomenon is the decline of water tables in large pats of the state. The scarcity of groundwater is most severe during...
Working Paper
On the Regulation of Telecommunications Markets
This paper discusses the theoretical concepts underlying recent developments in the regulation of telecommunications in Europe, the USA and developing countries with respect to efficiency and welfare. It focuses on analysing standardization problems...
Working Paper
Industry in Tanzania
Tanzania ranks among the leading stars of the ‘African growth miracle’, but a sector that has been largely absent from the Tanzania success story is industry. Although growth of manufacturing has outpaced economic growth over the past decade...
Working Paper
Resource-Led Growth - A Long-Term Perspective
Resource-Led Growth - A Long-Term Perspective surveys the 1870-1914 experience of growth in resource-rich economies: the so-called regions of recent settlement, some tropical countries and some mineral-based export economies. First, three contrasting...
Working Paper
Quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of mother tongue-based education on reading skills and early labour market outcomes
Prior to the introduction of mother tongue-based education in 1994, the language of instruction for most subjects in Ethiopia’s primary schools was the official language (Amharic)—the mother tongue of only one third of the population. This paper uses...
Working Paper
Group Behaviour and Development
A very large amount of activity occurs within groups (that is within families, firms, co-operatives, conununities or governments). Yet most economic analysis focuses on market transactions between these agents. The purpose of the study is to analyse...
Working Paper
Rising Wealth Inequality and Changing Social Structure in Rural China, 1988-95
The paper finds that a new system of social stratification is emerging in rural China in the wake of economic reforms, one that is far less equal than what preceded it. As part of this trend, wealth inequality has increased markedly in a short period...
Working Paper
Economics Theories of the Household
The aim of this paper is to review the principal assumptions and aspects of the unitary household model and collective models of household behaviour. Empirical studies are presented to assess whether the theories can offer adequate descriptions of...
Working Paper
Inequality in Income and Access to Education
In the current debate on the relationship between inequality in income distribution and growth one of the possible link works through the access to education. After reviewing this debate, a formal model shows how the imperfection of financial markets...
Working Paper
The interaction of institutional quality and human capital in shaping the dynamics of capital structure in Vietnam
The aim of this paper is to find which of two theories of capital structure—trade-off theory or pecking order theory—best explains the capital structure decision of non-state firms during the post-transition process in Vietnam. We also investigate...
Working Paper
Capital allocation, credit access, and firm growth in Vietnam
In this paper, we explore the relationship between firm growth, access to finance, and the efficiency of capital allocation in Vietnam over the period 2005–2015. Using data from the UNU-WIDER Vietnam SME survey, we test whether firms with higher...
Working Paper
Rowing against the current
The exploitation of natural resources is a huge opportunity, but one that carries considerable risks. Relative prices in resource-exporting economies tend to push them towards economic structures dominated by the resource sector. This paper explores...
Working Paper
How important are management practices for the productivity of small and medium enterprises?
Is the lack of ‘managerial capital’, alongside human and financial capital, a constraint on the growth of firms in developing countries? The evidence on this is still mixed, especially among small and medium enterprises. This paper uses a panel of...
Working Paper
Horizontal inequality as a dependent variable
A considerable body of research suggests that horizontal inequality between ethnic groups has major socioeconomic implications, in particular for peace and economic development. Much of this work focuses on horizontal inequality as an independent...
Working Paper
Liberalization, Globalization and Income Distribution
Recent mainstream analyses of changes in income distribution over the post World War II period have concluded that income inequality within countries tends to be stable, that there is no strong association between growth and inequality and that...
Working Paper
Does union membership pay off?
In the absence of adequate institutional mechanisms, trade unions can potentially promote higher wages and other worker benefits, yet limited data availability means little is known about the effect unions have on individual earnings in developing...
Working Paper
Wage Reform, Soft Budget Constraints and Competition
Since the beginning of the Chinese economic reforms in 1978, there has been a series of effort to reform the labour compensation practice in state- owned enterprises to strengthen the link between pay and productivity. Despite the reforms, however...
Working Paper
Tenurial security and agricultural investment
In Vietnam, all lands belong to the state, who assigns usufruct rights to those lands to individuals and households. In 1993, the state gave 20-year usufruct rights to growers of annual crops, and 50-year usufruct rights to growers of perennial crops...
Working Paper
The Weightless Economy in Economic Development
Can the increasing significance of knowledge-products in national income— the growing weightless economy—influence economic development? Those technologies reduce “distance” between consumers and knowledge production. This paper analyzes a model...
Working Paper
Pecuniary returns to working conditions in Vietnam
Using matched worker-firm data from three waves of the Vietnam Small and Medium Enterprises data, we examine whether workers are compensated with higher wages for working in vulnerable jobs and unfavourable working conditions. Wage equations indicate...
Working Paper
Rural roads and urban agglomeration economies
Do urban agglomeration economies enhance the social profitability of rural roads? When all goods are traded at parametric world prices, lower transport costs benefit villagers. Urban activities and welfare are unaffected if labour is immobile, but...
Working Paper
On the persistence of growth for South African firms
The growth of firms has been shown to have a meaningful impact on the health of firms and the economy in general. As the body of literature dedicated to understanding high-growth firms has expanded, an interest in the persistence of growth has become...
Working Paper
What does it mean to be poor?
This paper reflects on the relationship between economic (quantitative) and anthropological (qualitative) approaches to the analysis of poverty in developing countries. Drawing on detailed evidence from Mozambique, we argue that different research...
Journal Special Issue
Regional Growth Opportunities
This issue contains seven articles addressing the major changes underway in the integration of economies in southern Africa. This special issue is based on the UNU-WIDER project 'Regional growth and development in Southern Africa'. This project aims...
Working Paper
Economic Reform in the USSR
The subject of economic reform is probably as large as the problems with which it has to deal. In order to understand why such a reform became necessary after 70 years of socialist development, it is essential to see it in historical perspective.
Working Paper
Remote sensing of urban cyclone impact and resilience
Cyclone Idai, the most devastating cyclone ever recorded in Southern Africa, caused havoc in large parts of central Mozambique, especially the port city of Beira, upon its landfall in March 2019. This study reviews and compares measurements of the...
Working Paper
The role of trust and of poverty in compliance with social distancing measures in Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic
Since it began, the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a number of challenges on Africa and the rest of the world. Following the recommendations of the World Health Organization, many countries imposed social distancing measures and cancelled non...
Working Paper
Gender differences in formal wage employment in urban Tanzania
This paper uses the latest Tanzania labour force survey—the Integrated Labour Force Survey—and a censored bivariate probit model to analyse gender differences in labour force participation and gender bias in formal wage employment in urban Tanzania...
Working Paper
Forecasting recovery from COVID-19 using financial data
We develop a new methodology to nowcast the effects of the COVID-19 crisis and forecast its evolution in small, export-oriented countries. To this aim, we exploit variation in financial indexes at the industry level and relate them to the expected...
Working Paper
Simulating personal income tax in South Africa using administrative data and survey data
In this paper we explore South Africa’s personal income tax system using two microsimulation models. The first, SAMOD, simulates personal income tax and social benefits using a dataset derived from the nationally representative National Income...
Blog
How global tax dodging costs lives: New research shows a direct link to increased death rates
by
Bernadette O'Hare, Kyle McNabb, Stephen G. Hall
May 2021
Tax abuse is an expensive business. According to a recent report by the Tax Justice Network, avoiding or evading tax deprives governments across the...
Blog
Better measures of informality can improve poverty reduction policy
by
Eva-Maria Egger
May 2021
In a recent study, my co-authors and I propose a new way to measure informality by household, rather than by individual worker. We find that such an...
Blog
Over 2 billion workers globally are informal — what should we do about it?
Informality is a pervasive phenomenon in the labour markets of developing countries. Two billion workers, representing 61.2 per cent of the world’s...
Blog
Precarization or protection? How labour policies influence the effects of globalization on informality
by
Lourenço S. Paz, Rita K. Almeida, Jennifer P. Poole
May 2021
Globalization has generally coincided with a rise in work outside the formal economy, intensifying job precarization — when high-quality, formal jobs...
Blog
Precarious employment for youth in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia
by
Shireen AlAzzawi, Vladimir Hlasny
May 2021
Youth (those aged 15–29) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face notoriously precarious employment prospects. Youth unemployment is the...
Blog
Ethnic diversity and informal employment in Ghana
by
Michael Danquah, Sefa Awaworyi Churchill
May 2021
Informal activities are widespread in many developing countries. In many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries informal economic activities account for...
Working Paper
Rights-based Approach to Development
In April 2001 the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) approached the Supreme Court of India arguing that the government has a duty to provide greater relief in the context of mass hunger. The litigation has now become the best known precedent...
Working Paper
Clientelism, public goods provision, and governance
It is widely believed that clientelism—the giving of material goods in return for electoral support—is associated with poorer development outcomes. However, systematic cross-country evidence on the deleterious effects of clientelism on development...
Working Paper
Effectiveness of strategic environmental assessment in promoting sustainable development in Tanzania
This paper examines the extent to which strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is implemented in Tanzania and whether its implementation is in line with generally practised procedures/criteria. Out of 17 completed SEA, eight cases were purposively...
Working Paper
What explains the gender gap in top incomes in developing countries?
Based on tax records data from Ecuador, we analyse gender differences in top income groups from 2008 to 2017. Ecuador represents an interesting case as it shares many trends with other countries in the region in terms of women’s status in the labour...
Working Paper
Digital technology and productivity of informal enterprises
The lingering policy dilemma facing many governments in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years is what can be done in the short to medium term to boost the output and incomes of individuals and enterprises in the informal sector, given the size and...
Working Paper
Informality and pension reforms in Bolivia
How social protection programmes affect work choices is a question that has been at the centre of labour economics research for decades. More recently, a scant literature has focused on the effects of social protection on work choices and informal...
Working Paper
The changing nature of work and earnings inequality in China
This paper examines the evolution of China’s industrial and occupational structure in the last two decades and its impact on wage inequality. We find that non-routine cognitive and interpersonal tasks have increased, while routine cognitive tasks...
Report
UNU-WIDER Annual Report 2020
The year 2020 promised to be a big year for UNU-WIDER, with the celebration of its 35th anniversary, the 45th birthday of the United Nations University (UNU), and 75 years of the UN. But as the year began, the Institute’s focus quickly shifted away...
Working Paper
Pulling up or binding down: a review of upgrading trajectories in apparel and agro-processing global value chains for developing countries
There exist a plethora of developing country value chain studies based on a variety of methodological approaches, both in the academic literature and through policy reports. However, there has been little systematic synthesis of the findings and...
Journal Article
Informal work in sub-Saharan Africa
Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labor markets of many low- and middle-income countries. A key issue in this regard concerns the extent to which informality itself is a persistent...
Working Paper
The legacy of conflict: aggregate evidence from Sierra Leone
This paper studies the general equilibrium impact of civil war in Sierra Leone. I first use an instrumental variable (IV) strategy and geographic conflict variation to estimate reduced-form effects. I show that civil war leads to affected areas...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 pandemic and the economy in Southern Africa
The COVID-19 pandemic has had severe economic consequences in Southern Africa, resulting in an unprecedented decline in production and employment. Similar policy responses have emerged across the region, centred on temporary and inadequate relief for...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (May 2021): data selection
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). This technical note describes the first stage in constructing the new version...
Technical Note
WIID companion (May 2021): integrated and standardized series
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). A previous note described the selection of income distribution series. Since...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (May 2021): global income distribution
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). This technical note describes the construction of the global distribution...
Working Paper
The minimum wage and firm networks
There is a large literature on the minimum wage focused on directly exposed firms and geographies. This paper provides new evidence that the minimum wage has significant spillover effects on firms exposed to the minimum wage indirectly via firm...
Blog
Do resource rich economies have better or worse human development outcomes?
Although increasingly challenged, we often hear that being resource rich can adversely affect growth prospects. Here we concentrate instead on a...
Blog
Mozambique's difficult decade: Three lessons to inform next steps
At the start of the last decade, Mozambique’s prospects looked stellar. Following from the early 1990s, when peace finally arrived after a devastating...
Working Paper
Exploring economic support networks amidst racial inequality in Namibia
Community or interpersonal support as a critical source of livelihood sustenance in the Global South can exhibit unequal dynamics. An understanding of these practices is primarily tied to the conceptual space of poverty or small communities. Less is...
Working Paper
Who benefits from job training programmes?
Using admission lotteries and registry data linking labour market outcomes, we study the effect of a vocational training programme focused on disadvantaged individuals in Brazil. The intensive programme is an 18-month classroom training coupled with...
Working Paper
Re-examining the Brazilian South–Northeast labour income gap
The purpose of this article is to provide new evidence about the sources of regional income inequalities in Brazil along the wage distribution, taking into account the regional differentials in purchasing power. We use a unique and recent regional...
Policy Brief
The economic gains of reducing the employment gender gap in Morocco
Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, including Morocco, currently record the lowest rates of female labour force participation (FLFP) in the world. These rates — between 20-30% in 2019 — appear substantially low in comparison to Western...
Background Note
Building tax data for research
Introduction: data for development Globally, one of the key factors associated with increasing use of data to inform policy-making has been the increased availability of new administrative data sources. In 2014, the National Treasury of South Africa...
Blog
African Lions - Tapping the potential of Kenya's economic growth
by
Christina Golubski
June 2016
From 2000-2014, like many other sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya experienced high growth, at an average of 4.37 percent. Unfortunately, the 2007...
Blog
Why countries best placed to handle the pandemic appear to have fared the worst
During the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and...
Working Paper
Promoting environmental sustainability in the artisanal and small-scale mining sector in Tanzania
This study examines the interaction between formalization of the artisanal and small-scale mining subsector and the regulation of negative environmental impacts in Tanzania. Formalization generally seeks to move the artisanal and small-scale mining...
Working Paper
Clientelism and governance
Unlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short paper contains mainly the author’s general reflections on the broad issues of governance (or mis-governance including corruption), democracy, and state capacity that...
Working Paper
Taxation and income distribution in Myanmar
Despite major public finance reform efforts over the last decade, Myanmarese public finances continue to be characterized by relative weakness in revenue collection, budget execution, and long-term sustainability. Myanmar is therefore in need of...
Working Paper
Labour market projections and time allocation in Myanmar
Myanmar has, in recent years, strengthened its focus on human capital as a development pillar, and introduced legislation and adopted conventions on child labour. But child exploitation continues, including use of forced labour by the military and...
Working Paper
Climate change and agricultural productivity in Myanmar
Myanmar is facing climate change (CC) induced changes to the productivity of their critically important rice sector over the coming century. Moreover, the recent five-year Myanmarese Agriculture Development Strategy (ADS) sets out a vision of...
Blog
Long-term research in Tanzania sheds light on the reasons rural households diversify their income
by
Milla Nyyssölä
June 2021
Researchers and policymakers have long asked whether rural households in Africa diversify their income to spread risk or by seizing opportunities to...
Working Paper
Estimating employment responses to South Africa’s Employment Tax Incentive
We present new evidence on the effects of South Africa’s Employment Tax Incentive (ETI), a hiring and employment wage subsidy aimed at reducing youth unemployment. We show that attempts to estimate firm-level treatment effects via conditional...
Working Paper
The macroeconomic effect of fiscal policy in South Africa
This paper analyses the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in South Africa over the 1996–2019 period. We identify personal income tax shocks using a narrative approach and incorporate these shocks in a proxySVAR model. Our...
Working Paper
Changes in the Distribution of Wealth in China 1995-2002
This paper investigates some major changes in the wealth distribution in China using the data from two national household surveys conducted in 1995 and 2002. The surveys collected rich information on household wealth and its components, enabling a...
Working Paper
The impact of centralized bargaining on spillovers and the wage structure in monopsonistic labour markets
How does centralized bargaining affect the broader wage structure? And what does this tell us about the (non-)competitive dynamics of such labour markets? I study large contracted wage increases negotiated by centralized bargaining councils in South...
Working Paper
Female education and marriage in Pakistan
This project aims to explore the effect of wealth shocks on education and marriage for young women in Pakistan. Financial shocks are used to estimate the probability of dropping out of education and into marriage.Using the Pakistan Rural Household...
Working Paper
The effects of a risk-based approach to tax examinations
While technical assistance and increased use of ICT in the area of tax administration have been regarded to hold considerable promise for greater revenue collection, the evidence on how these activities work in the real-world circumstances of...
Book Chapter
Lessons for Japanese foreign aid from research on aid’s impact
Japan has provided foreign aid for some 60 years. Japan’s aid has grown and evolved as it became richer and as the developing world changed too. Japan is a strong supporter of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and revised its ODA Charter in...
Working Paper
Childbirth and women's labour market transitions in India
The impact of childbirth on the labour market participation of women has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries, constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and earnings being characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty...
Blog
Ecuador’s social protection system failed during the pandemic: It needs a rethink
by
H. Xavier Jara, Lourdes Montesdeoca, Iva V. Tasseva
March 2021
Household incomes in Ecuador were badly hit by the pandemic, despite the government’s emergency grant to families. H Xavier Jara Tamayo (University of...
Working Paper
Analysis of the distributional effects of COVID-19 and state-led remedial measures in South Africa
This paper explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa. Using a static tax–benefit microsimulation model with input datasets that were adjusted to reflect people’s...
Technical Note
How to implement sub-national poverty lines in a SOUTHMOD country model using conditional constants
This note describes how to incorporate sub-national poverty lines into a SOUTHMOD country model using conditional constants within the constants function in such a way that the Statistics Presenter can generate national-level poverty statistics. The...
Working Paper
Measuring earnings inequality in South Africa using household survey and administrative tax microdata
Overall income inequality in South Africa is very high, and inequality generated in the labour market is a key driver of inequality.In this paper, I use the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, the General Household Surveys, and administrative tax...
Working Paper
The financial inclusion agenda
Using a unique district-level panel dataset, we investigate the effect of banking system penetration on financial inclusion in Ghana. To purge potential endogeneity bias in the underlying relationship, we exploit a change in the policy environment of...
Working Paper
Rehabilitating Health Systems in Post-Conflict Situations
Although baseline data for post-conflict situations are frequently unavailable, there is a clear deterioration in the health conditions of populations during and following conflict. Excess mortality and morbidity, displaced populations, and...
Working Paper
What sustains informality?
We consider two vertical links between informal- and formal-sector firms and study their implications. In one case, the final products produced by the formal- and informal-sector firms are vertically differentiated in terms of quality, and the size...
Blog
Ghana's lockdown hit vulnerable workers hard: What needs to happen next time
by
Kunal Sen, Michael Danquah, Robert Darko Osei, Simone Schotte
March 2021
Coronavirus lockdowns brought the world to a standstill. Rules on hygiene and social distancing have reshaped daily life, schools and businesses had...
Working Paper
Informal employment or informal firms? Regulatory enforcement and the transformation of the informal sector
While there is general agreement that regulatory avoidance is an important part of firms’ decisions to produce in the informal sector, there is much less agreement on how regulation and enforcement affect firms’ decisions on, inter alia, which sector...
Working Paper
Good institutions and tax revenue outcomes in resource-rich countries
Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal...
Working Paper
The impacts of public expenditure innovations on real exchange rate volatility in South Africa
This study investigates the impacts of public expenditure innovations on exchange rate volatility in South Africa using quarterly data for the period 1970–2019. To achieve this objective, a version of the vector autoregressive impulse response model...
Working Paper
Firms’ resilience to financial constraints
We study the role of trade credit in enhancing the resilience of financially constrained firms from 2010 to 2017. Implicit borrowing in trade finance allows financially constrained firms to bridge the financing gap, expand employment by 8.26 per cent...
Working Paper
Consolidating behavioural economics and rational choice theory
Using illustrations from research on inequality, this paper offers evidence on the strengths of ‘behavioural synthesis’, i.e. the reconciliation between neoclassical and behavioural economics.We compare how theoretical models of absolute and relative...
Working Paper
Clientelism and development: is there a poverty trap?
There are sound theoretical reasons to expect clientelism to suppress economic growth: politicians who garner support by offering employment to voters and grassroots party members can do so more effectively when the voters’ participation constraint...
Blog
Foreign aid can help stem the decline of democracy, if used in the right way
Democracy is having a hard time. In India, once the world’s largest democracy, the pandemic has hastened the country’s slide toward authoritarianism...
Journal Article
Migrating out of mega-cities
Traditional economic models predict rural to urban migration during the structural transformation of an economy. In middle-income countries, it is less clear which direction of migration to expect. In this article, the author shows that in Brazil as...
Background Note
Review of sub-national institutional performance in Ghana
IntroductionThe literature on the concept, measurement, causes, and correlates of sub-national institutional governance is not new. From the seminal work of Putnam et al. (1993) to recent attempts by Iddawela et al. (2021), several authors have...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and the state
We expect effective state institutions to matter in a country’s ability to respond to crises. Yet notably in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, what has stood out in simple global snapshots is that wealthier countries with stronger institutions...
Working Paper
The impact of COVID-19 on consumption poverty in Mozambique
This study assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique on household consumption poverty. To predict changes in income and the associated effects on poverty and inequality, we...
Working Paper
The macroeconomic impact of COVID-19 in Mozambique
This study aims to assess the economic costs of COVID-19 and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique, relying on a social accounting matrix. It produces numerical results that represent the direct effect on (or ‘shocks’ to)...
Working Paper
Female managers and firm performance
This paper investigates whether firm performance differs significantly when comparing firms with female and male top managers in the Caribbean region. We use survey data with detailed information on gender for firms in 13 Caribbean countries. Our...
Working Paper
Cash grants to manufacturers after Cyclone Idai
In March 2019, Cyclone Idai hit central Mozambique and caused widespread damage, including businesses in the enterprise sector. We use panel data and a randomized controlled trial to estimate the impact of unconditional cash grants on micro...
Working Paper
The determinants of occupational sorting
We examine the link between individual characteristics and sorting into different occupations using data from university students in Mozambique. We provide a comprehensive approach combining the main determinants of occupational sorting identified in...
Journal Article
Internal migration and crime in Brazil
Empirical evidence suggests that the social effects of internal migration may be substantially different from those associated with the arrival of international migrants. In this study the author provides the first evidence of the effect of internal...
Working Paper
Cyclone impacts on manufacturing firms in Mozambique
This study investigates how manufacturing companies were affected by tropical Cyclone Idai, which struck Central Mozambique in March 2019. The analysis builds upon a representative sample of 464 enterprises located in the cities of Beira and Chimoio...
Report
Business Practice Intervention Survey
Myanmar’s manufacturing sector is at the heart of the country’s commercial landscape. From garment production for the international market to diverse food, furniture, gemstones, and metal provision, the more than 70,000 micro, small, and medium firms...
Working Paper
Young women’s transitions from education to the labour market in Ethiopia
We investigate the causes of the gender disparity in labour market participation in Ethiopia using iterative quantitative and qualitative longitudinal analysis through the whole childhood of the individual into early adulthood, from age 8 up to age...
Blog
New WIID Companion to improve the study of inequality
by
Carlos Gradín
April 2021
There is a growing need to understand income inequality trends and how they interplay with other social, economic, and political outcomes, both at the...
Blog
Unaccompanied asylum-seeking youth in the UK – an interview with an expert: Inequalities in access to education
I recently spoke to Catherine Gladwell, who is the Director and Founder of Refugee Education UK (formerly Refugee Support Network) and one of the...
Blog
Adding insult to injury – the impacts of COVID-19 on urban youth in Mozambique
by
Eva-Maria Egger, Ivan Manhique,
Finn Tarp
April 2021
The negative economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique range from reduced social interaction to business closures, job losses...
Blog
Good intentions falling short – the case of pension-related tax expenditures in South Africa
by
Agustin Redonda
April 2021
Tax benefits to boost contributions into pension funds or pension-related tax expenditures (PTEs) are used widely by governments worldwide to address...
Blog
'Love thy neighbour'?: Evidence from a randomized neighbourhood relocation policy in India
by
Shreya Bhattacharya
April 2021
Caste in India plays an instrumental role in determining access to education, jobs, public spaces, and social networks. For instance, despite state...
Blog
COVID-19 lays bare Cape Town’s social divide, deepens underlying inequalities
by
Simone Schotte, Rocco Zizzamia
April 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic delivered a devastating economic shock to livelihoods across the world. In Cape Town, it has been toughest on those who had just...
Working Paper
Regional Income Inequality in Rural China, 1985-2002
This paper depicts the trend of regional inequality in rural China for the period 1985-2002. The total inequality is decomposed into the so-called within- and between-components when China is divided into three regional belts (east, central and west)...
Working Paper
State-dependent fiscal multipliers and financial dynamics
The aim of this paper is to assess South Africa’s fiscal multiplier across different states of the economy, with a focus on the financial accelerator mechanism of fiscal policy shocks, by estimating impulse response functions from both linear and non...
Working Paper
Gender disparities in financial inclusion in Tanzania
Although Tanzania has made notable progress in enhancing access to financial services, the gender gap in financial inclusion persists. This paper examines gender disparities in financial inclusion in Tanzania using descriptive and regression analyses...
Working Paper
Firm and product survival analysis
Enterprise development, especially expansion into export markets, is essential to create employment and unlock growth potential in many economies, including in sub-Saharan Africa. However, both firm and product survival (mainly in the export market)...
Blog
Truly one of a kind – SA-TIED’s Research Assistant programme
by
Anne Tomi
May 2021
Most jobs right out of university are either filled with busy work or too much work—very little time is available for gaining new skills. This early...
Working Paper
A macro–micro analysis of gender segregation and job quality in Latin America
Latin America has seen vast improvements in gender educational and health equality. Favourable supply-side conditions, however, have not translated into greater gender economic equality, a process that also depends on structural economic change and...
Working Paper
Clientelistic politics and pro-poor targeting
Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics in delivery of programme benefits by local governments, or gram panchayats (GPs), and manipulation of GP programme budgets by legislators and elected officials at upper tiers in West...
Working Paper
Horizontal and intersecting inequalities in Mozambique
This study seeks to add to the research on inequality in least developed countries, namely in Mozambique, by measuring and mapping indicators of horizontal wealth inequality along geographic regions and ethnolinguistic identities. Using census data...
Working Paper
Informal freelancers in the time of COVID-19
Despite the severe negative economic shock associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence from many contexts points to a surge in sales on online platforms, as well as shifts in the composition of demand. This paper investigates how the pandemic has...
Working Paper
How far does the apple really fall from the tree?
Despite the importance attributed to intergenerational educational mobility in the process of development, there remains little consensus on how mobility should be measured. We present analytical and empirical evidence regarding the sensitivity of...
Working Paper
The socioeconomic impact of coal mining in Mozambique
This study assesses the impact of four coal mines in Mozambique on the socioeconomic outcomes of the local population. We combine four waves of household surveys with coal mine locations data and employ a difference-in-difference model. The timing of...
Working Paper
Inequality, institutions, and cooperation
We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation, and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab...
Working Paper
Ethnic diversity and informal work in Ghana
We present the first study that examines the effects of ethnic diversity on informal work. Using two waves of data from the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey, we find that ethnic diversity is associated with a higher probability of engaging in...
Working Paper
Political connections and firm's formalization
The literature shows that political connections have different effects on firms’ activities. However, the question of how political connections affect firms’ formalization has not been explored. Using data from three waves of the Vietnam Small and...
Working Paper
Finance, gender, and entrepreneurship
How does informal economic activity respond to increased financial inclusion? Does it become more entrepreneurial? Does access to new financing options change the gender configuration of informal economic activity and, if so, in what ways and what...
Working Paper
Formalization and productivity
Using a firm-level panel dataset on private small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Viet Nam’s manufacturing sector, this paper examines productivity dynamics of formal and informal firms. We decompose productivity changes into changes within...
Working Paper
Progress and stagnation in the livelihood of informal workers in an emerging economy
We use long-spanning individual longitudinal data to examine the long-term labour market outcomes of low-tier informal workers. We investigate their characteristics, calculate the extent of switching, and identify the characteristics of those who...
Blog
Populism in Brazil: how liberalisation and austerity led to the rise of Lula and Bolsonaro
While the rise of populist politicians in the Europe and the US gets a lot of attention from the media and researchers alike, the drivers of the...
Blog
Nobel Peace Prize acknowledges link between preventing hunger and promoting peace
Professor Patricia Justino is a leading expert on the links between political violence and economic development. Her work has greatly expanded...
Blog
South Asia: how to ensure progress on reducing poverty isn't reversed by coronavirus
South Asia accounted for nearly two-fifths of the world’s poor, nearly half of the world’s malnourished children and was home to the largest number of...
Journal Article
Effects of peers and rank on cognition, preferences, and personality
We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a...
Working Paper
Informality and firm performance in Myanmar
Using a novel panel survey of enterprises in Myanmar, we compare the performance of manufacturing firms by three different informality definitions. The first is binary, based on whether firms pay taxes. The second captures five categories of...
Working Paper
Exporters and global value chain participation
Using the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury firm-level panel data for 2009–17, this paper investigates how global value chain-related trade affects the export performance of manufacturing firms in South Africa. In particular, the...
Working Paper
Informal–formal workers' transition in Nigeria
This study evaluates the effects of the informal sector on Nigerian workers’ livelihoods and analyses workers’ transitions within the informal sector and between informal and formal employment. A binary logit model is applied to General Household...
Working Paper
Economic complexity and structural transformation: the case of Mozambique
Mozambique is among the world’s least complex economies. By systematically accounting for both supply- and demand-side factors, we identify new products and sectors that can help to diversify and upgrade its economy. In a supply-side analysis, we use...
Blog
Data for better tax policy analysis: Introducing the latest version of the Government Revenue Dataset
by
Kyle McNabb
February 2021
Thanks to the updated version of the Government Revenue Dataset (GRD) we are now able to gain a clear picture of tax and other revenue trends in over...
Working Paper
Capturing economic and social value from hydrocarbon gas flaring and venting: evaluation of the issues
Atmospheric emissions urgently need to reduce for natural gas to fulfill its potential role in the energy transition to achieve the Paris Agreement on climate change. This paper establishes the magnitude and trends of flaring and venting in oil and...
Journal Article
COVID-19 and global poverty
The study paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on global poverty in the light of IMF’s growth forecasts. It shows that the pandemic will erode many of the gains recorded over the last decade in terms of poverty reduction. Our...
Working Paper
Vulnerable employment of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Tunisian youth
Youths in the Middle East and North Africa face the highest unemployment rates in the world. Those who are employed are pushed to accept informal sector jobs that are insecure, unsafe, and lack non-wage benefits. Precarious employment is pervasive...
Research Brief
Are credits or deductions better in public health spending?
The impact of medical deductions and medical credits on income inequality is a subject of discussion in South Africa, as well as in many other countries, raising critical questions about the fairness of the medical tax system and the impact on...
Research Brief
Finding optimal solutions for efficient youth labour policies
According to South Africa’s National Development Plan Vision 2030, serious action needs to be taken to reduce poverty and encourage economic growth. One of the main challenges involves reducing the unemployment rates in South Africa, particularly...
Research Brief
Wage inequality in post-apartheid South Africa
Much work has been done on inequality in South Africa, but to date the literature that assesses the dynamic response of income or wealth distribution to economic policy actions is almost non-existent. This information gap is caused by data...
Working Paper
Capturing economic and social value from hydrocarbon gas flaring and venting: solutions and actions
This second paper on hydrocarbon gas flaring and venting builds on our first, which evaluated the economic and social cost (SCAR) of wasted natural gas. These emissions must be reduced urgently for natural gas to meet its potential as an energy...
Blog
The WIID celebrates 20 years with a daring new plan
by
Carlos Gradín
October 2020
After 20 years of contributions to income inequality research, the World Income Inequality Database (the WIID) is getting a new expansion that will...
Blog
The global distribution of routine and non-routine work – and why we should we care about it
by
Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, Albert Park
October 2020
The nature of work is changing due to technological progress, globalization, and the rapidly expanding supply of college-educated workers. At a global...
Working Paper
Economics and Politics of Official Loans versus Grants
The paper examines a wide range of issues relating to the mix between loans and grants as well as the degree of concessionality of loans. A number of empirical tests are carried out based on annual panel data over 1970 to 1999 for 22 donor countries...
Blog
35 years of research for change: Bringing inequality to the fore (1998-2020)
UNU-WIDER released the world’s first estimates of the global wealth distribution in 2007 – one result of a 2004–05 project, ‘Personal Assets from a...
Working Paper
The electric vehicle revolution
The emergence of a mass market for electric vehicles (EVs) offers considerable development opportunities for resource exporters, given their intensive raw material requirements, including for cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium, and manganese...
Working Paper
Structural estimates of the South African sacrifice ratio
This paper estimates the output cost of fighting inflation—the sacrifice ratio—for the South African economy using quarterly data spanning the period 1998Q1–2019Q3. To compute the sacrifice ratio, the structural vector autoregressive model developed...
Working Paper
Wealth inequality and CO2 emissions in emerging economies
As the world battles with the triple problems of social, economic, and environmental challenges, it has become important to focus both policy and research efforts on these. Therefore, this study examines the effect of wealth inequality on CO2...
Working Paper
Youth unemployment hysteresis in South Africa
This study simulates the macro-micro economic impacts of the employment policy, focusing on hysteresis in youth unemployment in South Africa. Specifically, we apply a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to calibrate the 2015 South African...
Working Paper
Do fiscal regimes matter for fiscal sustainability in South Africa?
This paper empirically examines South Africa’s fiscal sustainability through a Markov-switching model which utilizes quarterly datasets for the period from 1960 to 2019. The results show that public debt responds positively, demonstrating a...
Working Paper
Identifying structural changes in the exchange rates of South Africa as a regime-switching process
Exchange rate volatility is said to exemplify the economic health of a country. Exchange rate break points (known as structural breaks) have a momentous impact on the macroeconomy of a country. Nonetheless, this country study makes use of both...
Working Paper
The impact on the South African economy of alternative regulatory arrangements in the petroleum sector
This paper adds quantitative analysis to the study by Crompton et al. (2020), in which various alternative regulatory arrangements regarding the petrol price in South Africa were explored. We use a multi-sector dynamic computable general equilibrium...
Working Paper
What works to mitigate and reduce relative (and absolute) inequality?
Over the past two decades, research on the impacts of a diverse range of public policies and income inequality has seen rapid growth. Despite the large number of publications to date, there remain important lacunae in our understanding of how policy...
Working Paper
Transparency in extractive industry commodities trading
The paper reviews the debate about transparency in extractive industry commodities trade. It examines the obstacles to improved transparency. A critical review of the experience with estimating losses from a lack of transparency concludes that many...
Working Paper
Pandemics and their impact on oil and metal prices
We examine the effect of pandemics on selected commodity prices—in particular, those of zinc, copper, lead, and oil. We set up a vector autoregressive model and analyse data since the mid-nineteenth century to determine how prices reacted to...
Working Paper
Monetary policy and wealth inequality in South Africa
This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and wealth inequality in South Africa. We employed a unique database of tax administrative data which allowed us to account for individual heterogeneity. These tax data span from 2011 to...
Blog
The world needs a people’s vaccine
by
Sanjay G. Reddy, Arnab Acharya
November 2020
The world needs a people’s vaccine for COVID-19 — one provided universally, and accessible to the entire world population. A patent-protected vaccine...
Working Paper
Do bigger health budgets cushion pandemics?
How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID...
Working Paper
Evolution of wage inequality in India (1983–2017)
We examine data for urban workers in the non-agricultural sector across three decades, 1983–2017, and find that earnings inequality increased during 1983–2004, was largely stable during 2004–11, and decreased during 2011–17. We explore whether...
Working Paper
Earnings inequality and the changing nature of work
With structural changes in production coupled with technological progress, there have been shifts in modes of production and patterns of employment, with important consequences on task composition of occupations. This paper has utilized different...
Working Paper
Horizontal inequality, COVID-19, and lockdown readiness
A growing body of research shows that COVID-19 both reflects and exacerbates existing inequalities. However, there are significant gaps in this research area with respect to ‘horizontal’ or group-based inequalities in Global South countries. Lack of...
Working Paper
Size matters: measuring the effects of inequality and growth shocks
Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between...
Policy Brief
Policy implications of empirically estimated fiscal multipliers for South Africa
Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes, there remains significant uncertainty regarding the impact of fiscal policy decisions on macroeconomic outcomes. This impact is quantified by calculating fiscal multipliers. A...
Policy Brief
Fiscal multipliers and debt dynamics using a DSGE approach
Much of the research on the impact of fiscal policy shocks on macroeconomic outcomes (e.g., fiscal multipliers) uses reduced-form modelling approaches such as vector auto-regressions to obtain empirical results. In a recent study1, we used this...
Policy Brief
Mining for change
For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. There is an extensive literature linking natural resource dependence to poor economic performance. One...
Working Paper
Inequality and the changing nature of work in Peru
This paper identifies the socioeconomic drivers of earnings inequality in Peru in the period 2004–18. Using the ENAHO household surveys and data on routine task content of occupations, we apply inequality decomposition methods to the real earnings...
Research Brief
Extreme inequalities
South Africa is, by most contemporary measures, the most unequal country in the world. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to country’s wealth inequality. It is crucial to accurately measure the concentration of wealth inequality over...
Research Brief
Technology, tourism, malls, and metros
There is growing recognition around the world that tradable services can play a valuable role in economic development. Africa is no exception, with the need for multiple routes to growth, particularly vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic. Tradable...
Research Brief
Special economic zones in Zambia and South Africa
East Asia’s successful experience in accelerating the process of industrial development with SEZs paved way for the use of SEZs as policy instruments in Africa. In southern Africa, Zambia and South Africa instituted SEZs in legal and institutional...
Research Brief
Unlocking a regional plastics value chain between Mozambique and South Africa
Plastics are universal and integrated into different sectors of the economy. Industrial policy requires countries to look at moving up the value chain and producing progressively more sophisticated products to contribute to improved economic...
Research Brief
Job duration in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa
The two primary features of a job are its wage and how long it lasts. Today, there is an extensive literature on wages in the developing world thanks to the expansion of national household survey data. However, far less work has been conducted on job...
Research Brief
Does exchange rate volatility amplify existing inequalities in South Africa?
Even though poverty and inequality have been of overriding concern in South Africa’s development policies and programmes since its democratization in 1994, measures of poverty, inequality, and related phenomena in the country do not show a clear...
Journal Article
Duration of pre-university education and labour market outcomes
This study provides new evidence on the effect of shortening the duration of pre‐university education on long‐term labour market outcomes in Ghana, exploiting the education reform of 1987 as a natural experiment. Our results indicate that the drastic...
Working Paper
Gender priming in solidarity games
What is the effect of gender priming on solidarity behaviour? We explore a two-player solidarity game where players can insure each other against the risk of losses. In the utility function, priming is represented as the ‘change in weight’ given to...
Working Paper
Crowding out effects of financial knowledge and attitude on risk preferences
Using hand-collected survey and experimental data, we examine the determinants of financial literacy as well as the link between self-reported risk and elicited risk preferences in a least developed African country, Guinea. We measure financial...
Working Paper
The labour market impact of COVID-19 lockdowns
In this paper, we provide causal evidence of the impact of stringent lockdown policies on labour market outcomes at both the extensive and intensive margins, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict...
Working Paper
The case of taxing multinational corporations in Uganda
We study how large domestic firms and multinational corporations compare in their effective tax rates and whether there is evidence of profit shifting out of Uganda. Using administrative data from the Uganda Revenue Authority and regression analysis...
Working Paper
Estimating poverty transitions in Mozambique using synthetic panels
In this paper we first validate the use of the synthetic panels technique in the context of the 2014/15 intra-year panel survey data for Mozambique, and then apply the same technique to the 1996/97, 2002/03, 2008/09, and 2014/15 cross-sectional...
Technical Note
The Economic Transformation Database (ETD): content, sources, and methods
This note introduces the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database (ETD), which provides time series of employment and real and nominal value added by 12 sectors in 51 countries for the period 1990–2018. The ETD includes 20 Asian, 9 Latin...
Journal Article
Health-system equity, egalitarian democracy and COVID-19 outcomes
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spate of studies showing a close connection between inequitable access to health care, welfare services and adverse outcomes from the pandemic. Others have argued that democratic governments have generally failed...
Working Paper
Job quality and labour market transitions
In this paper we analyse informal work in Mexico, which accounts for the majority of employment in the country and has grown over time. We document that the informal sector is composed of two distinct parts: salaried informal employment and self...
Blog
Why should I care about economic growth?
Director of UNU-WIDER, Professor Kunal Sen is a world leading expert in development economics and led on ESID’s research into economic growth. In this...
Book
Social Mobility in Developing Countries
Social mobility — defined as the ability to move from a lower to a higher level of education or occupational status, or from a lower to a higher social class or income group — is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society...
Book
The Developer’s Dilemma
The developer’s dilemma is thus: developing countries seek inclusive economic development — i.e., structural transformation — sufficiently broad-based to raise the income of the poor. Inclusive economic growth requires falling income inequality to...
Book
Tasks, Skills, and Institutions
Developed countries have experienced a polarization in earnings and in employment, namely stronger growth in the earnings and jobs for the most and least skilled workers at the expense of those in the middle. This pattern has been attributed to...
Working Paper
Sources of output growth in the countries of the Common Monetary Area and provinces of South Africa
This paper aims to decompose the sources of growth in economies in the Southern African region’s Common Monetary Area and in the provinces of South Africa. Decomposition results for the Common Monetary Area reveal that the growth of aggregate and...
Working Paper
The Geographical Location of Manufacturing Exporters in South Africa
This paper provides empirical evidence on the location of export-oriented manufacturing firms in Africa (South Africa), and on how the patterns of location has changed over the past decade after the country embarked on trade liberalization. It is...
Working Paper
Intergroup contact and its effects on discriminatory attitudes
The contact hypothesis posits that having diverse neighbours may reduce one’s intergroup prejudice. This hypothesis is difficult to test as individuals self-select into neighbourhoods. Using a slum relocation programme in India that randomly assigned...
Blog
Finding keys for development in Africa
Economics researcher Aimable Nsabimana shares the relevance and inspiration behind his recent work with UNU-WIDER on climate change and human...
Blog
Clientelism – another reason to worry about US democracy
The last several months have given us many reasons to worry about US democracy – not least the riot at the US Capitol and the president’s refusal to...
Working Paper
Do gender wage differences within households influence women’s empowerment and welfare?
Using household data from the latest wave of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, this paper utilizes machine learning techniques to examine the effect of gender wage differences within households on women’s empowerment and welfare in Ghana. The...
Working Paper
Local crime and early marriage
This paper analyses whether living in a locality with high crime against women affects the probability of early marriage—that is, marriage before the legal age of marriage of girls. We hypothesize that parents who perceive themselves to live in a...
Blog
The Nordic Model — lessons for Sri Lanka
by
Arusha Cooray
January 2021
Sri Lanka, like the Nordic countries, is a social democratic nation with a strong welfare state. It is classified as a ‘high human development’...
Blog
New research horizons: Global value chains and transaction-level customs data
by
Giovanni Pasquali
January 2021
Over 70% of global trade goes through global value chains (GVCs). For firms in developing countries, insertion into GVCs has been associated with...
Blog
Have you heard about the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database?
by
Gaaitzen de Vries
January 2021
On 17 February 2021 the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) and UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database (ETD) will be launched. The new...
Working Paper
Resource rents in the diamond industry 2014–19
The focus of this study is rent in the diamond industry. Based on extensive datasets and a discussion of all relevant costs, we present resource rent statistics from the diamond industry in key producer countries in emerging economies such as Angola...
Working Paper
The influence of household composition on leisure time in South Africa
This study considers how household composition influences the leisure time of men and women in South Africa, using the South African 2010 Time Use Survey. Studying leisure time is important since the allocation of time outside the market provides...
Working Paper
A manufacturing renaissance? Industrialization trends in the developing world
This paper examines industrialization trends in developing countries. It uses the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, which provides time series of employment and real and nominal value added annually by 12 sectors in 51 countries for...
Working Paper
Labour turnover and workers' well-being in the Ethiopian manufacturing industry
Manufacturing industry expansion is a central part of Ethiopia’s growth and transformation agenda due to its potential for accelerated economic development and large-scale job creation, in particular for women. However, the industry is experiencing...
Journal Special Issue
Clientelist Politics and Development
Political clientelism — which reflects strategic, discretionary, and targeted exchange of private goods and services for political support to the incumbent — has characterised distributive politics in the Global South for decades. The conditional...
Journal Special Issue
What sustains informality
The special issue contributes significantly to critical issues related to the nature of informal employment and its determinants, how informal firms can grow their business and productivity, and the effects of labour market regulations and social...
Working Paper
Heterogeneous impact of internet availability on female labour market outcomes in an emerging economy
Greater female labour market participation has important positive implications not only for women’s empowerment and the well-being of their families but also for the economy they live in. In this paper, we examine the various effects of internet...
Working Paper
Ban on female migrant workers
This study examines the skills-differentiated impact of a restrictive female labour migration policy in Sri Lanka using monthly departure data from 2012 to 2018 in a difference-in-difference model. The policy has resulted in decreasing departures...
Journal Special Issue
Fiscal state capacity
This special issue presents new research on the state and its links to economic and social development. The special issue focuses on the processes of institutional transformation of the state, looking at how fiscal states arise in the developing...
Journal Article
Digital Technologies and Product Upgrading in Global Value Chains
This article provides empirical evidence on the impact of digitalisation on product upgrading in global value chains (GVCs). Analysis is done for a sample of Indian manufacturing GVC firms in the period 2001–15 from the firm-level database Prowess...
Working Paper
Multigenerational mobility in India
Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—that is, status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational...
Working Paper
The social psychology of economic inequality
In this review, I provide an overview of the literature investigating the social psychology of economic inequality, focusing on individuals’ understandings, perceptions, and reactions to inequality. I begin by describing different ways of measuring...
Blog
Surprise success – moving SA-TIED seminars online makes them more engaging and fruitful
by
Anne Tomi
February 2021
In September 2020, due to the ongoing pandemic, SA-TIED moved its seminar series online. What once took place at the National Treasury in Pretoria...
Journal Article
Ethnic inequality, cultural distance, and social integration: evidence from a native-settler conflict in the Philippines
A key debate in studies of native-migrant relations relates to the barriers to integration created by ethno-cultural differences and socio-economic disadvantage. How do changes in socio-economic inequality between ethnic groups affect interethnic...
Journal Article
Exclusive growth?
Despite South Africa’s need for inclusive economic growth, we find that the top income percentiles continue to diverge from the rest of the income distribution. We compare household survey data and tax data (which, unlike household survey data...
Working Paper
Heterogeneous informality in Costa Rica and Nicaragua
Informal work is often considered a place of employment for marginalized and vulnerable workers who have been rationed out of preferred formal work. However, informality can also be seen as a dynamic sector that budding entrepreneurs and those...
Working Paper
Precarization or protection? The impact of trade and labour policies on informality
Several episodes of market-oriented reforms in developing countries have been accompanied by a significant rise in work outside of the formal economy. This paper investigates whether the impact of increased exposure to trade on formal employment is...
Journal Article
The political economy of small and medium-sized enterprise development
This study analyses the differentials of productive values in Vietnamese micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and how market constraints have hindered their performance. Quantitative analyses suggest substantial differences in value addition...
Journal Article
A proposal for a new universal development commitment
Most developed countries have accepted, in principle at least, the 50‐year‐old commitment of contributing 0.7 per cent of gross national income to supporting the development of developing countries. But what if all countries made a universal...
Working Paper
Traditional and modern employee benefits in Myanmar’s manufacturing sector
Employer-provided benefits are independent elements in the compensation packages that make up firms’ payment strategies. Such benefits are aimed at attracting and retaining preferred employees and improving incentives. In Myanmar, there are two...
Research Brief
Strengthening SADC trade in alternative fuels
Analysis of World Bank data ranging from 1990–2017 indicates that increases in global oil prices would have negative effects on the economic growth of SADC, especially Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Mauritius. Given the high reliance of Southern...
Working Paper
A 2017 Social Accounting Matrix for Myanmar
This paper documents the compilation of a 2017 Social Accounting Matrix for Myanmar. This is based on partial and unpublished National Accounts data and unpublished Supply and Use Table data, as well as Balance of Payment data and Government Finance...
Working Paper
Explaining income inequality trends
In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income...
Blog
Temporary shock or lasting poverty trap?: COVID-19 in South Africa
by
Simone Schotte
May 2020
South Africa’s COVID-19 lockdown regulations are likely to have a devastating impact on the incomes of workers and their dependents. Already...
Working Paper
South African population projection and household survey sample weight recalibration
The existing sources of demographic data for South Africa have different strengths and limitations that make them inadequate for calibration of sample weights in post-apartheid South African household surveys. The official mid-year population...
Journal Article
The Determinants of Redistribution around the World
This study re-examines the determinants of redistribution in light of improved data and methods relative to earlier literature. In particular, we use the latest version of the UNU‐WIDER’s Income Inequality Database to have the best available...
Working Paper
Taxpayer responsiveness to taxation
The author applies the bunching methodology to South African administrative tax data over the period from 2011 to 2017 to investigate the responsiveness of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates. She finds significant...
Working Paper
Evolution of multidimensional poverty in crisis-ridden Mozambique
Mozambique experienced important reduction in the poverty rate until recently, before two major natural disasters hit and the country started suffering from a hidden debt scandal with associated economic slowdown. As the last available national...
Working Paper
An analysis of the distributional impact of excise duty in Uganda using a tax-benefit microsimulation model
The distributional analysis of consumption taxes is useful for establishing the welfare impact of tax policy. This paper uses the UGAMOD microsimulation model to establish the tax incidence and welfare impact of excise duty in Uganda. The results...
Working Paper
Structural features of the Myanmar economy through the lens of a 2017 Social Accounting Matrix
Based on a recently constructed 2017 Social Accounting Matrix, we examine structural aspects of the Myanmar economy. The exposition ranges from industry, trade, household income, and expenditure to labour market issues. Agriculture remains dominant...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and global poverty
This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on global poverty in the light of the IMF’s April 2020 growth forecasts. The analysis shows that the pandemic will have dramatic consequences, eroding many of the gains recorded over...
Working Paper
The global distribution of routine and non-routine work
Studies of the effects of technology and globalization on employment and inequality commonly assume that occupations are identical around the world in the job tasks they require. To relax this assumption, we develop a regression-based methodology to...
Working Paper
COVID-19: macroeconomic dimensions in the developing world
The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented global crisis. The task for economic policy is to help keep people alive, enterprises afloat, and households out of poverty. The pandemic has macroeconomic dimensions. First, it affects macroeconomic...
Background Note
COVID-19 and the socioeconomic impact in Africa
The first two cases of COVID-19 were reported in Ghana on 12 March 2020 by the health ministry. As a first response, on 15 March all public gatherings were banned, all schools and universities were closed, and on 23 March all of the county's borders...
Working Paper
Exploring the quality of income data in two African household surveys for the purpose of tax-benefit microsimulation modelling
The quality of data on employment income is explored using Tanzanian and Zambian household survey datasets. The extent of missing and implausible income data is assessed and four different methods are applied to impute missing or implausible values...
Working Paper
The energy transition in Asia
This study provides an overview of the use of natural gas and liquefied natural gas in Asia, both historic, current, and with an outlook for the future. Traditionally, Asia has been a strong liquefied natural gas producing region as well as the...
Working Paper
Comparative approaches to key issues in the economic regulation of telecommunications markets in South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe
This paper reviews comparative approaches to key issues in economic regulation in four countries of the Southern African Development Community, and how this has been reflected in outcomes in terms of competition, prices, access, and innovation in...
Working Paper
Exploring options for a universal old age pension in Tanzania Mainland
The provision of a universal old age pension is increasingly recognized as an important instrument for strengthening and extending social protection. A growing number of emerging economies, including East African countries, are introducing universal...
Working Paper
Competition and inclusive regional economic growth in food production
The growth of African multinational companies in Southern and East Africa in recent decades brings with it a great opportunity for development of productive capacity in the region and greater regional integration. This study identifies three emerging...
Working Paper
The impact of employment protection on the temporary employment services sector
Attempts to regulate the temporary employment sector have had mixed results internationally. In South Africa, temporary employment was regulated in 2015 through amendments to the Labour Relations Act. This paper uses administrative data to examine...
Working Paper
Africa’s lockdown dilemma
The primary policy response to suppress the spread of COVID-19 in high-income countries has been to lock down large sections of the population. However, there is growing unease that blindly replicating these policies might inflict irreparable damage...
Working Paper
Precarity and the pandemic
This paper makes a set of estimates for the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poverty incidence, intensity, and severity in developing countries and on the distribution of global poverty. We conclude there could be increases in poverty of...
Working Paper
Competitive dynamics of telecommunications markets in South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe
Low levels of broadband penetration combined with poor quality of services present a challenge to growth and development in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This paper performs a comparative analysis of the competitive dynamics of...
Working Paper
Wage inequality under inflation-targeting in South Africa
This paper aims at providing new evidence over the effect of conventional monetary policy shocks on wage inequality through the earnings heterogeneity channel under the inflation-targeting regime implemented in South Africa since 2000. The empirical...
Working Paper
Unequal expectations
Students’ expectations about their future wages are established in the literature as relevant determinants of the choices made for education progression and, at the university level, for the area and course to be studied. In this paper, the first...
Working Paper
Globalization and gender inequality
Inequality has been rising in most countries for several decades, with negative consequences for social cohesion and economic growth. Substantial gender wage gaps contribute significantly to overall wage inequality. We look at an often-overlooked...
Working Paper
Donor relations and sovereignty
As a sovereign country, Mozambique initially relied on international solidarity and managed its donor relations well. Donor dependency entailed some loss of agency for the government as it allowed donors to challenge its capacity but never its...
Working Paper
Economic development and institutions in Mozambique
Mozambique has achieved incipient but still fragile socio-economic development since 1975. The public financial management system has been reformed and improved, but its performance has weakened since 2013. Applying an institutional economics...
Working Paper
Industry classification in the South African tax microdata
This paper documents the industry classification variables in the anonymized tax microdata available for research at the National Treasury Secure Data Facility in Pretoria. It discusses how the variables in the data are related to the raw records...
Report
Myanmar Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Survey 2019
The 2019 descriptive report of the Myanmar Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise Survey is the second quantitative report of the Myanmar Enterprises Monitoring System (MEMS) project. MEMS is a four-year project, and is implemented by the Central...
Working Paper
Arab-Related Bilateral and Multilateral Sources of Development Finance
This article analyses the organizational structure as well as the characteristics of development finance provided by Arab donor countries. This is done with a comparative view in relation to western donors and with the aim to develop recommendations...
Blog
The end of poverty postponed?: Over a billion people living in poverty and a $500 million per day loss of income for the poorest people in the world could soon be reality
by
Andy Sumner, Christopher Hoy, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez
June 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to dominate headlines as the death toll rises and economies falter. However, far too little attention is being given...
Working Paper
Investigating the fiscal resource curse
The term fiscal resource curse refers to countries’ inability to raise taxes from a broad base in the presence of natural resources. We employ a novel instrumental variable strategy to estimate the causal effect of resource revenues on non-resource...
Working Paper
Trust in the time of corona
The global spread of COVID-19 is one of the largest threats to people and governments since the Second World War. The on-going pandemic and its countermeasures have led to varying physical, psychological, and emotional experiences, shaping not just...
Working Paper
The potential of extractive industries as anchor investments for broader regional development
The paper reviews what we know about the possibilities of designing and implementing policy measures that raise the contribution of the extractive industries’ production/consumption links to economic growth and wellbeing, and reviews how policies...
Background Note
Making a COVID-19 vaccine globally available once developed
Development and production of a COVID-19 vaccine There is a high risk that the intellectual property (IP) rights of a COVID-19 vaccine will effectively block people in many poorer countries from accessing it. To avoid this situation, I propose that a...
Working Paper
State–market–society alliance
While mainstream economics since the 1980s has been largely characterized by neo-liberal ideology, the past decade witnessed the rise of nationalism and protectionist policies globally. The latest COVID-19 pandemic has further refocused attention on...
Journal Article
Vulnerability to natural shocks
Mozambique is among the most disaster-prone countries in the world. A bigger than usual, and mostly unexpected, flood occurred in the central-northern region of the country in the first few months of 2015, causing huge damage to infrastructures. In...
Working Paper
Partnership for inclusive growth
A recent strand of literature on small and medium enterprise (SME) development identifies linkages with large firms as some of the enablers of development and competitiveness. However, there is a dearth of empirical studies on the topic. In this...
Working Paper
Healthcare equity and COVID-19
Scholars of public health typically focus on societal equity for explaining public health outcomes. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spate of studies showing a tight connection between inequitable access to healthcare, welfare services, and...
Blog
Poverty and the pandemic in the Pacific
by
Christopher Hoy
June 2020
COVID-19 has had a far greater economic impact than health impact on Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific. There has been extensive commentary about...
Working Paper
Building malls or metros?
Service industries are increasingly important in international trade and offer additional paths to economic development. There are many opportunities to expand trade in services between South Africa and other African countries. Improvements in urban...
Working Paper
Fast tracking the SADC integration agenda to unlock regional collaboration gains along growth corridors in Southern Africa
Despite more than two decades of economic integration efforts, levels of spatial development inequality remain high within the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Owing to persistent delays in the implementation of the SADC integration...
Working Paper
Trade, technology, and absorptive capacity
Trade-linked technological change has potential to increase incomes in low-income countries (LICs). The most labour-intensive segments of the textiles and apparel global value chain are in LICs. However, gaps between available technologies and best...
Working Paper
Empirical estimates of fiscal multipliers for South Africa
Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes and the important role fiscal activism has played over the last decade, the size of budgetary multipliers (i.e. the output response following an exogenous shock to fiscal policy)...
Working Paper
A medium-sized, open-economy, fiscal DSGE model of South Africa
Much of the research on fiscal multipliers has used reduced form modelling approaches. While these models have been extended to include richer controls and identification approaches, it remains unclear whether shocks identified capture the true...
Blog
Global poverty: coronavirus could drive it up for the first time since the 1990s
by
Andy Sumner, Christopher Hoy, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez
June 2020
As COVID-19 slows in developed countries, the virus’s spread is speeding up in the developing world. Three-quarters of new cases detected each day are...
Working Paper
Old-age pensions and female labour supply in India
Whether cash transfers have unintended behavioural effects on the recipient household’s labour supply is of considerable policy interest. We examine the ‘intent to treat effect’ of the Indira Gandhi National Old-Age Pension Scheme on prime-age women...
Working Paper
Transforming informal work and livelihoods in Costa Rica and Nicaragua
We divide workers into six work statuses: formal self-employed, upper-tier informal self-employed, lower-tier informal self-employed, formal wage-employed, upper-tier informal wage-employed, and lower-tier informal wage-employed. In both Costa Rica...
Working Paper
Natural resources, institutions, and economic transformation in Mozambique
In the light of Mozambique’s natural resources boom—especially its large-scale investments in mining, oil, and gas—this paper analyses the prospects for the extractive industries to contribute to economic transformation from an institutional...
Working Paper
Character or context
We run a lab-in-the-field experiment with 1,060 university students in Mozambique to examine the correlates of behavioural dishonesty, distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Using an incentivized dice game, which yields direct...
Working Paper
Corruption and assortative matching of partners in international trade
While the effects of corruption on bilateral trade have been relatively well explored, its effect on the composition of trading partners has not been studied. In this paper, we argue that corruption in a country is likely to impose asymmetric costs...
Working Paper
Closing the gap
Innovation generally takes place in male-dominated industries. A gender gap might therefore exist. This study used data from the 2015 Tanzania Firm-Level Skills Survey to investigate the gender innovation gap between female-owned enterprises and male...
Blog
Beyond lockdown: rebuilding the social contract
Continued lockdown measures are straining the social contract between citizens and governments. As this column explains, in contexts where there are...
Working Paper
Income diversification and household welfare in Tanzania 2008–2013
This paper uses three waves of Tanzanian National Panel Surveys (2008/09, 2010/11, and 2012/13) to construct a panel from 3,676 households that appear in at least two waves to explore the effect of income diversification on household welfare measured...
Working Paper
Transitions between informal and formal jobs in India
The Indian labour market is characterized by a high level of informality, with large numbers of workers in poorly paid ‘lower-tier’ informal jobs, and somewhat better paid ‘upper-tier’ informal jobs, which do not have the same benefits and security...
Background Note
COVID-19 and employment
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic poses important risks for people’s health and economic wellbeing. While the full socio-economic consequences remain uncertain, the pandemic’s impact on the labour market has become an issue of global concern...
Working Paper
Agro-industry, exports, and income distribution
This paper considers the impacts of agro-industry development and international trade on income distribution in Myanmar, focusing on low-income rural households. We use a social accounting matrix multiplier (SAM) decomposition model featuring...
Working Paper
Future-proofing the plastics value chain in Southern Africa
Plastics are ubiquitous across the region and play an important role in multiple industries. Most plastic products are based on a value chain that is grounded in petroleum refining, posing an environmental challenge. Plastic manufacturing in South...
Working Paper
Duration of pre-university education and labour market outcomes
This paper provides new evidence on the causal effect of shortening the duration of pre-university education on long-term labour market outcomes in Ghana. We use the education reform of 1987 as a natural experiment, which reduced the years of...
Working Paper
Discerning trends in international metal prices in the presence of non-stationary volatility
Modelling the underlying long-run trend of metal prices is important, given that selected metals are a source of income for many countries. However, estimating the underlying trend has proven to be difficult, given the persistence and volatility of...
Working Paper
Is there a gender bias in intergenerational mobility?
We examine the intergenerational mobility of women relative to men, using paired mother-daughter and father-son data on occupation and education for Cameroon. We find that both in occupation and education, intergenerational mobility is higher for...
Journal Special Issue
Income inequalities and redistribution in China
This special section presents the main findings about long-run trends in inequality in China and its driving factors as they emerge from a country case study carried out under a UNU-WIDER-supported project. Special focus in the umbrella project were...
Working Paper
Impact of a Single Customs Territory in the East African Community on Tanzania’s exports
The implementation of a Single Customs Territory by East African Community countries is intended to ease the movement of goods across borders by cutting costs and time through harmonization and simplification of customs documents, removal of...
Working Paper
From fiscal stabilization to economic diversification
The management of revenues from exhaustible natural resources involves a number of challenges. In this paper, we argue that the standard policy advice to managers of resource revenues has been dominated by short-termism and the lack of a perspective...
Research Brief
Estimating tax gaps in the non-financial sector
Many governments, particularly those in developing countries, have set an objective to improve tax revenue mobilization to offer more and better public services to their citizens. To develop effective revenue-raising strategies it is necessary to...
Research Brief
Turnin’ it up a notch
Since the end of apartheid, South Africa’s economic challenges have disrupted efforts to establish a society of inclusive growth and prosperity. Understanding how South Africa can break the pattern of sluggish growth, high unemployment, inequality...
Book
Inequality in the Developing World
Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty...
Background Note
Do more diversified suppliers rebound faster than concentrated suppliers in times of shocks?
In this background note, we examine how different firms and sectors rebound or prevail in crises. We draw on insights from the performance (upgrading potential) of Kenyan horticulture, tea, and leather export firms during two recent, but very...
Working Paper
Flight Capital and its Reversal for Development Financing
In this paper, we review the theoretical and empirical literature on capital flight. First, we discuss the measurement of capital flight. Next, we provide information on the magnitude as well as the ‘burden’ of capital flight for a selected set of...
Working Paper
The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–20
The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-20—commonly known as the Spanish flu—infected over a quarter of the world’s population and killed over 50 million people. It is by far the greatest humanitarian disaster caused by infectious disease in modern...
Research Brief
Solutions for designing better special economic zones programmes in Africa
Special economic zones (SEZ) in Africa are generally regarded as underperforming relative to their peers in the rest of the world. To explain this underperformance and to support success in the future it is important to analyse the key features and...
Research Brief
Developing a Malawi–South Africa value chain for industrial hemp
Diversifying the agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa is important for the combat against poverty and climate change. In Malawi there are plans for legalizing the cultivation of industrial hemp, which would at best bring possibilities for...
Journal Special Issue
Migration and Those Left Behind
This collection of studies considers the impact of migration in the Global South on those who do not migrate: children, partners, and families left behind; sending communities; and national economies. In so doing, it speaks to continuing research ad...
Working Paper
Redistribution, inequality, and growth revisited
An influential paper by Berg et al., ‘Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence’, uses the SWIID data to examine the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth in both developing and developed countries. It finds that while...
Blog
Graduating in the shadow of the pandemic: The impact of COVID-19 on the transition of young Mozambicans from school to work
by
Ivan Manhique, Gimelgo Xirinda
September 2020
Since appearing in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the world into an unprecedented health and socioeconomic crisis. In response, during the...
Blog
Why all countries should contribute to ending global poverty
In 1969, richer countries agreed to commit 0.7% of their gross national income to international development aid. The world has changed since then, and...
Working Paper
Implications of the changing nature of work for employment and inequality in Ghana
In this paper, we analyse the role of the changing nature of occupational employment and wages in explaining the trend in earnings inequality in Ghana between 2006 and 2017, a period in which there was a substantial transformation of the economy...
Working Paper
Polarization in the South African labour market
Technical change impacts both the employment intensity of production and the composition of occupations and skills of employment. Artificial intelligence, automation, and robots are already leading to machines undertaking routinizable tasks...
Research Brief
Tackling poverty and inequality in Southern Africa
Comprehensive harmonization is crucial to eliminate inefficiencies that hamper free movement of goods and services in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Territorial collaboration between metropolitan clusters and rural areas...
Working Paper
Taxing extractive resources in the transition to a low-carbon future
This paper explores the potential impacts of the transition to a low-carbon future for the taxation of extractive resources. The global debate on climate change has firmly moved on from the question of whether countries ought to shift towards such a...
Working Paper
Extractive dependency in lower-income countries
The first objective of this paper is to update earlier assessments of mineral dependence in lower-income countries. In 2018, the mining of metals and coal continued to be an important contributor to the economies of several low- and middle-income...
Working Paper
Influence of institutional factors on the performance of the agricultural sector in Mozambique
This paper is a review of the institutions and the performance of the agricultural sector in Mozambique, using an analysis table adapted to the assessment of the connections between the institutions and economic development. In the first part...
Working Paper
Rule of law and judicial independence
The rule of law and judicial independence are a project yet to be achieved in Mozambique. The different attempts made so far to reform the legal system, mainly after the change in political and strategic direction brought about by the Constitution of...
Working Paper
Petrol price regulation in South Africa
The South African liquid fuels industry is a significant part of the economy. Historically, government policy focused on import substitution industrialization to support industry margins. This approach is called into question by the 2006 shift from...
Policy Brief
Migration governance in the Global South
Building knowledge about migration governance and policy in the Global South is a priority for research and policy. Migration is a defining feature of our time and one closely linked with processes of economic and political development. Sustainable...
Journal Article
Beyond access to basic services: perspectives on social health determinants of Mozambique
A wide range of evidence shows systematic differences in health status among social groups, which are associated with unequal exposure to and distribution of the social determinants of health (SDH). However, the role of these SDH has not been studied...
Working Paper
Decentralization reforms in Mozambique
With the introduction of the economic reforms in the late 1980s, the opening up of the political arena and the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the decentralization process began in Mozambique. Different research developed in recent years...
Journal Special Issue
Involuntary Migration, Inequality, and Integration
Migration is an inherent feature of human history. A rich literature considers the experiences of global migrants across diverse environments. This special issue explores such experiences with a focus on inequality between migrants and host...
Working Paper
Changes in inequality within countries after 1990
In this paper, we use the World Income Inequality Database to assess the main trends in inequality within countries since around 1990. We cope with the heterogeneity in the original information (regarding the measure of resources, equivalence scale...
Working Paper
A review of consumption poverty estimation for Mozambique
We broadly review the challenges encountered and choices made in the national assessments of consumption poverty using the 1996/97, 2002/03, and 2008/09 budget surveys. Efforts to maintain consistency with the previous survey imply that prior choices...
Working Paper
The South African manufacturing exporter story
Existing South African work on firm-level data has been limited by access to large datasets that track firms over time. This paper overcomes this by analysing a new dataset of the population of manufacturing firms that are matched to their export...
Working Paper
Roots of dissent
This paper investigates the long-term impact of economic shocks on populism, by exploiting a natural experiment created by the trade liberalization process implemented in Brazil between 1990 and 1995. This high impact and low duration event generated...
Journal Article
Infrastructure improvements and maize market integration
Historically, transport infrastructure connecting the most agriculturally productive areas of Mozambique and the richer southern region has been poor. A primary bottleneck was an unreliable ferry service over the Zambezi river, addressed by...
Working Paper
Fiscal policy, labour market, and inequality
Inequality in South Africa is the enduring legacy of racial discrimination. We use a dynamic perspective to show the linkages between persistent effects of discrimination in the labour market and the efficacy of redistributive fiscal policy in...
Working Paper
Special economic zones and transnational zones as tools for Southern Africa’s growth
The paper evaluates strategies for developing successful special economic zones and transnational zones for Southern African countries to spur growth and employment. Most special economic zones implemented in Southern Africa have largely failed to...
Working Paper
By choice or by force?
Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers’ preferences for jobs with social security coverage, I estimate that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that...
Blog
Decent work and COVID-19 – it’s time for a just deal for all workers
Seven months into the unprecedented crisis of COVID-19, we already see significant effects on employment and earnings worldwide. The fallout could see...
Blog
Barriers to opportunity for students in Mozambique: In their own words
by
Anna Schnupp
September 2020
Across Mozambique, 1,600 secondary school graduates from technical and vocational (TVET) institutes are being tracked as part of the school-to-work...
Working Paper
The education sector in Mozambique
From the early days of national independence in 1975, the central aim of the educational policy in Mozambique has been to ensure that all school-age children have access to school and can remain there until they have completed their basic education...
Blog
UNU-WIDER at 35: Letter from the Director
2020 promised to be a big year for UNU-WIDER, with the celebration of our 35th anniversary, the 45th birthday of UNU, and 75 years of the UN. But as...
Working Paper
Putting the financial system to work for the poor and SMEs
The financial inclusion effort achieved positive results, with the number of Mozambicans having access to banking services increasing considerably, particularly after 2011–12. However, the economic and social impact was limited, considering that farm...
Working Paper
Health, development, and institutional factors
The central aim of this text is to show the impact institutions have on the performance of the health sector in Mozambique. The text shows that of the social determinants of health, institutions play a central role in the performance of the...
Working Paper
Aid Effort and its Determinants
The paper empirically explores the factors that could have accounted for the generally declining aid effort (defined as the generosity ratio, or the share of GDP given as aid) of bilateral donors over the last three decades. Annual panel data over...
Blog
35 years of knowledge for change: Changing IMF orthodoxy (1985-95)
UNU-WIDER was among the first to challenge IMF orthodoxy on macroeconomic stabilization. The 1985-87 project ‘Stabilization and adjustment policies...
Working Paper
The social profitability of rural roads in a small open economy
In the presence of agglomeration economies, the effects of a rural roads programme depend not only on the reduction in transportation costs, but also on the form of labour mobility. When financed by a poll tax on rural households, the wage will rise...
Working Paper
The political economy of the resource curse
This paper reviews the recent literature on the developmental effects of resource abundance, assessing likely effects and channels with respect to income inequality, poverty, education, and health. To date, this area has received less analysis...
Working Paper
Migration and the labour market impacts of COVID-19
Using detailed microdata, we document how migration-dependent households are especially vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. We create pre- and post-COVID panel datasets for three populations in Bangladesh and Nepal, leveraging experimental and...
Working Paper
Dynamics of off-farm self-employment in West African Sahel
This study uses detailed household-level data to analyse off-farm self-employment dynamics in Mali and Niger. It adds to the literature that acknowledges the existence of heterogeneities in informal work and the body of evidence on informal self...
Working Paper
Transforming informal work and livelihoods in China
The informal sector has long been viewed as a locus of the disadvantaged, unskilled, and inexperienced workers in under-developed and developing economies. Workers in the informal sector, however, can learn skills and gain experience that could help...
Working Paper
Effects of productivity growth on domestic savings across countries
Resource mobilization continues to be an important policy challenge for developing economies, raising questions as to what determines differences in saving behaviour across countries. Using a panel of 47 economies with at least 40 years of continuous...
Working Paper
Orphans and stunted growth
Stunted growth in early life has serious implications for children and is a well-established constraint to productivity, life expectancy, and cognitive development. This paper evaluates the relative contributions of household resources and public...
Working Paper
Agricultural input subsidy and farmers outcomes in Tanzania
This paper examines the impact of the government input subsidy—the National Agriculture Input Voucher—on farmers’ production and welfare in Tanzania as well as the factors that influence agricultural production in the country. The analysis is based...
Working Paper
Updating great expectations
How jobseekers set their earnings expectations is central to job search models. To study this process, we track the evolution of own-earnings forecasts over 18 months for a representative panel of university-leavers in Mozambique and estimate the...
Report
Research for development: the first ten years of UNU/WIDER
This report, covering the first ten years of the institute's existence, gives readers a comprehensive overview of the activities and achievements of UNU-WIDER. It provides the overall work of UNU-WIDER completed during its first decade.
Working Paper
Informality and work status
The most important determinant of households’ livelihoods is how much they earn for their labour. People in informal work are more likely to be low earners, to live in poverty, and to make fewer transitions into the higher-paying work statuses. The...
Working Paper
Climate shocks, agriculture, and migration in Nepal
Climate change is expected to increase the risk in agricultural production due to increasing temperatures and rainfall variability. Smallholders can adjust by diversifying income sources, including through migration. Most existing studies investigate...
Working Paper
The dynamics of state–business relations between the Ethiopian state and Chinese private firms
Despite the Ethiopian government’s commitment to attracting foreign direct investment to its emerging manufacturing sector and its shared interests with Chinese private businesses in building profitable investments, relations between Chinese private...
Report
Survey on the school-to-work transition of technical and vocational training graduates in Mozambique
This report documents the main conclusions of the Survey on the School-to-Work Transition of Technical and Vocational Education and Training Graduates in Mozambique. The research was planned and implemented by researchers from the United Nations...
Report
Inquérito à transição ensino-emprego dos finalistas do ensino técnico-profissional em Moçambique
Este relatório documenta as principais conclusões do Inquérito à Transiçãoo Ensino-Emprego dos Finalistas do Ensino Técnico-Profissional em Moçambique. A pesquisa foi planificada e implementada por pesquisadores do United Nations University World...
Research Brief
Is technical and vocational education and training a solution for youth unemployment?
Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is often seen as a silver bullet resolving issues ranging from youth unemployment to labour market-related structural change. This is particularly true for developing countries with deficient...
Research Brief
Será o Ensino Técnico-Profissional (ETP) uma solução para o desemprego jovem?
O Ensino Técnico-Profissional (ETP) é frequentemente visto como uma solução milagrosa que resolve questões que vão desde o desemprego juvenil até à mudança estrutural relacionada com o mercado de trabalho. Isto é particularmente verdade para os...
Working Paper
Trends in inequality within countries using a novel dataset
We revisit trends in within-country income inequality using a newly integrated dataset that covers at least 70 per cent of the global population since 1980. We investigate absolute and relative inequality trends across the past four decades...
Journal Article
Searching for religious discrimination among childcare workers
We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment among childcare workers in Chandigarh, India, to evaluate discriminatory attitudes of the Hindu workers toward Muslim children. We use a third-party allocation game that controls for selfish payoff...
Journal Article
Stabbed in the back?
This study provides the first country-wide research evidence that an affirmative action policy may induce a backlash. I exploit the timing of the implementation of castebased electoral quotas across and within the states of India. The results show...
Working Paper
Norms that matter
Based on primary data from India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying women’s low labour force participation. In developing countries, women engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers. Women are...
Book Chapter
Foreign aid and peacebuilding
Foreign aid is a core component of peacebuilding and among the largest external financial flows to fragile states and conflict-affected areas. Nevertheless, troubling critiques have been raised about its overall impact and effectiveness. Some of the...
Working Paper
Local governance quality and law compliance
Using panel data of manufacturing enterprises in Mozambique between 2012 and 2017, we investigate how changes in perceived quality of governance are related to firms’ law compliance. Controlling for firm-level unobserved heterogeneity, we look at...
Journal Article
Do gender wage differences within households influence women's empowerment and welfare?
Using household data from the latest wave of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, this paper utilizes machine learning techniques – IV LASSO – that allows for the treatment of unconfoundedness in the selection of observables and unobservables to...
Working Paper
Barriers to entry and the role of African multinational corporations
Effective competition in the Southern and East African regions requires independent rivals competing across borders and within domestic markets through innovation and effort, investment, product quality, and prices. To understand the constraints to...
Working Paper
The regulation of interconnection and regulatory alignment in the Southern African Development Community
This paper analyses interconnection in telecommunications markets in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, focusing on cross-border roaming as well as international interconnection. These issues have been identified as critical...
Working Paper
Learning from experience: Special Economic Zones in Southern Africa
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become common across Southern Africa in the past 20 years. In line with experiences in the rest of the world, they have had at best marginal success. Their essential premise is that it should be more efficient and...
Blog
A summer reading list of our latest papers, articles, and books
At the UNU-WIDER offices here in Helsinki, Finland, the summer holidays are almost upon us. Looking at the list of new UNU-WIDER publications, it is...
Working Paper
Housing Privatization and Household Wealth in Transition
All countries in transition experienced increases in inequality. They have also undertaken massive privatization of key asset housing, often on give-away terms. Are these two phenomena related? Has transfer of ownership rights to residents slowed...
Working Paper
Maternity benefits mandate and women’s choice of work in Viet Nam
Despite a sizeable literature on the labour market effects of maternity leave regulations on women in developed countries, how these policies affect women’s work in developing countries with a large informal sector remains poorly understood. This...
Working Paper
Do gifts buy votes?
Vote-buying—or the pre-electoral distribution of private goods in exchange for support at the ballot box—is often blamed for the poor economic performance of many sub-Saharan countries. For instance, vote-buying may undermine accountability and the...