Blog

We calculated a lockdown readiness index for Mozambique and the results don’t look good. If lockdown policies are needed to halt the spread of the...

Working Paper

The Bangladesh economy has undergone significant structural changes over the last four decades. The share of agriculture in GDP has declined, while the significance of industry and service sectors has increased. These structural changes have been...

• Bangladesh
• Structural transformation
• Inclusive growth

Working Paper

This paper estimates the distribution of personal wealth in South Africa by combining tax microdata, household surveys, and macroeconomic balance sheet statistics. We systematically compare estimates of the wealth distribution obtained by direct...

• Administrative data
• Households balance sheets
• income capitalization

Blog

The novel Covid-19 is affecting the advanced countries in the Western Hemisphere disproportionately more than developing countries. In this post, Basu...

• COVID-19
• Population

Working Paper

Inaccurate expectations of future wages are found in many contexts. Yet, existing studies overwhelmingly refer to high-income countries, and there is little evidence regarding the sources of expectational errors.Based on a longitudinal survey of...

• Job mismatch
• Mozambique
• Tracer study

Working Paper

Between 1981 and 2017, real gross domestic product in Thailand grew at an average annual rate of 5.7 per cent. Agricultural output grew more slowly than industry or services, and its gross domestic product share consequently declined. Industry’s...

• Inclusive growth
• Inequality
• Poverty reduction

Background Note

Several countries have enacted lockdown measures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to protect their health systems and reduce the number of mortalities. One of the most extreme national lockdown measures has been taken by the government of India...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Lockdown

Working Paper

This paper provides an overview of the energy transition in Asia. It sets out the underlying drivers and how these set energy transition priorities in China, India, and South East Asia. It particularly describes the role of (liquefied) natural gas in...

• Renewable resources
• Energy
• Energy utilities

Working Paper

Despite South Africa’s need for inclusive economic growth, we find that the income trajectories of the rich continue to diverge from the rest of the income distribution. We combine household survey data and tax data (which, unlike household survey...

• Top incomes
• Income distribution
• Tax data

Working Paper

Nowadays, tax depreciation allowances are used less as instruments of macroeconomic stabilization and more as long-term measures to stimulate investment. This paper tabulates the types of accelerated depreciation allowances in South Africa and...

• Tax depreciation allowances
• Tax investment allowances
• Tax expenditures

Blog

People who live through extreme events are, often deeply, altered by the experiences they have. Even when those experiences take place predominantly...

• COVID-19

Working Paper

This paper evaluates structural change, inequality dynamics, and industrial policy in South Africa between 1960 and the present day. We find that South Africa experienced growth-enhancing structural transformation until the early 1970s, before...

• Structural transformation
• Inclusive growth
• South Africa

Background Note

What has the government of South Africa done with respect to COVID-19 measures of mitigation and suppression? The first COVID-19 positive case was confirmed on 5 March 2020. Just ten days later, South Africa had 61 positive cases and President...

• COVID-19
• South Africa
• Government action

Blog

by Arkebe Oqubay April 2020

The response to Africa’s COVID-19 plight must be swift and at scale rather than too little, too late. In a world short of progressive global...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Economic Policy and Good Governance

Working Paper

This paper presents new evidence on the employment effects of a large increase in agricultural minimum wages in South Africa using anonymized tax data. We add to the minimum wage literature by differentiating employment effects resulting from the...

• Minimum wage
• Employment effects
• Non-compliance

Blog

Millions of migrant workers around the world provide valuable income for their families and contribute more broadly to the economies of both their...

• COVID-19
• Migration
• Global health

Working Paper

We study the determinants of stock market development and the growing migration of capital raising, listing, and trading activity to international exchanges. Economies with higher income per capita, sounder macro policies, more efficient legal...

• Capital market
• Globalization
• Stock exchanges

Blog

As the COVID-19 virus has spread across the globe, developing countries are starting to enact many of the same policies used in China, Europe, and...

• COVID-19
• Lockdown
• Mozambique

Journal Article

India has employed a variety of military, political and economic measures to combat the long running insurgency in Kashmir with little evidence on what contributes to stability in the region. This paper uses a variety of tests to detect structural...

• Conflict
• Multiple structural breaks
• Development programs

Blog

by Ludvig Wier April 2020

Corporate taxation is at the heart of economic development, and cardiac failure looms if international tax reform is not made globally inclusive There...

• International taxation
• Tax avoidance
• Tax havens

Background Note

The COVID-19 pandemic has now spread to over 180 countries, including several countries in sub-Saharan Africa.1 Kenya reported its first COVID-19 case on 13 March 2020. By 31 March the number of confirmed cases had risen to 59, with over 70 per cent...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Africa

Working Paper

The Employment Equity Act No. 55 of 1998 was introduced by the South African government to address the legacy of apartheid and ensure equitable representation of black people and women in the South African labour market. Although the impacts of the...

• Employment Equity Act
• Wage gap
• Industry networks

Report

View the latest ECUAMOD country report here. This report documents ECUAMOD, the SOUTHMOD micrososimulation model developed for Ecuador. The report describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model takes advantage of...

• Taxes
• Benefits
• Microsimulation

Blog

by Anna Schnupp May 2020

Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is often put forward as the solution to youth unemployment — but to prove its worth, better...

• Employment
• Graduate employability
• Education policy

Blog

by Arkebe Oqubay April 2020

COVID-19 is the greatest global threat the world has faced since the Second World War. It is not the deadliest or most infectious disease recorded...

• COVID-19
• Leadership charasteristics
• Global cooperation

Report

The research detailed herein was planned and implemented by researchers at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), the Develop-ment Economics Research Group (DERG) at the University of Copenhagen...

• Mozambique
• Education policy
• Employment

Report

A investigação aqui apresentada foi planeada e implementada por pesquisadores do United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), do Grupo de Pesquisa em Economia do Desenvolvimento (DERG) da Universidade de...

• Mozambique
• Education policy
• Employment

Working Paper

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...

• Firm productivity
• Informal institutions
• Relational contracting

Working Paper

This paper investigates the short- and medium-term impact of a randomized group-based early child development programme targeting parents of children aged six to 24 months in a poor, rural district of Rwanda. The programme engaged parents through...

• Child education
• Child development
• Parenting programme

Working Paper

Earnings growth in South Africa displayed a U-shaped pattern across the earnings percentiles between 2000 and 2015, resembling wage polarization in the industrialized world. We investigate whether the drivers of this example of wage polarization in...

• Inequality
• Minimum wage
• Recentered influence function

Working Paper

The purpose of this research is to investigate whether transport accessibility influences the employment duration of individuals in South Africa. The South African Revenue Service’s IRP5 administration datasets, which indicate employment duration and...

• Employment
• Employment duration
• Equality

Journal Article

The canonical approach to analyse the poverty impact of growth is based on the comparison of poverty before and after growth. Measurement tools endorsing this approach fail to capture the different experiences of poverty dynamic in the population...

• Income mobility
• Poverty Dynamics
• Pro-poor

Blog

by Piotr Lewandowski May 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes an unprecedented shock for labour markets around the world. Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social...

Report

View the latest UGAMOD country report here. This report documents UGAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Uganda. The report describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions...

• SOUTHMOD
• UGAMOD
• Taxation

Working Paper

In this paper, we examine the relationship between childhood exposure to adverse weather shocks and nutritional and health outcomes of children in Tanzania. Using household panel data matched with spatially disaggregated data on weather shocks, we...

• Child nutrition
• Tanzania
• Weather shock

Blog

Today, we see clear trends in developing countries of a potentially troubling ‘new normal’ for economic development. We see tertiarization with rising...

• Structural transformation
• Economic development

Working Paper

Through rapid urbanization, Brazil—previously a country where most workers were in the agricultural sector—went through a strong process of structural transformation that lasted almost four decades until economic liberalization at the beginning of...

• Brazil
• import substitution
• Inclusive growth

Working Paper

The principal contribution of this paper is to investigate the relationship between policy uncertainty, caused by recent developments in international markets, and firms’ trade margins for the largest economy in Africa: South Africa. In particular...

• Brexit
• policy uncertainty
• Preferential trade agreements

Working Paper

COVID-19 causes extremely high mortality among the old. This motivates a comparison of the losses of future lifetime years and future lifetime years of work ensuing from a hypothetical 25,000 excess deaths in Italy, whose affluent population is one of...

• Age structure
• COVID-19
• Italy

Blog

by Wim Naudé May 2020

The rush to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fight against the pandemic may be an opportunity for developing countries to accelerate the...

• COVID-19
• Artificial intelligence
• Public health

Background Note

In this note, I will refer to current efforts to harness artificial intelligence (AI) in the push back against COVID-19, note its promises, limitations, potential pitfalls, and identify priorities for developing countries. Artificial Intelligence is...

• Artificial intelligence
• COVID-19
• Developing countries

Working Paper

Special economic zones (SEZs) in Africa are generally regarded as underperforming relative to their peers in the rest of the world. This study focuses on the design features of the SEZ in Africa that may help explain this underperformance. Literature...

• Design attributes
• Implementation
• Infrastructure (Economics)

Blog

by Kehinde Oluwaseun May 2020

While growing up, I was troubled by the scale of the socioeconomic gap between the haves and the have-nots in the community around me. I saw cases...

• Capacity building

Working Paper

This paper explores how Southern Africa can leverage its mineral resources to support growth and industrialization. It considers the aggregate and spatial effects of transport infrastructure improvements, and the relative benefits of financing these...

• Computable general equilibrium
• Infrastructure (Economics)
• Resource sector

Working Paper

The IRP5 and IT3(a) tax data from the South African Revenue Service have been made available to researchers through a joint project between the South African Revenue Service, the National Treasury, and UNU-WIDER. In this paper, I explain how to use...

• Employment
• Labour income
• South Africa

Working Paper

The objective of this research is to assess the extent to which export processing zones in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe integrate the Sustainable Development Goals in their implementation and operations. We focused on four Sustainable...

• Export processing zones
• Sustainable development
• Botswana

Working Paper

The purpose of the study is two-fold. First, it examines whether Internet usage converges across the geographical space comprising the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Second, it aims to expand the currently rather limited...

• Education
• Information technology
• Institutional economics

Research Brief

The design and implementation of industrial policy should be closely linked to spatial considerations. Firm output and productivity are often location-specific, with factors such as the availability of physical infrastructure, proximity to sources...

• Agglomeration
• Firm productivity
• South Africa

Research Brief

Service exports are the fastest growing portion of world trade and now account for nearly a quarter of global exports. Tradable services contribute to economic growth and development by bolstering industrial capabilities, facilitating productivity...

• Tradable sectors
• Services
• International trade

Research Brief

The success of an economy’s manufacturing sector is often critical to economic growth and development. As a major contributor to exports, site of innovation, adopter of international best practices, and engine of job creation, an internationally...

• Offshoring
• Firm-level data
• Linked employer-employee data

Working Paper

The impact of childbirth on women’s employment has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries. Constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and consequent fall in earnings are characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty’...

• child penalty
• Childbirth
• event study

Technical Note

This note, which forms part of a series of technical notes that complement Lastunen et al. (2021), reports the approach used to derive shocks to household expenditures from shocks at the individual-level labour incomes. Its structure is composed by...

• COVID-19
• Income
• Shocks

Technical Note

This note describes how the counterfactual datasets in the working paper by Lastunen et al. (2021) have been reweighted, for each country analysed, to the ‘pre-crisis’ time point of 31 March 2020. The procedure consists of five main steps. The note...

• COVID-19
• SOUTHMOD
• Microsimulation

Journal Article

Gender gaps in labor 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...

• Gender gap
• Youth
• Employment

Working Paper

This paper 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...

• Vulnerable employment
• Gender gap
• Developing countries

Working Paper

Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the...

• Public debt
• Interest rate
• Fiscal sustainability

Working Paper

This paper analyses the pathways of technology diffusion through social networks, following the experimental introduction of new technologies in Guinea-Bissau. In the context of an agricultural extension project, we document both the direct effects...

• Agriculture
• Technology
• Knowledge diffusion

Working Paper

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. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions through a feminist political...

• Feminist economics
• Political economy
• Social reproduction

Working Paper

In this paper we use different sources of data on job task content to investigate the importance of occupations and the intensity of routine tasks embodied in them in explaining changes in employment and earnings in Brazil, in particular their...

• Brazil
• Inequality
• Polarization

Blog

by Ruby Richardson September 2021

The opening keynote of the recent WIDER Development Conference, COVID-19 and development – effects and new realities for the Global South, was given...

• COVID-19
• Poverty
• Human capital

Blog

by Timothy Shipp September 2021

In introducing Staffan Lindberg’s keynote at the WIDER Development Conference, UNU-WIDER Senior Research Fellow and political scientist Rachel...

• Democracy
• Democracy and human rights
• Autocracy

Blog

by UNU-WIDER September 2021

Kanika Mahajan, a researcher engaged in UNU-WIDER's project on 'The changing nature of work and inequality', is the August 2021 featured economist of...

• Inequality
• Labour economics
• Gender

Technical Note

This technical note presents a modelling approach used in Lastunen et al. (2021) where tax and benefit policies are scaled to reflect their actual duration during a single calendar year. It can be applied to tax-benefit microsimulation models...

• COVID-19
• Tax-benefit systems
• Poverty

Technical Note

This note sets out two different methods on how to adjust incomes in the microdata underlying the standard SOUTHMOD models to reflect a sudden shock, in this case the COVID-19 shock, as done in the accompanying working paper by Lastunen et al. (2021)...

• Imputation
• Income
• Survey data

Working Paper

There is a widespread perception that taxing in sub-Saharan Africa has been and remains fraught with problems or government failure. This is not generally true. For more than a century, colonial administrations and independent states have steadily...

• Tax
• Revenue
• Sub-Saharan Africa

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Blog

In summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and...

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Blog

by Rachel M. Gisselquist October 2021

Around the world, the pandemic, and the measures taken to address it, have had far reaching effects on poverty, inequality, and governance. And even...

• COVID-19
• WIDER Development Conference

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Working Paper

There is limited research on the underlying institutional framework of tax policy and capacity: how tax collection efficiency changes over time and the importance of institutional factors in this process.This paper fills this gap by devising a...

• Fiscal capacity
• General-to-specific
• Tax policy

Working Paper

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...

• Fuel subsidies
• Riots
• protest

Working Paper

The paper builds a framework for the analysis of research and development (R&D) offshoring and outsourcing that encompasses several strands of the economics literature. It surveys the predictions from key theoretical models advanced in the literature...

• Contracting out
• International business enterprises
• Knowledge management

Working Paper

An often-neglected potential negative consequence of tariffs is the impact they may have on the misallocation of factor inputs. Trade protection can provide space for domestic firms to increase prices and mark-ups, allowing low-productivity firms to...

• Tariffs
• Productivity
• Misallocation

Working Paper

Although the effect of fiscal drag is well studied in the industrialized world, empirical evidence from developing economies remains limited. Against this backdrop, this study aims to explore the effect of fiscal drag on income distribution and work...

• Inflation
• Income tax
• Fiscal drag

Working Paper

A plethora of work has been done on the effectiveness of foreign aid. However, virtually none of the previous studies has investigated the impact of aid on social cohesion. Yet, in order to promote the achievement of the targets in SDG 16, donors and...

• Social cohesion
• Foreign aid
• Panel data

Working Paper

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Kenya’s foreign trade using quarterly trade data for the period 2019 to the second quarter of 2021. The exploratory analysis shows that growth of Kenya’s merchandise exports remained resilient...

• Trade
• Kenya
• Exports

Blog

by Alan R. Roe October 2021

The transition to net zero over the next few decades will involve a large increase in the global demand for many metals essential to the renewables...

• COP26
• Climate change
• Extractive industries

Blog

by Amir Lebdioui October 2021

The economic decline of Nauru, an island in the Central Pacific, is a cautionary tale. Nauru was the highest GDP per capita country in the world in...

• COP26
• Climate change
• Extractive industries

Blog

by Tony Addison October 2021

The long-awaited COP26 in Glasgow is about to start. Billed as the most important COP to date, it is widely seen as a last chance to avoid a global...

• COP26
• Developing countries
• Climate change

Blog

The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) is seen as the last best chance for countries and companies to set out how they are actually...

• COP26
• Climate change
• Extractive industries

Blog

by Mahmoud Mohieldin October 2021

At the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, world leaders discussed the need to scale-up ambition to address key global challenges...

• COP26
• Developing countries
• Climate change

Working Paper

With data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, this paper examines how firm-level resilience capabilities interact with government support in the reduction of lay-offs among formal firms in Central America. We estimate two latent variables to...

• Capabilities
• Resilience
• COVID-19

Journal Article

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of the poor in a semi-rural setting in Bangladesh. We use an unusually rich dataset which tracks the economic and financial transactions of sixty poor and very poor individuals and...

• COVID-19
• Lockdown
• Livelihoods

Working Paper

A large share of the population in Zambia is living below the national poverty line. To reduce poverty, in 2019, the government initiated the Cash Plus reform, which aims to build on the existing Social Cash Transfer as a floor benefit with...

• Poverty
• Zambia
• Social protection

Blog

The situation of Afghanistan has drawn a picture of a poor, conflict-prone, doomed country. But this does not have to be the case. We have examples of...

• Least Developed Countries
• Productivity
• Sustainable development

Blog

by Kunal Sen October 2021

The next decade is a make-or-break for the world’s most vulnerable countries. To tackle the unprecedented confluence of COVID-19, climate, and...

• Least Developed Countries
• Sustainable development
• Research

Working Paper

Presumptive tax, a final tax on business income, was introduced in Uganda in 1997. The latest reform to the regime in July 2020 sought to make the system more progressive, simpler, and fairer to small firms. In this work, we evaluate the reform...

• presumptive tax
• Tax administration
• Small business

Blog

by Virgi Sari October 2021

Virgi Agita Sari joined UNU-WIDER as a visiting PhD fellow in the summer of 2017. Coming from Indonesia, Virgi joined five other fellows from across...

• UNU-WIDER PhD Fellowship
• Capacity development
• Capacity building

Blog

by Kunal Sen October 2021

This month we had the honour to co-host the first ever LDC Future Forum here in Helsinki. It was our first large-scale live event since the COVID-19...

• Least Developed Countries
• Research
• Sustainable development

Blog

How do crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic influence inequality and the other way around? This year’s UN Day Dresden put a spotlight on “Inequalities...

• Inequality
• COVID-19
• Crisis

Working Paper

We examine the patterns and correlates of the productivity gap between male-owned and female-owned firms for informal enterprises in India. Female-owned firms are on average 45 per cent less productive than male-owned firms, with the clearest...

• Gender
• Productivity gap
• India

Research Brief

• Risk-based approach
• Tax compliance
• Tanzania

Working Paper

The rise of the emerging southern economies – China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS) – as both economic and political actors, is having significant and far-reaching impact on the world economy. Notwithstanding the increasing amount of study...

• International economic relations
• International trade
• Restraint of trade

Working Paper

Is maternal employment beneficial or harmful for child development? Maternal employment generates income, which is needed to provide core inputs for children’s health and education. However, maternal employment comes at the cost of time spent with...

• Child development
• Indonesia
• Female labour force participation

Working Paper

We use a fiscal incidence model based on the South African 2014/15 Living Conditions Survey to simulate the poverty reduction impacts of a selection of medium-to-long-term social grant options with the goal of replacing the existing special COVID-19...

• Fiscal incidence
• Social protection
• Social spending

Working Paper

Attention on domestic resource mobilization—particularly in developing countries—has increased significantly in recent years. This stems from, among other things, recognition in the Sustainable Development Goals that further domestic funding is...

• Tax effort
• Domestic revenue mobilization
• Tax

Working Paper

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...

• Business
• Management
• Productivity

Working Paper

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...

• Public service delivery
• Ethnicity
• Africa

Journal Article

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...

• Resource abundance
• Inequality
• Institutions

Working Paper

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...

• Economic development
• Investments
• Productivity

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Lockdown
• Livelihoods

Working Paper

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...

• East African Community
• Customs union
• Single Customs Territory

Working Paper

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...

• Economic policy
• policy uncertainty
• Investment

Working Paper

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...

• Tariffs
• Employment
• Structural transformation

Blog

by Rachel M. Gisselquist February 2021

Among the many things said about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the description by the President of the UN General Assembly’s 70th...

• Inequality
• Quantitative research methodology
• Qualitative research methodology

Blog

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...

• Structural transformation
• Manufacturing
• Employment and Industry

Working Paper

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...

• Tanzania
• Livelihoods
• Informal sector

Blog

by Timothy Shipp February 2021

This month, a partnership between UNU-WIDER and the Groningen Growth and Development Center (GGDC) brings a new database on economic transformation...

• Data
• Economic Transformation Database
• Income inequality

Blog

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...

• Income inequality
• Global inequality

Blog

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

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...

• Boolean functions
• Composite indexes
• Multidimensional poverty

Report

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...

• TAZMOD
• SOUTHMOD
• Tax

Blog

Agriculture and agro-processing value chains have been under pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been particularly marked where they...

• Technology
• Supermarkets
• South Africa

Journal Article

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...

• Income distribution
• SOUTHMOD
• Tax-benefit microsimulation

Research Brief

• Tax compliance
• Small business
• Uganda

Working Paper

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...

• economy-wide perspective
• Social Accounting Matrix
• Multiplier analysis

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Welfare dynamics
• Lockdown

Blog

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...

• COVID-19
• Africa
• Africa's Economic Development

Blog

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...

• Gender
• Motherhood
• Women's work

Blog

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...

• South Africa
• Women's empowerment
• Female labour force participation

Working Paper

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...

• Labour market dynamics
• Inequality
• Occupations

Working Paper

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...

• Fiscal decentralization
• Efficiency
• Local government

Working Paper

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...

• Gender inequality
• Labour market segmentation
• Mixed methods

Working Paper

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...

• Morocco
• Female labour force participation
• Gender gap

Working Paper

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...

• Income
• Poverty
• Poverty measurement

Working Paper

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...

• Labour supply
• Gender
• Sub-Saharan Africa

Blog

by Sam Jones March 2021

Investments in infrastructure – such as roads – typically aim to reduce transport costs, stimulate trade, and make new production activities viable...

• Infrastructure (Economics)
• Agriculture
• Mozambique

Technical Note

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...

• Data
• Inequality
• WIID

Technical Note

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...

• Inequality
• WIID
• Database

Technical Note

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...

• Income distribution
• Inequality
• WIID

Blog

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...

• Child Marriage
• Women's empowerment
• Crime

Report

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...

• COVID-19
• Survey data
• Employment

Working Paper

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...

• Global inequality
• Income distribution
• WIID

Blog

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...

• Women's work
• Female labour force participation
• Economics

Blog

by Patricia Justino March 2021

One of the most critical challenges in international development today is to understand how best to support peace, security, economic recovery, and...

• Institutions
• Conflict
• Post-conflict

Blog

by Kunal Sen March 2021

One of the most pressing challenges in development policy is to bring about rapid, sustained, and inclusive growth in developing countries. Apart from...

• Fragile states
• Conflict
• Economic growth

Journal Article

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...

• Education
• Human fertility
• Minorities

Blog

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...

• Social conflict
• Good governance
• Social movement

Working Paper

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...

• global production networks
• value added
• Exports

Working Paper

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...

• Field experiment
• Forests and forestry
• Altruism

Working Paper

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...

• job quality
• Productivity
• Working conditions

Blog

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...

• Civil conflict
• Peacebuilding
• Institutions

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Lockdown
• protest

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Informal sector
• Employment

Working Paper

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...

• Intergenerational Mobility
• Education
• Welfare

Working Paper

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...

• Intergenerational Mobility
• socioeconomic status
• Occupational choice

Working Paper

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...

• Wage inequality
• Polarization
• Skills

Research Brief

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...

• Regional integration
• Agriculture
• Agro-processing

Research Brief

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...

• Credit channel
• Firm heterogeneity
• Financial constraints

Blog

Globally, around 250 million children under the age of five do not meet key development milestones, which reduces their ability to reach their full...

• Social mobility
• Human capital
• Cognitive ability

Working Paper

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...

• Informality
• Occupational turnover
• Education

Journal Article

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...

• Formal credit
• Gender
• Personality traits

Journal Article

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...

• Firm productivity
• Informal institutions
• Relational contracting

Working Paper

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...

• Economic assistance and foreign aid
• Economic development
• Econometric models (Economic development)

Journal Article

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...

• Corruption
• Democracy
• Economic growth

Blog

States with fragile state health systems have been commended for effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But if we take into account factors...

• COVID-19
• Capable states
• State capacity

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Trade facilitation
• Regional integration

Working Paper

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...

• Environment
• Livelihoods
• Oil

Working Paper

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...

• Informality
• Measurement
• Poverty

Working Paper

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...

• Convergence
• Growth
• Inequality

Blog

As COVID-19 ravages international trade and production, policy-makers are shifting their sights from global value chains (GVCs) to regional value...

• Value chain directionality
• Textiles
• Apparel industry

Working Paper

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...

• Natural resources
• Valuation
• environmental impact

Working Paper

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...

• Catalonia
• Conflict
• Independence movements

Working Paper

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...

• Gender
• Earnings inequality
• Sticky floor

Journal Article

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...

• Formal and informal
• Informal
• Formal

Working Paper

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...

• Gender gap
• Youth
• Employment

Blog

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...

• United Nations
• Annual lecture

Working Paper

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...

• Deindustrialization
• Income inequality
• Middle-income countries

Working Paper

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...

• Multidimensional poverty index
• Income
• Poverty

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Microsimulation
• Poverty

Working Paper

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...

• Pensions
• Tax incentive
• Inequality

Working Paper

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...

• Routinization
• Wage inequality
• Tasks

Working Paper

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...

• Skills
• Tasks
• Polarization

Working Paper

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...

• Illicit financial flows
• Tax havens
• Multinational firms

Working Paper

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...

• Microfinance
• female entrepreneurship
• Wellbeing

Blog

by Gimelgo Xirinda December 2020

Like many developing countries, Mozambique is struggling with problems of poverty, inequality, low productivity, unemployment, and low institutional...

• Inclusive growth
• Mozambique

Working Paper

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...

• Implementation
• Information
• randomization

Blog

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...

• Economic growth
• Employees
• Equality and inequality

Working Paper

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...

• Foreign aid
• Democracy
• Systematic review

Working Paper

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...

• Female labour force participation
• Mexico
• Education

Report

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...

• Democracy aid
• Aid effectiveness
• Democracy

Working Paper

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...

• Gender
• Ghana
• Labour market

Working Paper

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...

• Income diversification
• Tanzania
• Livelihoods

Blog

As the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, developing nations are struggling to deliver economic assistance and public services to their...

• Tax-benefit microsimulation
• Tax-benefit policy
• Individual poverty

Technical Note

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...

• Multinational firms
• Foreign firms
• Tax data

Blog

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...

• Structural transformation
• Technology
• Developer's dilemma

Working Paper

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...

• International trade
• Manufacturing
• Transportation cost

Blog

Policy makers seeking inclusive growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural transformation, which is potentially...

• Structural transformation
• Economic inequality
• Economic development

Blog

To celebrate its 35th birthday, UNU-WIDER has looked back at some of its greatest achievements. As the year closes, Armida Alisjahbana, Kunal Sen...

• Structural transformation
• Economic inequality
• Economic development

Blog

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

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...

• child penalty
• event study
• female labour supply

Working Paper

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...

• Competitiveness
• Manufacturing
• Exports

Working Paper

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...

• Female labour force participation
• Ghana
• Decision making

Working Paper

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...

• Personal income tax
• Uganda
• Administrative data

Working Paper

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...

• Tax administration
• Small business
• Tax compliance

Working Paper

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...

• Inequality
• Growth
• Health

Working Paper

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...

• Remote sensing
• Natural disasters
• Urban

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Trust
• Africa

Working Paper

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...

• Labour force participation
• Formal
• Regression analysis

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Forecasting

Annual Lecture

• Social protection
• Social health insurance
• Latin America

Working Paper

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...

• Microsimulation
• Personal income tax
• Income distribution

Annual Lecture

• UN
• Multilateralism
• COVID-19

Blog

Tax abuse is an expensive business. According to a recent report by the Tax Justice Network, avoiding or evading tax deprives governments across the...

• Tax evasion
• Tax avoidance
• Human rights

Blog

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...

• Informality
• Labour rights
• Labour market outcomes

Blog

by Kunal Sen May 2021

Informality is a pervasive phenomenon in the labour markets of developing countries. Two billion workers, representing 61.2 per cent of the world’s...

• Informal poor
• Labour market outcomes
• Equality and inequality

Blog

Globalization has generally coincided with a rise in work outside the formal economy, intensifying job precarization — when high-quality, formal jobs...

• Precarity
• Labour market outcomes
• Informality

Blog

Youth (those aged 15–29) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face notoriously precarious employment prospects. Youth unemployment is the...

• Labour market outcomes
• Gender equality; Labour markets
• Informality

Blog

Informal activities are widespread in many developing countries. In many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries informal economic activities account for...

• Ethnic diversity
• Inequalities
• Informality

Working Paper

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...

• Dispute resolution
• Economic development
• Food supply

Working Paper

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...

• Clientelism
• Development
• Benefit programmes

Working Paper

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...

• Strategic environmental assessment
• Strategic planning
• Sustainable development

Working Paper

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...

• Top incomes
• Gender inequality
• Tax data

Working Paper

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...

• Information technology
• Informal sector
• Productivity

Working Paper

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...

• Social protection
• Informal work
• Bolivia

Working Paper

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...

• Occupations
• Wage inequality
• Education

Report

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

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...

• Global value chains
• Upgrading
• Apparel industry

Journal Article

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...

• Informality
• Labour market dynamics
• Sub-Saharan Africa

Working Paper

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...

• Conflict
• Livelihoods
• Structural transformation

Working Paper

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...

• Southern Africa
• COVID-19
• Economic policy

Technical Note

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...

• Data
• Inequality
• WIID

Technical Note

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...

• Inequality
• WIID
• Database

Technical Note

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...

• Income distribution
• Inequality
• WIID

Working Paper

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...

• Minimum wage
• Supply chains
• Firms

Blog

Although increasingly challenged, we often hear that being resource rich can adversely affect growth prospects. Here we concentrate instead on a...

Blog

At the start of the last decade, Mozambique’s prospects looked stellar. Following from the early 1990s, when peace finally arrived after a devastating...

• Foreign Direct Investment
• Foreign investments
• Natural resource management

Working Paper

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...

• Inequality
• Race
• Social networks

Working Paper

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...

• Brazil
• Income inequality
• Decomposition

Policy Brief

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...

• Female labour force participation
• Gender gap
• Employment

Background Note

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...

• Tax data
• Administrative data
• South Africa

Blog

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...

• Economic growth
• Labour
• Labour productivity

Blog

During the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• State

Working Paper

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...

• Formalization
• Small-scale mining
• Coordination incentives

Working Paper

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...

• vote-buying
• Clientelism
• Politics

Working Paper

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...

• Myanmar
• Tax reform
• Economic efficiency

Working Paper

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...

• Myanmar
• Child labour
• Education reform

Working Paper

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...

• Myanmar
• Agricultural technology
• Climate change

Blog

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

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...

• Difference-in-differences
• Employment
• event study

Working Paper

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...

• Personal income tax
• Structural VAR
• Instrumental variable

Working Paper

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...

• Equality and inequality
• Household survey
• Households

Working Paper

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...

• Wages
• Collective bargaining
• Monopsony

Working Paper

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...

• Marriage payments
• Shocks
• early marriage

Working Paper

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...

• Risk-based approach
• Tax compliance
• Tanzania

Book Chapter

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...

• Economic assistance and foreign aid
• Infrastructure (Economics)
• Millennium Development Goals

Working Paper

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...

• child penalty
• Childbirth
• event study

Policy Brief

• SMEs
• Tanzania
• Growth and employment

Blog

Household incomes in Ecuador were badly hit by the pandemic, despite the government’s emergency grant to families. H Xavier Jara Tamayo (University of...

• COVID-19
• Microsimulation
• Poverty

Working Paper

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...

• Social protection
• Tax-benefit microsimulation
• Income distribution

Technical Note

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...

• Tax-benefit microsimulation
• Poverty

Working Paper

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...

• Inequality
• Earnings
• Tax data

Working Paper

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...

• Banking
• Financial inclusion
• Access to credit

Working Paper

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...

• Health
• Social conflict
• War

Working Paper

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...

• Informal sector
• Income distribution
• Supply and demand

Blog

Coronavirus lockdowns brought the world to a standstill. Rules on hygiene and social distancing have reshaped daily life, schools and businesses had...

• COVID-19
• Lockdown
• Employment

Working Paper

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...

• Informal sector
• Regulation
• Spillovers

Working Paper

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...

• resource rent
• Tax revenue
• Institutions

Working Paper

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...

• Public expenditure
• impulse response
• Exchange rate

Working Paper

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...

• Financial constraints
• trade credit
• Employment

Working Paper

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...

• Inequality
• Behavioral economics
• Behaviour

Working Paper

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...

• Clientelism
• political competition
• Public policy

Blog

Democracy is having a hard time. In India, once the world’s largest democracy, the pandemic has hastened the country’s slide toward authoritarianism...

• Foreign aid
• Development aid
• Aid effectiveness

Journal Article

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...

• Brazil
• Internal migration
• Prices

Background Note

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...

• Decentralized governance
• Decentralization
• Governance

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• State

Working Paper

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...

• COVID-19
• Poverty
• Inequality

Working Paper

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)...

• COVID-19
• Multiplier analysis
• Social Accounting Matrix

Working Paper

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...

• The Caribbean
• Firm performance
• Gender gap

Working Paper

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...

• Firms
• Manufacturing
• Natural disasters

Policy Brief

• Income diversification
• Tanzania
• Livelihoods

Working Paper

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...

• Occupational choice
• Mozambique
• Personality traits

Journal Article

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...

• Brazil
• Crime
• Internal migration

Working Paper

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...

• Firms
• Natural disasters

Report

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...

• Business
• Firm survey
• Manufacturing firms

Working Paper

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...

• Gender
• Female labour force participation
• Ethiopia

Blog

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...

• Inequality
• Equality
• Economic inequality

Blog

by Timothy Shipp April 2021

I recently spoke to Catherine Gladwell, who is the Director and Founder of Refugee Education UK (formerly Refugee Support Network) and one of the...

• Inequalities
• Intersecting inequalities
• Refugees

Blog

The negative economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique range from reduced social interaction to business closures, job losses...

• Education
• Youth
• Employment

Blog

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...

• Inequality
• Tax administration data
• Tax expenditures

Blog

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...

• Group-based inequality
• Inequalities
• Anti-discrimination measures

Blog

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...

• South Africa
• Urban
• COVID-19

Working Paper

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)...

• Equality and inequality
• Regression analysis
• Rural development

Research Brief

• Inequality
• Income inequality
• Global inequality

Book

• Fragile states
• Inclusive growth
• Elites