Blog
Is Mozambique prepared for a lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic?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...
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...
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...
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...
The novel Covid-19 is affecting the advanced countries in the Western Hemisphere disproportionately more than developing countries. In this post, Basu...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
People who live through extreme events are, often deeply, altered by the experiences they have. Even when those experiences take place predominantly...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Millions of migrant workers around the world provide valuable income for their families and contribute more broadly to the economies of both their...
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...
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...
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...
Corporate taxation is at the heart of economic development, and cardiac failure looms if international tax reform is not made globally inclusive There...
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...
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...
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...
Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is often put forward as the solution to youth unemployment — but to prove its worth, better...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes an unprecedented shock for labour markets around the world. Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social...
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...
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...
Today, we see clear trends in developing countries of a potentially troubling ‘new normal’ for economic development. We see tertiarization with rising...
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...
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...
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...
The rush to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fight against the pandemic may be an opportunity for developing countries to accelerate the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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’...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The opening keynote of the recent WIDER Development Conference, COVID-19 and development – effects and new realities for the Global South, was given...
In introducing Staffan Lindberg’s keynote at the WIDER Development Conference, UNU-WIDER Senior Research Fellow and political scientist Rachel...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
In summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and...
Around the world, the pandemic, and the measures taken to address it, have had far reaching effects on poverty, inequality, and governance. And even...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
At the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, world leaders discussed the need to scale-up ambition to address key global challenges...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Among the many things said about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the description by the President of the UN General Assembly’s 70th...
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...
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...
This month, a partnership between UNU-WIDER and the Groningen Growth and Development Center (GGDC) brings a new database on economic transformation...
More accurate estimates of inequality trends allow us to measure progress towards achieving reductions in inequality within and between countries...
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...
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...
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...
Agriculture and agro-processing value chains have been under pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been particularly marked where they...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In most countries, traditional gender roles within the household are still common due to the prevalence and persistence of patriarchal systems. These...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Investments in infrastructure – such as roads – typically aim to reduce transport costs, stimulate trade, and make new production activities viable...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
One of the most critical challenges in international development today is to understand how best to support peace, security, economic recovery, and...
One of the most pressing challenges in development policy is to bring about rapid, sustained, and inclusive growth in developing countries. Apart from...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Civil wars leave enduring legacies for social networks, political identities, preferences, and attitudes. Their impacts on public perceptions of peace...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Globally, around 250 million children under the age of five do not meet key development milestones, which reduces their ability to reach their full...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
As COVID-19 ravages international trade and production, policy-makers are shifting their sights from global value chains (GVCs) to regional value...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Like many developing countries, Mozambique is struggling with problems of poverty, inequality, low productivity, unemployment, and low institutional...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
As the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, developing nations are struggling to deliver economic assistance and public services to their...
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...
Technological catch-up is bringing new asynchronies to development pathways. What does this mean for employment, globalization, and inequality? A...
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...
Policy makers seeking inclusive growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural transformation, which is potentially...
To celebrate its 35th birthday, UNU-WIDER has looked back at some of its greatest achievements. As the year closes, Armida Alisjahbana, Kunal Sen...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Tax abuse is an expensive business. According to a recent report by the Tax Justice Network, avoiding or evading tax deprives governments across the...
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 is a pervasive phenomenon in the labour markets of developing countries. Two billion workers, representing 61.2 per cent of the world’s...
Globalization has generally coincided with a rise in work outside the formal economy, intensifying job precarization — when high-quality, formal jobs...
Youth (those aged 15–29) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face notoriously precarious employment prospects. Youth unemployment is the...
Informal activities are widespread in many developing countries. In many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries informal economic activities account for...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Although increasingly challenged, we often hear that being resource rich can adversely affect growth prospects. Here we concentrate instead on a...
At the start of the last decade, Mozambique’s prospects looked stellar. Following from the early 1990s, when peace finally arrived after a devastating...
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...
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...
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...
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...
From 2000-2014, like many other sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya experienced high growth, at an average of 4.37 percent. Unfortunately, the 2007...
During the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and...
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...
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...
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 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 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...
Researchers and policymakers have long asked whether rural households in Africa diversify their income to spread risk or by seizing opportunities to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Household incomes in Ecuador were badly hit by the pandemic, despite the government’s emergency grant to families. H Xavier Jara Tamayo (University of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Coronavirus lockdowns brought the world to a standstill. Rules on hygiene and social distancing have reshaped daily life, schools and businesses had...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Democracy is having a hard time. In India, once the world’s largest democracy, the pandemic has hastened the country’s slide toward authoritarianism...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
There is a growing need to understand income inequality trends and how they interplay with other social, economic, and political outcomes, both at the...
I recently spoke to Catherine Gladwell, who is the Director and Founder of Refugee Education UK (formerly Refugee Support Network) and one of the...
The negative economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique range from reduced social interaction to business closures, job losses...
Tax benefits to boost contributions into pension funds or pension-related tax expenditures (PTEs) are used widely by governments worldwide to address...
Caste in India plays an instrumental role in determining access to education, jobs, public spaces, and social networks. For instance, despite state...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...