Journal Special Issue
The New Economy in Growth and Development
The benefits from the New Economy should accrue as improvements in productivity and economic growth. But while the use of information and communication technology (ICT) seems to have had a substantial impact on the performance of the United States...
Working Paper
Reform, Stabilization Policies, and Economic Adjustment in Poland
The mechanism and dynamics of the recent economic developments in Poland determine the mechanism and the implementation methods for adjustment programmes and stabilization policies. The syndrome of crisis phenomena in Poland is composed of three...
Working Paper
Understanding the African Growth Record
The current paper, first, finds that although the post-independence growth of African economies has fallen substantially below that of other regions, this comparative evidence is less than uniform across time and countries. Second, it uncovers total...
Working Paper
The Road to the Market in North Korea
North Korea's economic reform began in the mid-1980s. It was motivated by the increasing seriousness of the problems typical of centrally planned socialist economies.In general, the country's reforms have so far been limited both in scope and depth...
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship and human development
We provide a formal model of entrepreneurship in human development. The framework is provided by the capabilities approach (CA). Hence we extend not only the conceptualisation of entrepreneurship in development, but the reach of the CA into...
Working Paper
Gender Aspects of Urban Economic Growth and Development
The urbanization process is frequently shaped by prevailing constructions of gender. The recognition of this phenomenon is vital both in diagnosis and policy terms. This paper aims at illustrating the importance of gender in three major related...
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship is Not a Binding Constraint on Growth and Development in the Poorest Countries
Many economists claim that entrepreneurship is an important determinant of economic growth and development. In the sub-discipline of development economics however, entrepreneurship is largely absent from explanations of growth and development. This...
Working Paper
Viet Nam
In analyzing Viet Nam's recent economic adjustments, this paper attempts to distinguish events and policies that are properly assigned to the transition effort (defined as the process of increasing the market determination of economic outcomes) and...
Journal Article
A note on modelling economic growth determinants in the Dominican Republic
The article models economic growth determinants in the Dominican Republic. The exercise considers a panel of 25 candidate explanatory variables observed during the last three decades of the twentieth century. The time series are selected on the basis...
Working Paper
User Fees, Expenditure Restructuring and Voucher Systems in Education
The analysis of the optimal funding of education is complicated by the numerous and serious market failures which are likely to characterize a free market for education. Prominent amongst these are the likely external benefits of education, stressed...
Working Paper
The Political Economy of Complex Humanitarian Emergencies
This paper develops and tests five hypotheses regarding the economic causes of complex humanitarian emergencies (CHEs). We argue that: (1) such emergencies, involving large-scale deaths and population displacements, are most likely to occur when...
Working Paper
Decentralization and the Provision and Financing of Social Services
This paper is the fruit of an attempt to distinguish the elements, present in a fiscal decentralization process, that are likely to contribute to efficiency enhancement in the provision of social services in developing countries. From the...
Working Paper
The Investment Decline in Transition Economies
All centrally planned economies suffered from over-investment. Due to low capital productivity, reasonable growth rates in output could be maintained only with high investment/GDP ratios. Nevertheless, the sharp reduction in investment during...
Working Paper
The Process of Economic Change
A good deal is known about what makes for successful economic development, but very little is known about how to get there - that entails an understanding of the process of economic change. The paper first examines the sources of successful growth...
Working Paper
A Review of Welfare Changes in Asian Transitional Economies
In examining the welfare situation, this paper explores the relationship between economic changes and social development in Asian transition economies. Under the central planning system, achievements in human development in these countries were...
Working Paper
Poverty Alleviation during the Transition in Rural China
According to information issued at the World Food Summit held in Rome in 1996, about one fifth of the world's population is now living under the poverty line, and this number is increase by 25 million people in developing countries every year. For...
Working Paper
The Liberalization of Foreign Exchange Markets and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper analyses the rationale of interventions in foreign exchange markets in Sub- Saharan Africa and reviews exchange rate theory and balance of payments management and its application to African countries. It analyses the liberalization of...
Working Paper
External Liberalization, Economic Performance, and Distribution in Latin America and Elsewhere
As seen from the year 2001, economic policy in developing and post-socialist economies during the preceding 10-15 years had one dominating theme - external 'liberalization' or the drastic lowering or removal of long-standing barriers to almost all...
Working Paper
Does Educational Achievement Help to Explain Income Inequality?
In this paper we propose to measure the inequality of educational achievements by constructing a Gini index on educational attainments. We then use the proposed measure to analyse the relationship between inequality in incomes and educational...
Working Paper
Growth, Structural Change and Inequality
The impressive economic growth record of Thailand before 1997 was dominated by the increasing importance of modem industrialization, as well as the expansion of other sectors. This occurred at the expense of agriculture, which accounts for the...
Working Paper
The Impact of Financial Liberalization and the Rise of Financial Rents on Income Inequality
This study attempts to investigate and assess the impact of financial liberalization and the ongoing rise of financial rents on income distribution in the post-1980 Turkish economy. Our quantitative investigation of the dynamics of macroeconomic...
Working Paper
Reducing Poverty and Inequality in India
This study examines the empirical relationship among inequality, poverty and economic growth in India. Using data on consumption from the 13th to the 53rd Rounds of the National Sample Survey, the author computes, for both rural and urban sectors...
Working Paper
Land Ownership Inequality and the Income Distribution Consequences of Economic Growth
While unequal land ownership has a role to play in explaining historically high levels of income inequality, this paper asks what role agrarian structure plays in explaining contemporary trends of increasing income inequality. Using a Gini...
Working Paper
Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries
This paper reviews main S&D provisions for developing countries under the GATT-WTO trading system and discusses issues relating to the future of S&D treatment from the perspective of the least-developed countries (LDCs). It argues that negotiations...
Working Paper
New Paradigms on Ownership of the Firm
This paper establishes a theoretical framework for the ongoing research project of UNU/WIDBR on Property Rights Regimes, Microeconomic Incentives and Development. It identifies the major research interests, questions, and focuses. The theoretical...
Book Chapter
Aid to Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Working Paper
Globalization, Marginalization and Development
This paper surveys issues related to globalization, and the obstacles to the successful integration of vulnerable economies. For many developing countries, the positive benefits of the increased globalization that has been taking place since around...
Working Paper
Information Technology and Economic Growth
This paper explores the impacts of information technology investment on economic growth in a cross-section of 39 countries in the period 1980-95 by applying an explicit model of economic growth, the augmented version of the neoclassical (Solow)...
Book Chapter
Agriculture, Growth, and Development in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.Africa has achieved a much-improved agricultural and economic growth performance over the last 15 years. During 2003-2010 the agricultural sector grew at an annual average rate of almost...
Book Chapter
The Economics of Malaria
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
Capacity Development for Transformation
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
Innovation Capabilities for Sustainable Development in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
China-Africa Cooperation in Structural Transformation
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Journal Special Issue
The New Economy in Europe, 1992–2001
Despite the fast catching up in the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) experienced by most EU countries in the last few years, information technologies have so far delivered few productivity gains in Europe. In the second...
Book Chapter
Gender, Economic Growth, and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
The Economics of Happiness and Anger in North Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Book Chapter
Employment, Unemployment, and Underemployment in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Book Chapter
The Impact of Democracy on Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1982-2012
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Book Chapter
Informality, Growth and Development in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Working Paper
A Russian Puzzle
This paper seeks to explain, why Russian (and CIS) economic transformation was neither a shock therapy nor a gradual transition case, but instead followed a sort of middle ground inconsistent shock therapy path. It is argued that there were some...
Working Paper
Dealing with Capital Inflows
We have now witnessed more than half a decade of relatively heavy capital inflows to a large group of highly heterogeneous developing countries and economies in transition in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Former Soviet Union, Latin America, and parts of...
Working Paper
Long-Term Growth and Welfare in Transitional Economies
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
Working Paper
A Land Cursed by its Wealth?
In Angola, the availability of two abundant resources (oil and diamonds) has prolonged the conflict beyond its Cold War context. The geography and political economy of these resources were crucial to the course taken by the conflict. Matching the...
Working Paper
Selecting Priorities for Poverty Reduction and Human Development
Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. At least 45 per cent of the population cannot meet their minimum basic needs. Human development indicators are amongst Africa's worst, including a very high level of illiteracy. The country was...
Working Paper
Regional Development and Government Policy In China's Transitional Economy
This paper examines the causes and consequences of the increase in regional disparities in China during its economic transition towards a 'socialist market economy'. Part 1 seeks to explain why the 'Core' provinces in southeast China have...
Working Paper
The Change of the Financial System and Developmental State in Korea
This study examines the role of institutions and their change related to the rapid economic development and the 1997 Korean financial crisis. In Korea, the government built a state-led financial system through the 1960s and 1970s and a specific...
Blog
Development, democracy and cohesion: Critical essays with insights on Sierra Leone and wider Africa contexts
by
Yusuf Bangura
March 2016
African countries face huge challenges in building democratic and cohesive societies that will enhance the wellbeing of their citizens. Even after...
Working Paper
The IMF Model and Resource-Abundant Transition Economies
The IMF model of the economic transition stresses the role of macro policy reform. It concludes that rapid reform to a market economy is preferable to slow reform because late reformers experience very steep transition recessions and severe...
Working Paper
Development Discountinuities
The development literature considers associations an important economic development tool that allows producers to pursue their economic welfare collectively and through participatory means. This paper comparatively analyses the experience of three...
Working Paper
A Macroeconomic Model of a Developing Country Endowed with a Natural Resource
The present paper presents a short-run theoretical macroeconomic model of the type suggested in Sachs (1996), attempting to differentiate economic development in East Asia with Latin America. Latin America, when compared to East Asia is said to...
Working Paper
Resource-Led Growth - A Long-Term Perspective
Resource-Led Growth - A Long-Term Perspective surveys the 1870-1914 experience of growth in resource-rich economies: the so-called regions of recent settlement, some tropical countries and some mineral-based export economies. First, three contrasting...
Working Paper
Inequality in Income and Access to Education
In the current debate on the relationship between inequality in income distribution and growth one of the possible link works through the access to education. After reviewing this debate, a formal model shows how the imperfection of financial markets...
Working Paper
The Weightless Economy in Economic Development
Can the increasing significance of knowledge-products in national income— the growing weightless economy—influence economic development? Those technologies reduce “distance” between consumers and knowledge production. This paper analyzes a model...
Working Paper
Economic Reform in the USSR
The subject of economic reform is probably as large as the problems with which it has to deal. In order to understand why such a reform became necessary after 70 years of socialist development, it is essential to see it in historical perspective.
Working Paper
Aspects of Transition
The six studies, selected from those contributed to the research project entitled The Integration of the New Market Economies of Europe and Asia into the World Economy: the Changing Internal and External Factors and Global Implications, open with...
Working Paper
Real Exchange Rate Policy and Non-Traditional Exports in Developing Countries
In this paper I estimate a non-traditional export performance equation for a panel of 60 developing countries. As an input to the export model, I also estimate a panel regression model of the real exchange rate (RER) for the same countries. The RER...
Working Paper
Resource Abundance and Economic Development
Since the 1960s the resource-rich developing economies have under-performed compared with the resource-deficient economies. This paper explains why and outlines the reforms that are required in order to achieve environmentally and socially...
Working Paper
Information Technology and Economic Development
There is substantial evidence that new information technologies are in many ways transforming the operations of modern economies. More than half of employees use a computer at work in the most advanced industrial countries. About 10 per cent of the...
Working Paper
The Role of Knowledge and Capital in Economic Growth
This paper discusses new ideas in growth theory focusing on how to make sustained growth feasible. It first reviews models that broadened the notion of capital to include human capital and the state of technology. The paper next surveys models which...
Working Paper
Selective Policies for Export Promotion
This paper considers the rationale for and limitations to selective export promotion policies in developing countries, with a focus on manufactured exports. It draws upon the experience of the most successful exporters in the developing world - the...
Working Paper
Towards the Abyss?
Towards the Abyss? The Political Economy of Emergency in Haiti analyzes the various factors that have contributed to create a protracted humanitarian emergency situation in Haiti. The first section deals with the economic causes, the interplay...
Working Paper
Contribution Possible De L'excédent Japonais Au Développement Économique Mondial
1. La communauté internationale doit mettre au point des methodes permettant de soutenir la croissance japonaise afin d'attenuer les effets de l'essoufflement americain et d'enrayer toute amorce de deflation mondiale.2. Alors que certaines des...
Journal Article
Is Economic Volatility Detrimental to Global Sustainability?
In a dynamic panel data model allowing for error cross-section dependence, output volatility is found to impede sustainable development. Through a financial development channel (liquidity liability ratio), output volatility exerts a significant...
Journal Article
Exploring regional and gender disparities in Beninese primary school attendance
DHS data is combined with school supply statistics to study primary school attendance in the 2005–06 school year in Benin, a country that has seen almost unparalleled increases in attendance since the 1990s. Results of a logistic regression model...
Working Paper
Why Humanitarian Emergencies Occur
This paper provides a beginning toward explaining why humanitarian emergencies have been so substantial in the post-cold war era, a period expected to be less violent. The humanitarian emergencies of the contemporary period tend to be state-centred...
Journal Article
The Effects of the Value-Added Tax on Revenue and Inequality
This paper examines the impact of the introduction of the value-added tax on inequality and government revenues using newly released macro data. We present both conventional country fixed effect regressions and instrumental variable analyses, where...
Working Paper
Oil Driven Macroeconometric Model of Kuwait
Kuwait is a well endowed, small and open economy. In this economy the Government is the owner of the bulk of the wealth. Its wealth comes basically from underground oil and oil-accumulated assets. Since there is virtually no tax, the government...
Blog
Industrial clusters: Who benefits?
Manufacturing production in both developed and developing economies tends to be highly geographically concentrated in cities and industrial clusters...
Blog
Understanding FDI spillover mechanisms
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has been praised as an important development tool, especially for countries at low levels of industrial development...
Journal Special Issue
Fiscal Policy, State Building and Economic Development
This journal presents a synopsis of the contextual conditions, factors and challenges under which the recent evolution of tax systems has taken place, as an introduction to this United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics...
Blog
Bringing in Public Economics – An Interview with Jukka Pirttilä
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
March 2014
29 March 2014 Quite a few prominent Finnish economists have been collaborating with UNU-WIDER throughout the years. One of them is Jukka Pirttilä, who...
Blog
The Present Development Debate and Beyond
Finn Tarp The current global development agenda is centred on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), established at the turn of the Millennium. They...
Blog
Jobs Drive Development: An interview with Martin Rama
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
January 2013
15 January 2013Martin Rama from The World bank discusses the process behind the World Development Report 2013 on jobs, which he directed.He emphasises...
Blog
A New Agenda for a New World
by
Gunilla Carlsson
June 2013
24 June 2013 Minister Gunilla Carlson Like every political agenda, the post-2015 agenda must be firmly based in a reality check. The current...
Blog
Microcredit and Poverty Alleviation: Can Microcredit Close the Deal?
by
M. G. Quibria
October 2012
M.G. Quibria In the wake of the worst famine of Bangladesh of the post-World War era Professor Muhammad Yunus launched a microcredit experiment in...
Blog
Millennium Development Goals in Turbulent Times: Emerging Challenges for Post-2015 MDGs
by
Rolph van der Hoeven, Peter van Bergeijk
June 2012
Rolph van der Hoeven and Peter van Bergeijk One of the most important trends that emerged since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)...
Blog
Redefining Poverty in China and India: What Does This Mean for the Fight Against Global Poverty? Part I
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But...
Blog
Redefining Poverty in China and India: Making Growth more Inclusive, Part 2
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But...
Blog
Reflecting Change: The Second Edition of ‘From Poverty to Power’
by
Duncan Green
November 2012
Duncan Green Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose the...
Blog
Research Entering the Policy Domain
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
September 2012
Carl-Gustav Lindén The research project ReCom-Research and Communication on foreign aid, which is co-ordinated by UNU-WIDER with funding from the...
Blog
Urbanization and Development in Asia: Linkages with Globalization and Migration
by
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen
June 2012
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen The Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, was the venue for the launch on 16 June 2012 of the just...
Blog
Africa's Failure to Industrialize: Bad Luck or Bad Policy?
by
John Page
December 2014
16 December 2014 John Page On 20 November 2014 the United Nations celebrated the 25th Africa Industrialization Day. But perhaps ‘celebrate’ is not...
Blog
Africa’s Low Hanging Fruits
by
Justin Lin, Yan Wang
April 2014
23 April 2014 Justin Yifu Lin and Yan Wang At the onset of its miraculous rise in 1979, China had been trapped in poverty for centuries and was poorer...
Journal Article
IMF and Economic Reform in Developing Countries
In this paper we assess the IMF approach to economic reform in developing countries. The impact of IMF program participation on economic growth has been evaluated empirically in a cross-country literature, with little evidence of IMF programs having...
Policy Brief
Enhancing Development through Policy Coherence
Policy coherence implies that donors in pursuing domestic policy objectives should avoid adversely affecting the development prospects of poor countries. To achieve policy coherence donors and multilateral institutions need to ensure security and...
Journal Article
Property Rights and Productivity
This paper explores the effect of land titling on agricultural productivity in Vietnam and the productivity effects of single versus joint titling for husband and wife. Using a plot-fixed-effects approach our results show that obtaining a land title...
Journal Article
Weather Shocks and Cropland Decisions in Rural Mozambique
Economic development in low income settings is often associated with an expansion of higher-value agricultural activities. Since these activities often bring new risks, an understanding of cropland decisions and how these interact with shocks is...
Blog
What’s in a Name?: Human Rights, Human Development, and Human Dignity
by
David L. Richards
December 2012
David L. Richards Over the past decades, the terms ‘human rights’ and ‘human development’ have been characterized as being: complementary to one...
Blog
The Macroeconomic Management of Foreign Aid
by
Tony Addison, Tseday Jemaneh Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott,
Finn Tarp, Tuuli Paukkeri
January 2012
Tony Addison, Tseday Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott, Finn Tarp, Tuuli Ylinen To meet development objectives, aid recipients and their donor...
Research Brief
A colonial legacy?
The presence of European colonial powers in Africa has left a long-lasting legacy that has severely impacted their development trajectories. But what are the lingering effects of colonization on economic performance, in particular with regard to...
Blog
Interview with David Richards – How to Measure Human Development?
21 September 2012 The intricate dynamic between foreign aid to Africa, democratic transitions and consolidation is the topic of a series of research...
Blog
Green Growth: A Win-Win Approach to Sustainable Development?
by
Danielle Resnick, James Thurlow
June 2012
Danielle Resnick and James Thurlow The concept of ‘green growth’ is one which has understandable political currency, highlighted by its prominence in...
Blog
From The Editor's Desk (October 2012)
Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (March 2012)
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (June-July 2012)
Tony Addison I started writing this ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ in Accra, to the sound of an African drum band, preparing for a ceremony to mark the...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (January 2012)
Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The...
Blog
From The Editor's Desk (December 2012)
Tony Addison This year has rushed by at speed. For UNU-WIDER it’s been a year of big successes. We will have published some 110 working papers by the...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (August 2012)
Tony Addison With this issue, Angle returns refreshed from its Nordic summer break. The sun continues to shine on the Baltic, although it is getting...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (April 2012)
Tony Addison With our temperatures now well above zero, we head for the official end of the Finnish winter on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday). As...
Blog
Climate Change and Development Policy
by
James Thurlow
November 2012
James Thurlow UNU-WIDER recently hosted an international conference on ‘Climate Change and Development Policy’. We were motivated by the apparent...
Blog
Climate Change and Development Policy: Competing Aims?
by
Yongfu Huang
September 2012
Yongfu Huang The climate change crisis and development needs of the world's poor require us to acknowledge the necessity and urgency for both...
Blog
The Chilean Development Model and the Limits of Neoliberal Economics
by
Andrés Solimano
May 2012
Andrés Solimano Chile underwent a free market revolution initiated by the Pinochet regime in the 1970s and 1980s. A very similar model, with some...
Blog
The Big Picture: Aid, Growth, and Macroeconomic Management
Lucy Scott and Annett Victorero The ReCom—Research and Communication on Foreign Aid programme held its first results meeting on the topic of ‘Aid...
Blog
The View from Buenos Aires
Tony Addison A visit to Buenos Aires in September provided a good vantage point to look at the euro zone’s deepening crisis. Angle readers will recall...
Blog
Understanding Life in Poverty
by
Milla Nyyssölä
September 2011
Milla Nyyssölä Behavioural economics, an approach combining the insights of psychology and economics, is coming to the fore in development economics...
Blog
Surprises Ahead?
Tony Addison With six months remaining till the end of 2011, it’s time to take a peek into the near future. What can we expect? John Kenneth Galbraith...
Blog
Resilient People, Fragile Governance: The Success of Bangladesh so Far (Part I)
by
Lucy Scott
November 2011
Lucy Scott Bangladesh has made some remarkable strides in development and poverty reduction since independence. Yet the country is in many ways a...
Blog
From the Editor's desk (October 2011)
Tony Addison As autumn moves into winter in Helsinki, it is time to bring you the October edition of UNU-WIDER’s newsletter, WIDER Angle. Regular...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (December 2011)
Tony Addison With the end of the year fast approaching, we bring you the last Angle of 2011. Here in Helsinki, the shortest day of the year is nearly...
Blog
A Commentary on Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (ed. Wim Naudé)
by
Robert J. Strom
April 2011
Robert J. Strom Interest in the study of entrepreneurship has flourished among scholars in recent years. This research has brought to light, among...
Blog
What Can Developing Countries Learn From Finland’s Industrial Transformation?
by
Markus Jäntti, Juhana Vartiainen
October 2009
Markus Jäntti and Juhana Vartiainen Finland is an example of a late but successful state-led industrialization that was carried out rapidly. The...
Blog
China and India’s Development Strategies: Lessons for Developing Countries
by
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino, Guanghua Wan
October 2010
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan China and India have become global economic powers. Even at the market exchange rate, China overtook Japan...
Blog
Vulnerability in Developing Countries
by
Wim Naudé, Amelia U. Santos-Paulino, Mark McGillivray
September 2009
Wim Naudé, Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Mark McGillivray The global economic crisis, which erupted about one year ago with the US sub-prime mortgage...
Journal Article
Institutions and African Economies
This article presents an overview of the current special issue ‘Institutions and African Economies’. The findings include: (1) greater prevalence of democratic regimes improved both agricultural productivity and the overall growth of African...
Journal Special Issue
FDI, Employment, and Growth in China and India
The project centers on the inter-linkages between the major developing countries of Brazil, India, China and South Africa and the global economy, with a special emphasis on the implications of China's growth on smaller economies and the rest of the...
Blog
The Challenge of Small Island Developing States
by
Wim Naudé, Mark McGillivray, Amelia U. Santos-Paulino
July 2010
Wim Naudé, Mark McGillivray and Amelia U. Santos-Paulino A vital part of WIDER's research agenda has in recent years focused on the challenges faced...
Journal Special Issue
Development Aid
Following on WIDER's work on Development Finance which has involved three projects since 2002, a development conference on 'Aid: Principles, Policies and Performance' was organized in June 2006. Aid is one of the most challenging development issues...
Report
Aid in a Post-2015 World
The ReCom – Research and Communication on Foreign Aid – programme produced 247 original studies. More than 300 researchers from 59 countries came together and provided evidence on what does and could work in development, and what can be transferred...
Working Paper
Ghana
Ghana is relatively rare among Sub-Saharan African countries in having had sustained positive growth every year since the mid-1980s. This paper analyses the nature of the growth and then presents an analysis of the evolution of both consumption...
Working Paper
Growth and Poverty Reduction in Tanzania
After many years of relatively slow growth, Tanzania’s national accounts data report accelerated aggregate growth since around 2000. Our analysis shows that there has been somewhat slower growth in private consumption and in sectors such as...
Working Paper
A Quest for Institutional Foundations Towards Inclusive Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
The paper explores the paths towards building institutional foundations for inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewing institutional configurations as a system of multiple equilibria, the concepts of endogenous institutions and...
Working Paper
Aid, education policy, and development
This paper discusses the recent history of education aid policy. It highlights an important shift in policy thinking in the international aid architecture that has dominated the global education aid agenda since the early 1990s. It argues that...
Working Paper
An Uncertainty Approach to Modelling Climate Change Risk in South Africa
This study represents the first attempt at an integrated approach to assessing the potential impacts of climate change on the national economy of South Africa via a number of (but not necessarily all) impact channels. The study focuses on outcomes by...
Working Paper
Mozambique
Since 1994, a great deal has been accomplished. We argue that poverty reduction was temporarily sidelined in the 2000s. A series of shocks, especially the fuel and food price crisis of 2008, combined with poor productivity growth in agriculture and a...
Blog
Climate Change Adds to Risks in North Africa
by
Imed Drine
September 2011
Imed Drine The climate change threat North Africa is going through a turbulent year. With much of the focus on political transition, there is a danger...
Blog
Beyond the Urban Tipping Point
by
Jo Beall, Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Ravi Kanbur
September 2011
Jo Beall, Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, and Ravi Kanbur By many estimates, the world has just crossed the point where more than half the global population...
Policy Brief
Inequality, Growth and Poverty in the Era of Liberalization and Globalization
This policy brief reports the main findings of the study on changes in within-country income inequality over the last two decades and on the links between poverty, inequality, and growth. It focuses on inequality at the national level, i.e. the...
Policy Brief
Mobilizing Talent for Global Development
Talent (combining creativity, education, skills, and knowledge) is associated with human capital and provides a very valuable economic resource. In the past, the emigration of human capital from developing countries raised fears because of the...
Policy Brief
Linking Globalization to Poverty in Asia, Latin America and Africa
Despite the enormous potential of globalization in accelerating economic growth through greater integration into the world economy the impact of globalization on poverty reduction has been uneven. Asia has been the major beneficiary of globalization...
Policy Brief
Promoting Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries
This policy brief provides some fresh perspectives on the relationship between entrepreneurship and development, and considers policy design issues. It reports on the UNU-WIDER two-year research project 'Promoting Entrepreneurial Capacity', which...
Policy Brief
The Global Impact of the Southern Engines of Growth
This Policy Brief focuses on links between the developing countries of Brazil, India, China and South Africa and the global economy, with a special emphasis on the implications of China’s spectacular growth on developing economies and the rest of the...
Journal Special Issue
Entrepreneurship, Developing Countries and Development Economics
We are pleased to announce a Special Issue of the Small Business Economics Journal on Entrepreneurship, Developing Countries and Development Economics, guest edited by Wim Naudé. With more than a billion people living in absolute poverty it is of...
Journal Special Issue
Explaining Violent Conflict
Recent years have seen a surge of research into the causes of conflict together with its development effects, as well as the design of peace initiatives, peace-keeping and programmes of reconstruction, reconciliation and democratization in ‘post...
Journal Special Issue
Conflict and Peace-building
Reconstruction from conflict is a complex and demanding task, and a major challenge for the UN system as well as the wider donor community. National authorities and their donor partners are faced with multiple priorities - rebuilding infrastructure...
Research Brief
Clustering, competition, and spillover effects in Cambodia
What types of businesses benefit or suffer due to geographic clustering? Data available from Cambodia on competition and spillovers—at both village- and commune-level—is useful to answer a number of questions about the effects of clustering and the...
Research Brief
Measures of inequality
The majority of income inequality occurs at the tails of the income distribution The Gini coefficient does not provide a representative measure of income inequality When the top 10% of income earners expand their share of national income it often...
Blog
Building on success in development aid
In academic discourse, it has become almost ritualistic to begin a piece on foreign aid by highlighting the sharp controversies over its effectiveness...
Journal Special Issue
Well-being Achievements in Pacific Asia
Summary measures of human well-being are increasingly used to compare and monitor performance within and across countries. The UNDP's Human Development Index (HDI) is one of a number of measures which have done much to refocus attention on the...
Journal Special Issue
FDI to Developing Countries
As one of globalisation's most visible dimensions, foreign direct investment (FDI) is central to the prospects for developing countries in the world economy. Key issues include the direction of causation between FDI and growth, the potential role of...
Journal Special Issue
Policy Arena: Small Island Developing States
This Policy Arena examines some of the development challenges faced by SIDS. It brings together a collection of papers arising from the UNU-WIDER project Fragility and Development. These investigations were presented at the UNU-WIDER project meeting...
Journal Special Issue
The Rise of China and India
There has been considerable media coverage of China’s trade and financial activities, on India’s emergence as a technology and innovation hub, and on the commerce and investment interactions between China, India, Brazil, and South Africa and other...
Journal Special Issue
Focus
This Focus is devoted to small islands' development challenges, specifically relating to the achievement of economic growth, and draws on five papers arising from the UNU-WIDER 'Fragility and Development' research project meeting held in Fiji in...
Journal Special Issue
South-South and North-South Trade Agreements
In this special issue, five articles address some of the challenges associated with integrating an existing S-S regional agreement with a new template that results from block negotiations with a northern partner. The compatibility issues this raises...
Journal Special Issue
Entrepreneurship and Conflict
Entrepreneurs are often adversely affected by violent conflict such as civil war. At the same time though entrepreneurs may contribute to or even benefit from violent conflict and other ‘destructive’ and ‘unproductive’ activities that limit economic...
Journal Special Issue
Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
This Special Issue brings together papers from UNU-WIDER Conference on Poverty and Behavioural Economics that were accepted after the peer review process of the journal. The eight papers in this Special Issue all share the objective of exploring the...
Book Chapter
Foreign Aid and Development
With entries from leading international scholars from around the world, this eight-volume encyclopedia offers the widest possible coverage of key areas both regionally and globally. The International Encyclopedia of Political Science provides a...
Book Chapter
The Political Economy of Green Growth
Much of the debate on green growth and environmental governance tends to be general in nature, and is often conceptual or limited to single disciplines. Even though recent discussions on these topics have benefited from the accumulation of empirical...
Journal Article
Impact of the Global Financial and Economic Crisis on Development
The global economic crisis beginning in 2008 has come at an inopportune time for Africa. Economic growth had recovered, poverty had declined, and human development had improved. Then the crisis hit. Growth then fell by 60 per cent. The growth decline...
Journal Article
Economy-Wide Implications of Energy Build Plans
We introduce a linked modeling framework based on existing computable general equilibrium and energy planning models for South Africa. The combined model provides for a more accurate assessment of the macroeconomic impacts of detailed energy build...
Journal Article
Climate Change and Economic Growth Prospects for Malawi
Malawi confronts a growth and development imperative that it must meet in a context characterised by rising temperatures and deep uncertainty about trends in precipitation. This article evaluates the potential implications of climate change for...
Journal Special Issue
Land and Property Rights
This special issue of the Journal of Development Economics originates from a UNU-WIDER research project on land inequality and decentralized governance in LDCs. The research began in late 2010 with Dilip Mookherjee and Pranab Bardhan jointly...
Journal Special Issue
Female Entrepreneurship Across Countries and in Development
In this article we provide an introduction to the papers in the special section of this edition of the European Journal of Development Research. We start by framing the challenges posed by female entrepreneurship to the research community, note some...
Journal Special Issue
Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Fast-growing developing countries have emerged as an important destination and source of trade, investments and technology. Furthermore, trade between developing countries has grown rapidly over the last decades, and is becoming more diversified...
Working Paper
Institutional and policy adjustments to implement Free Trade Agreements with the European Union
Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) between the European Union (EU) and trade partners go far beyond mere elimination of tariffs to include such diverse issues as non-tariff barriers, competition legislation, investment protection, and more. Implementing...
Working Paper
Is There a Brazilian Model of Development?
Brazil’s recent growth has been intensely pro-poor, and both poverty and inequality have declined significantly in the last decade. It has been suggested that Brazil’s unexpected successes are the outcome of a new model of development. The paper...
Working Paper
Varieties of Capitalists?
Political scientists have generally seen two key features of African political economies—a relatively small or absent middle class, and a middle class that is unusually embedded in the state—as key explanations of the troubled political and economic...
Working Paper
Social Transfers and Growth
The effects of social transfers on growth are still unclear. The limitations of aggregated data at sub-national levels have confined the analysis to the use of simulation models and household surveys. As an alternative, this paper contributes to the...
Working Paper
Young People, Agriculture, and Employment in Rural Africa
This paper examines the current interest in addressing the problem of young people’s unemployment in Africa through agriculture. Using notions of transitions and mobilities we set out a transformative work and opportunity space framework that...
Working Paper
Health Effects of Market-Based Reforms in Developing Countries
Radical and simultaneous economic reforms were implemented in many developing countries, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many of these reforms - structural adjustment programmes - were implemented with...
Working Paper
Regionalization in Southern Africa
This state of the art paper reviews literature published up to the end of 1994 on economic, security and environmental regionalization in southern Africa. In the field of economic regionalization a distinction is made between three main integration...
Working Paper
Impacts of Africa's Growing Debt on its Growth
The main theme of this manuscript is to demonstrate that growth in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries has continued to decline under the burden of the foreign debt over the last fifteen years. After a decade of painful lost growth, the continent...
Working Paper
Structural Adjustment in Africa
The main purpose of this paper is to argue that Ghana's economic recovery under SAP would have been much brighter if policy makers had not made some obvious errors in the application of the theory of 'comparative advantage' and in the selection...
Blog
Income generation and malaria in Uganda
by
Saurabh Singhal, Yao Pan
December 2017
Several large-scale efforts have been made to combat malaria in the last decade under the Millennium Development Goals, and while these have led to a...
Working Paper
Gender and the Development Process in a Changing Global Environment
Prior to the 1970s, the "problems of women", in the societies where their rights were recognized, were defined and dealt with by various movements and political groups in the context of moderating or eliminating legal and customary forms of...
Journal Article
Globalization Crises, Trade and Development in Vietnam
Vietnam has been among the most successful East Asian economies, especially in weathering the external shocks of recent globalization crises. Examination of economic performance and policy responses shows rising dependence on foreign finance around...
Journal Article
Structural Transformation, Biased Technological Change and Employment in Vietnam
Employment in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia has grown more slowly than GDP over the last several decades. This means GDP per capita is rising. Vietnamese policymakers, however, are concerned that ongoing structural transformation is creating too few...
Working Paper
Debt Reduction
Working Paper
Fiscal policy, state building and economic development
This paper presents a synopsis of the contextual conditions, factors and challenges under which the recent evolution of tax systems has taken place over the past three decades. The paper gives especial emphasis to the role of natural endowments...
Working Paper
Soviet Economy
Working Paper
Educational inequality in Mozambique
In very poor countries, inequality often means that a small part of the population maintains living standards far above the rest. This is also true for educational inequality in Mozambique: only a small segment of the population has access to higher...
Working Paper
What determines administrative capacity in developing countries?
While it is recognized that effective state institutions are pivotal for economic development, it is not well understood what their origins are and what explains their cross-country differences. We focus on budget institutions in developing economies...
Working Paper
Growth and Entitlements
In the preceding pages we have attempted a detailed rebuttal of the view that, given the prevailing structural constraints imposed by the unequal distribution of land and other assets, growth through Green Revolution must impoverish, or at best by...
Working Paper
Scoping of the Tunisian Economy
In this scooping paper on the Tunisian economy we review the historical background of the economy which has undergone substantial structural change since independence in 1956. In particular we emphasize that past record of consistent growth has often...
Working Paper
Innovation Capabilities for Sustainable Development in Africa
A sustainable pathway for Africa in the twenty-first century is laid out in the setting of the development of innovation capabilities and the capture of latecomer advantages. Africa has missed out on these possibilities in the twentieth century while...
Working Paper
The Impact of Democracy on Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1982-2012
Does democracy promote economic growth? There is still an ongoing debate over the economic implications of democracy, and this question has gained critical importance particularly in the African context, where a wave of democratization in the early...
Working Paper
Informality, Growth, and Development in Africa
The informal sector makes up an overwhelming share of both gross domestic product and total employment in Africa. In this paper, we lay out some of the basic characteristics of the informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa, relevant institutions, and...
Working Paper
Industrial Development and Growth in Nigeria
The structure of the Nigerian economy is typical of an underdeveloped country. The primary sector, in particular, the oil and gas sector, dominates the gross domestic product accounting for over 95 per cent of export earnings and about 85 per cent of...
Policy Brief
Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries
How does innovation impact on development? How, and under what conditions, do entrepreneurs in developing countries innovate? And what can be done to support innovation by entrepreneurs in developing countries? This policy brief addresses these...
Policy Brief
What is the (New) Deal with Fragile States?
Poor governance and lack of state capabilities in around 45 countries pose a threat to global security and development. The involvement of the international community is required to help these states break out of their low-development–high-conflict...
Policy Brief
Development Success
What, if anything, can today's developing countries learn from the past strategies of more advanced countries? the answer is 'a great deal', despite the obvious fact that the development environment has changed significantly. Based on 11 themes, this...
Policy Brief
Achieving Development Success
What can the less well-off developing countries learn from the ’successes’ of other developing countries? This Policy Brief highlights successful development strategies and lessons from in-depth case studies of select countries from the developing...
Annual Lecture
From Flying Geese to Leading Dragons
Structural transformation is a pre-requisite for sustained growth and poverty reduction — such was the conviction of development economists in the mid twentieth century. They demonstrated empirically that moving resources out of low-productivity...
Policy Brief
Industrial Policy for Development
New challenges and emerging paradigms have turned industrialization and industrial policy into one of the most hotly debated and interesting issues of the early twenty-first century. Both the role of manufacturing in economic development and the...
Working Paper
The Burden of Government Debt in the Indian States
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major...
Journal Article
Finance and Economic Development in Africa
It is clear that a lot remains to be learnt about the role of the financial sector in African growth and development process. All three papers in this volume focus on the existing consensus in the literature that there seems to be a positive...
Working Paper
African Growth Miracle or Statistical Tragedy?
This paper reviews the current problems of national accounting in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the current uneven application of methods and availability of data, any ranking of countries according to gross domestic product levels is misleading. It is...
Blog
Three types of interventions that can improve the quality of education in developing countries
by
Miguel Niño-Zarazúa, Serena Masino
January 2016
In a recent article in the International Journal of Educational Development we present the results of a systematic review conducted to identify policy...
Journal Article
What works to improve the quality of student learning in developing countries?
We conducted a systematic review to identify policy interventions that improve education quality and student learning in developing countries. Relying on a theory of change typology, we highlight three main drivers of change of education quality: (1)...
Working Paper
‘Rushing in where Angels Fear to Tread?’
In this paper I empirically investigate the early international entrepreneurship of indigenous Chinese firms using data on 3,948 firms surveyed by the World Bank in 2002-03. I find important differences in the extent and motivation of early...
Working Paper
The Idea of Economic Development
Although development generally refers to a broad concept, the quest for development in Sub-Saharan Africa has been biased by ideological considerations which made abstraction of local conditions and people’s aspirations. The prevalent development...
Working Paper
The Performance of the Manufacturing Sector in Tanzania
Tanzania’s industrial sector has evolved through various stages since independence in 1961, from nascent and undiversified to state-led import substitution industrialization, and subsequently to de-industrialization under the structural adjustment...
Working Paper
How Many Manufacturing Firms are there in Mozambique?
This paper addresses the issue of poor data on Mozambican manufacturing firms. A new dataset (the merged manufacturing database) is merged from provincial industrial databases from each of Mozambique’s 11 provinces. The new dataset is assessed by...
Working Paper
Exporting and Foreign Direct Investment Spillovers
One feature of exporting firms in Cambodia is that they are not of domestic origin but are foreign firms that export from the moment they are established in Cambodia. In this paper we examine the extent to which the presence of foreign-owned export...
Working Paper
The Theory and Practice of Agriculture, Growth, and Development in Africa
Africa’s improved growth performance over the last 15 years provides an opportunity for the continent to transit from recovery to structural transformation. This paper reviews the evolution of development theory and practice, the role of agriculture...
Working Paper
Capacity Development for the Transformation of Africa
Countries need capacity for a variety of reasons, including sustaining economic growth, generating jobs, reducing poverty, effectively managing development programmes, and transforming societies and economies. A lot of effort has been expended to...
Working Paper
The Structural Anatomy and Institutional Architecture of Inclusive Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
The distinct features of inclusive growth within the context of sub-Saharan Africa are identified. The anatomy of growth is analysed by exploring the interrelationship among growth, inequality, and poverty. The present growth spell appears to have...
Working Paper
Aid to Africa
To continue its economic growth and create new and better livelihoods, Africa must transform the productive side of its economy. Ongoing globalization—in trade, finance, and technology—opens up new possibilities for structural transformation, but...
Blog
How Will the Financial Crisis Impact on the Developing World and What Can Be Done About It?
by
Wim Naudé
February 2009
Wim Naudé Following the US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008, the world is now staggering from financial to economic crisis as many high-income...
Blog
How American Capitalism Really Works: Some Lessons for Developing Countries
by
William Lazonick
April 2009
William Lazonick Defined as the act of forming a new business, entrepreneurship is viewed as a prime way in which individualism can contribute to...
Working Paper
Growth and Inequality in the Distribution of India’s Consumption Expenditure
This paper undertakes an assessment of the evolution of inequality in the distribution of consumption expenditure in India over the last quarter-century, from 1983 to 2009-10, employing data available in the quinquennial ‘thick’ surveys of the...
Journal Special Issue
Economics of climate change impacts on developing countries
Under the very large majority of combinations of global mitigation efforts (emissions scenarios) and climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, a considerable amount of warming appears to be built into the global climate system. For...
Blog
Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Travails of East Germany’s Economic Transition
by
Charles S. Maier
November 2009
Charles S. Maier When the Berlin Wall fell, twenty years ago, on 9 November 1989, many expected that the East German (German Democratic Republic - DDR...
Journal Article
Can Cities or Towns Drive African Development?
Rapid urbanization is an important characteristic of African development and yet the structural transformation debate focuses on agriculture’s relative merits without also considering the benefits from urban agglomeration. As a result, African...
Journal Article
Corruption and the Efficiency of Capital Investment in Developing Countries
This paper tests the effect of corruption on the efficiency of capital investment. Using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, covering 90 developing and transition economies, we consider whether the cost of informal bribe payments...
Journal Article
The Political Economy of Green Growth
The concept of Green Growth implies that a wide range of developmental objectives, such as job creation, economic prosperity and poverty alleviation, can be easily reconciled with environmental sustainability. This article, however, argues that...
Blog
Foreign Aid: Down but Not Out
by
Peter J. Burnell
January 2009
Peter Burnell The UN Doha Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development, held late in 2008, reminds us of how far foreign aid has...
Journal Special Issue
Health and Development
The papers in this special issue were originally presented at a World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) Conference on Health Equity in 2006. They look beyond the current literature in terms of measures of inequality, indicators...
Journal Special Issue
Climate Change and Economic Development
The roots of development economics lie in the study of large-scale phenomena such as economic transformation. Climate change, as a global phenomenon, is drawing the attention of the profession back towards studies of transformational processes...
Working Paper
Reversal of the Kuznets Curve
This paper uses recently published top 1% income share series in studying the inequality– development association. The top income shares data are of high quality and cover about a century for some countries and thus provide an interesting opportunity...
Blog
Conflict and Entrepreneurship in Afghanistan
by
Tommaso Ciarli, Saeed Parto, Maria Savona
November 2009
Tommaso Ciarli, Saeed Parto and Maria Savona Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world with an estimated per capita income of 300...
Blog
Africa’s Recovery from the Global Economic Crisis
by
Augustin Kwasi Fosu, Wim Naudé
June 2009
Augustin Fosu and Wim Naudé African economies have been shaken by the global economic downturn which followed the US-centered financial crisis of 2008...
Journal Article
Climate Change and Economic Development in Africa
Recent studies indicate that climate change will negatively impact Africa's growth and development prospects, particularly in the absence of adaptation and mitigation. Losses of up to 4% of Africa's gross domestic product (GDP) are projected, and...
Book Chapter
Aid Effectiveness
Controversy over the aggregate impact of foreign aid has focused on reduced form estimates of the aid-growth link. The causal chain, through which aid affects developmental outcomes including growth, has received much less attention. We address this...
Working Paper
Indices of Social Development and their Application to Africa
This paper, using a new set of social development indices, explores the measurement of social development across Africa, and how this relates to broader development patterns and measurement. Development practitioners worldwide increasingly recognize...
Blog
Urbanization and Development: The Big Questions
by
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen
October 2011
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen In October the London School of Economics and Political Science hosted the launch of Urbanization and Development...
Policy Brief
Measuring Human Well-being
This Policy Brief is an outcome of the UNU-WIDER research project 'Social Development Indicators'. The overall aim of the project was to provide insights into how human well-being might be better conceptualized and, in particular, measured, by...
Working Paper
Scoping Study on the Evolution of Industry in Ghana
This paper chronicles the evolution of industry in Ghana over the post-independence era from an inward over-protected import substitution industrialization strategy of 1960-83 to an outward liberalized strategy during 1984-2000, and since 2001, to...
Working Paper
Productivity-Enhancing Manufacturing Clusters
In this paper we explore the extent to which firms experience productivity spillovers from clustering using a rich data source from Vietnam for 2002 to 2007, a period of significant transition. We address issues of simultaneity, self-selection and...
Working Paper
Learning by Exporting
In this paper, we aim to analyse the learning by exporting hypothesis in the Mozambican context. Due to the presence of the born-global phenomenon among exporters, we address the endogeneity introduced by self-selection by combining a generalized BO...
Working Paper
Clustering, Competition, and Spillover Effects
The potential benefits of the geographical clustering of economic activity have been well documented in the literature, yet there is little empirical evidence quantifying these effects in developing country contexts. This is surprising given the...
Working Paper
The Economics of Happiness and Anger in North Africa
Economics has rediscovered happiness even though the discipline has always been about human wellbeing. A growing evidence suggests that happier people can be more productive and innovative, which leads to profitability and economic growth. Thus...
Working Paper
Gendered Perspectives on Economic Growth and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Researchers have linked sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) poor growth performance in recent decades to several factors, including geography, institutions, and low returns to investment. This literature has not yet integrated the research that identifies...
Working Paper
Development and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa
This paper puts sub-Saharan Africa’s economic development into perspective. While much did not go as hoped for at independence, much of the region has been on a more promising development trajectory since the mid-1990s, as we illustrate using growth...
Working Paper
The Economics of Malaria in Africa
Malaria still claims a heavy human and economic toll, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa. Even though the causality between malaria and poverty is presumably bi-directional, malaria plays a role in the economic difficulties of the region. This...
Working Paper
China-Africa Co-operation in Structural Transformation
This paper examines China and Africa co-operation from the angle of structural transformation as a major driver of growth and job creation. Being a bit ahead in the structural transformation process, China can provide ideas, tacit knowledge...
Working Paper
Distributional Impacts of the 2008 Global Food Price Spike in Vietnam
Agriculture and food cultivation production remains a key sector in the Vietnamese economy in terms of productive activities, income generation, and national export earnings. Higher world market prices should therefore in principle have a beneficial...
Working Paper
Employment, Unemployment, and Underemployment in Africa
This paper documents and analyses the predominance of informal employment in Africa and shows that lack of demand for labour rather than worker characteristics is the main reason for pervasive underemployment. Integration into the global economy and...
Working Paper
Climate Change and Economic Growth Prospects for Malawi
Malawi confronts a development imperative in a context of rising temperatures and deep uncertainty about precipitation trends. We evaluate the implications of climate change for overall growth and development prospects to 2050. We focus on three...
Working Paper
Youth in Tanzania’s Urbanizing Mining Settlements
Over the last fifteen years many African countries have experienced a ‘mining take-off’. Mining activities have bifurcated into two sectors: large-scale, capital-intensive production generating the bulk of the exported minerals, and small-scale...
Blog
The role of economists in policy-making
by
James Stewart
February 2016
At our 30th Anniversary Conference Stefan Dercon of University of Oxford and DfID and Stephen O’Connell of USAID participated in a session on the role...
Working Paper
Achieving Development Success
This paper provides a synthesis of successful strategies and implied lessons for development success, employing at least six themes on in-depth case studies of a large number of developing countries around the world. The coverage includes East Asia...
Book Chapter
Terms of Trade and Growth of Resource Economies
The current paper demonstrates a dichotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade, employing as case studies the two African countries, Botswana and Nigeria. Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of...
Book Chapter
The African Economic Growth Record, and the Roles of Policy Syndromes and Governance
The current chapter, first, finds that although the post-independence growth of African economies has fallen substantially below that of other regions, this comparative evidence is less than uniform across time and countries. Second, it uncovers...
Book Chapter
Ghana
The Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa is a definitive and comprehensive account of the key issues and topics affecting Africa's ability to grow and develop. It includes 53 thematic and 48 country perspectives by a veritable who's who of...
Policy Brief
New Sources of Development Finance
As a result of the Five Year Review of the World Summit for Social Development, the UN General Assembly in September 2000 adopted a resolution calling for 'a rigorous analysis of the advantages, disadvantages and other implications of proposals for...
Working Paper
China, India, Brazil and South Africa in the World Economy
This paper attempts to analyse the economic implications of the rise of China, India, Brazil and South Africa, for developing countries situated in the wider context of the world economy. It examines the possible impact of their rapid growth on...
Working Paper
Southern Engines of Global Growth
This article views the four economies of the South in a long run historical perspective of 1500-2000. It contrasts the history and the initial endowments of the two Northern hemisphere economies China and India which are land scarce and labour...
Annual Lecture
Development research and changing priorities
In 2015 WIDER Annual Lecture 19 was given by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He discussed the overall challenge of sustainable and human-focused development including new and old challenges. Much progress has been made on the old issues of poverty and...
Working Paper
Social Funds in Stabilization and Adjustment Programmes
Well before the introduction of adjustment-related Social Funds (SFs), many developing countries had developed a variety of safety nets comprising food subsidies, nutrition interventions, employment-based schemes and targeted transfers. Middle-income...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurial Ventures and the Developmental State
A basic intellectual challenge for those concerned with the poverty of nations is to come to grips with the nature and causes of the wealth of the world’s wealthier nations. One might then be in a position to inform the poorer nations how they might...
Working Paper
Big Push versus Absorptive Capacity
In this paper we examine whether absorptive capacity can constitute sufficient justification for rejecting the proposal of a large aid increase to support the ‘big push’. We argue that the probability of a poverty trap exists for many countries, in...
Working Paper
Peace, Prosperity, and Pro-Growth Entrepreneurship
Support for entrepreneurship is widely seen as a mechanism to facilitate prosperity and peace in a growing number of post-conflict states. In this paper I critically evaluate this view. I argue that entrepreneurship is a ubiquitous quality in post...
Working Paper
Aid to Fragile States
The record of aid to fragile and poorly-performing states is the real test of aid effectiveness. Rich countries can justify aid to fragile states both through altruism and self-interest. But, with some exceptions, donors have appeared at the wrong...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid Resurgent
This study is premised on the view that reports circulating in the 1990s, claiming foreign aid was in terminal crisis, were premature. Aid’s reviving fortunes are explained in terms both of a growing awareness of the uneven implications of...
Working Paper
Reforming Process and Consolidation in the Soviet Economy
One of the main reasons for launching a radical economic reform in the USSR is that the previous system of rigid administrative management failed to become efficient and to react adequately to internal and external developments. Disproportions and...
Working Paper
Prospects for 'Pro-Poor' Growth in Africa
This paper examines trends in income distribution and its linkages to economic growth and poverty reduction in order to understand the prospects for achieving poverty reduction in Africa. We examine the levels and trends in income distribution in...
Working Paper
Empirical challenges comparing inequality across countries
This study presents new empirical results, using microdata from the LIS database, on development patterns in economic inequality for a set of countries that are less covered in the empirical literature, mostly due to the lack of appropriate data...
Working Paper
Poverty Mapping with Aggregate Census Data
Spatially disaggregated maps of the incidence of poverty can be constructed by combining household survey data and census data. In some countries (notably China and India), national statistics agencies are reluctant, for reasons of confidentiality...
Working Paper
If People were Money
In this paper we elaborate on the findings produced by an applied equilibrium model that is used to calculate the annual efficiency gains from free international migration. These findings suggest that we can expect significant gains from liberalizing...
Working Paper
Composite Indices of Human Well-being
This paper surveys the various composite well-being indices that have been inter-country assessments over the last 40 or so years, including the well known Human Development Index (HDI). A number of issues are considered, including the choice of...
Working Paper
Globalization, Development, and Mobility of Technical Talent
The objective here is to understand how the mobility of technical talent might be changing the structural relationship between rich and poor countries. This paper examines the under-researched relationship between India and Japan in the context of...
Working Paper
Modelling Aid Allocation
There is a widespread view that political criteria have received less emphasis in aid allocation since the end of the cold war, with a greater share of aid subsequently being based on developmental criteria. An observed increase in aid effectiveness...
Working Paper
The New Economy in Europe, 1992-2001
Despite the fast catching-up in ICT diffusion experienced by most EU countries in the last few years, information technologies have so far delivered little productivity gains in Europe. In the second half of the past decade, growth contributions from...
Working Paper
Who Gains from Tariff Escalation?
With the help of a simple model of production and trade, we examine the differential impact of tariff escalation on skilled and unskilled wages in an economy. Our findings provide a lobbying-based explanation of the prevalence of tariff escalation in...
Journal Article
How does petty corruption affect tax morale in sub-Saharan Africa?
Revenues from taxation gain in importance to finance economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. One obstacle to enhancing the willingness to remit taxes can be the extortion of bribes by public officials. Using micro-level data from the...
Working Paper
Regional Output Differences in International Perspective
Accurate regional estimates of output are desired as an indicator of level of development and as a variable used to explain internal migration, demand patterns, fertility and other aspects of behaviour. This chapter explores one often neglected...
Working Paper
Persistence of Underdevelopment
This paper examines growth successes and failures across countries and notes the latter’s perplexing predominance among ex ante low-income economies. An explanation for this persistence of underdevelopment is proposed through an empirical...
Working Paper
'Looking at the Other Side of the Coin'
This paper extends the history of thought narrative on Allyn Young to recognize the close relationship that the classical growth theory has with the early development theory, as Young’s externalities-fuelled, cumulative growth process influenced the...
Journal Article
Agricultural extension, intra-household allocation and malaria
Can agricultural development programs improve health-related outcomes? We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of a large-scale agricultural extensionprogram in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility...
Working Paper
Decomposing Spatial Differences in Poverty in India
Over the last decade, India has been one of the fastest growing economies, and has experienced considerable decline in overall income poverty. However, in a vast country like India, poverty levels vary significantly across the different states. In...
Working Paper
Divergent Means and Convergent Inequality of Incomes among the Provinces and Cities of Urban China
Two precisely comparable national household surveys relating to 1988 and 1995 are used to analyse changes in the inequality of income in urban China. Over those seven years province mean income per capita grew rapidly but diverged across provinces...
Blog
Commodities, industry, and the African Growth Miracle
by
John Page
April 2016
The 2016 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank occur during uncertain times for the “African Growth Miracle.” After...
Working Paper
On the Empirics of Aid and Growth
The paper contributes to the empirics of aid and growth by taking a fresh look at the aid-policies-growth nexus emanating from the very influential but also debatable paper on the subject by Burnside and Dollar: ‘Aid, Policies and Growth’. We employ...
Working Paper
Taxation in Developing Countries
In the beginning of the 1980s, Cameroon witnessed a sustained rate of growth, associated essentially with the boom in the oil sector. Increased budgetary and extra-budgetary resources generated by this sector helped to raise the investment rate in...
Working Paper
Millennium Development Goal 7
Access to water and sanitation (target 10) is an important ingredient of quality of life. As per WHO-UNICEF assessments, globally, 77 per cent of population had access to water in 1990. This proportion has increased to 83 per cent in 2002, thus, on...
Working Paper
Development Questions for 25 Years
Recent growth experience in developing countries is reviewed, with an emphasis on structural change and sources of effective demand. How policy influences such outcomes is analyzed in light of historical experience. Options are discussed for macro...
Working Paper
Marketable Wealth in a Poor African Country
The study uses an asset index of consumer durables to track changes in household wealth in Ghana during the recent period of strong growth. Using the Ghana Living Standards Survey of 1998 that contains both wealth data and consumer durable data, the...
Working Paper
Gender Earnings Differentials and Regional Economic Development in Urban China, 1988-97
Gender earnings differentials in urban China by region and their changes during the first decade of economic reform are examined. It is found that the female–male earnings ratio increased during the early stage of reform. The male earnings premium...
Working Paper
Development in Chile 1990-2005
Chile, in the last 15 years, has shown remarkable results in terms of growth, poverty reduction and democratic governance. This paper reviews the structural changes that were behind these positive outcomes, as well as the pending challenges for Chile...
Working Paper
Development Strategies and Regional Income Disparities in China
This paper argues that the regional income gap of China is endogenously determined by its long-term economic development strategy. Development strategies can be broadly divided into two mutually exclusive groups: (i) the comparative advantage-defying...
Working Paper
Forces Shaping China's Interprovincial Inequality
This paper explores the forces that shaped China’s interprovincial inequality in the last five decades of communist rule. In so far as the change in interprovincial inequality is the result of differential growth in the provincial GDP per capita and...
Working Paper
What Kind of Education Does China Need?
This paper analyses the impact of different levels of educational attainment on local growth and economic disparities in China. By applying decomposition analysis and quantile regression techniques to a set of sub-provincial level regional data...
Working Paper
Income Inequality in China and its Influencing Factors
While the average level of income per capita has increased in China rapidly, income inequality is becoming a more serious problem that may threaten social stability and the sustainability of economic development. This paper examines the existence in...
Working Paper
Terms of Trade and Growth of Resource Economies
The current paper demonstrates a dichotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade, employing as case studies the two African countries, Botswana and Nigeria. Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of...
Working Paper
How Does Colonial Origin Matter for Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa?
This paper investigates some of the existing hypotheses regarding the transmission of different colonial legacies to modern day economic growth. The fact that different colonial strategies were pursued by different colonizers in various territories...
Blog
Africa’s Poverty - Is Growth Delivering Enough?
To Stockholm, for Sida’s Development Talks on the theme ‘Africa rising? Poverty and growth in sub-Saharan Africa’. Finn Tarp and Andy McKay spoke...
Working Paper
Is Internal Migration Bad for Receiving Urban Centres?
During the twentieth century, internal migration and urbanization shaped Brazil’s economic and social landscape. Cities grew tremendously, while immigration participated in the rapid urbanization process and the redistribution of poverty between...
Working Paper
Globalization Crises, Trade, and Development in Vietnam
Vietnam has been among the most successful East Asian economies, especially in weathering the external shocks of recent globalization crises—the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and the 2008-09 great recession, financial crisis and collapse of global...
Working Paper
Does Lack of Innovation and Absorptive Capacity Retard Economic Growth in Africa?
This paper reviews the innovative capabilities and absorptive capacities of African countries, and investigates whether they have played significant roles in the region’s slow and episodic economic growth. Results from cross-country regressions...
Working Paper
Development Cycles, Political Regimes and International Migration
At the turn of the twentieth century, a large number of Europeans, mostly from Italy and Spain, left their homelands and headed to the distant shores of Argentina in response to the good economic opportunities, fertile land and hopes for a better...
Working Paper
Poverty and Growth in the WAEMU after the 1994 Devaluation
This paper brings out that poverty increased massively in the wake of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc, despite a significant recovery of economic growth. Although this increase affected all the social groups, it fell mostly on the urban poor...
Working Paper
Long-Term Growth in the CFA Franc Zone Countries
The paper identifies and examines those factors that have affected growth in the CFA franc zone countries relative to the non CFA countries. It examines the special arrangements between franc zone countries and France, which give some advantages that...
Working Paper
The Global Economic Crisis
This paper outlines the impact of the global economic crisis on Africa. Recovery requires coordinated and consistent efforts to assist individual countries in mitigating (reducing) the risk, coping with the impact, and reducing risk over the longer...
Working Paper
Diffusion of Digital Mobile Telephony
Factors determining the diffusion of digital mobile telephony across 200 developed and developing countries in the 1990s are studied with the aid of a Gompertz model. The market size and network effects are found to play more important roles in the...
Working Paper
An Aggregate View of Macroeconomic Shocks in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper investigates the impacts and responses of macroeconomic shocks in some domestic economies in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1961-99; more specifically, it seeks to answer the question of whether there are any systematic differences in...
Working Paper
An Inquiry into Cities and Their Role in Subnational Economic Growth in South Africa
South Africa is characterized by significant inequality in spatial economic activity. Whether future growth and development on a subnational level in South Africa will be such as to reduce this inequality may depend on the economic growth and...
Working Paper
Return International Migration and Geographical Inequality
This paper explores entrepreneurship amongst return migrants, how their business locations and characteristics differ from other businesses, and the implications for rural-urban inequality. First, we examine, amongst returnees, the determinants of...
Working Paper
Love Thy Neighbour?
There is increasing evidence to suggest that a fundamental source of information for farmers on how to access and use new agricultural technologies comes from interacting with neighbours. Economic research on adoption of innovations in a rural...
Working Paper
Economic Growth, Income Distribution and Poverty
The causes of the slow growth of CFA countries are investigated. There is little difference in this respect between the CFA and other sub-Saharan African countries. Since 1970, GDP growth in the CFA countries has shown no significant trend but one or...
Working Paper
Spatial Inequality and Development in Central Asia
This paper focuses on inequality in living standards across oblasts and regions within Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Regional inequality is an important area of research and policy development. Inequality...
Working Paper
Changes in Spatial Income Inequality in the Philippines
The purpose of this paper is to establish some basic facts about income inequality in the Philippines, with a special focus on the importance of spatial income inequality. Despite major fluctuations in macroeconomic performances, income inequality...
Working Paper
Rule of law and judicial independence
The rule of law and judicial independence are a project yet to be achieved in Mozambique. The different attempts made so far to reform the legal system, mainly after the change in political and strategic direction brought about by the Constitution of...
Working Paper
Earnings Mobility in Times of Growth and Decline
In recent years, the economy of Argentina has experienced both rapid economic growth and severe economic decline. In this paper, we use a series of one-year long panels to study who gained the most in pesos when the economy grew and who lost the most...
Blog
Double dividends and mixed blessings: What would the pioneers of development economics make of new trends in developing economies?
Today, we see clear trends in developing countries of a potentially troubling ‘new normal’ for economic development. We see tertiarization with rising...
Blog
The Great Gatsby Curve and the Global South: Time for a more ambitious redistribution and reparations agenda
The famous 1920s book The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the classic analogy for the American dream of meritocracy —that any person can...
Book
Mozambique at a Fork in the Road
Few countries have experienced as many political and economic changes as Mozambique. A vast and diverse country, it faced a particularly difficult start after a long period of colonial dominance followed by a deadly war that formally ended only in...
Blog
How institutions matter in Mozambique
Launched in 2015 and completed in 2022, the Institutional Diagnostic Project aimed at identifying institutional factors that affect development...
Blog
Will growth be enough to end poverty?: New Projections of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Today, October 17th is the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (you already knew that, right?). In new analysis for UNU-WIDER, we...
Policy Brief
How to support the emergence of effective tax systems
There has been a revival of interest in the state’s role in economic development. Recent research argues that the most successful economies are those where effective states provide crucial public goods and services. The historical emergence of...
Book
Chilean Economic Development under Neoliberalism
This publication examines the process of economic development of the last 50 years or so under the neoliberal model in terms of impacts on growth, inflation, income and wealth distribution and structural change. The analysis includes a historical...
Blog
Are knowledge monopolies driving global inequality?
by
Dev Nathan
July 2024
In a new release for the UNU-WIDER and Cambridge University Press Elements in Development Economics series, I look at global capitalist economic...
Blog
Why clientelistic politics matter for development prospects
by
Miguel Niño-Zarazúa
July 2024
Dr Miguel Niño-Zarazúa explores the complex effects of clientelism on economic development, state capacity, and governance, emphasising the need for...
Blog
Remembering Giovanni Andrea Cornia
by
Bruno Martorano
August 2024
It was with great sadness that we received the news of Giovanni Andrea Cornia’s passing on 10 July 2024. Giovanni Andrea Cornia was Honorary Professor...
Blog
In appreciation of Giovanni Andrea Cornia
I first met Andrea some 40 years ago, in 1985, when he invited me to a conference at UNICEF in New York on ‘Adjustment with a Human Face’, a highly...
Working Paper
Globalization and the Human Development Trap
The feeble results of liberalization policies in Latin America are explained in terms of a multiple steady state model including a dynamic human development trap, endogenous technological change, technology transfer and trade. Divergent and...
Working Paper
Japan’s National Economic Identity and African Development
Japan has emerged in recent years as a leading donor country to African countries. At one level, Japan’s renewed assertiveness in providing foreign aid to Africa is on par with the more active approach by other donor countries. Some might argue that...
Working Paper
The Impact of Foreign Aid in Education Growth
This paper examines whether foreign aid in education has a significant effect on growth. We take into consideration the heterogeneous nature of aid as well as the heterogeneity of aid recipients—we disaggregate the aid data into primary, secondary...
Working Paper
How Macroeconomic Instability Lowers Child Survival
The reduction of child mortality is one of the most universally accepted Millennium Goals. However, there is a significant debate on the means of reaching it and its realism with regard to the situation in most of the least developed countries. The...
Working Paper
Growth Oriented Macroeconomic Policies for Small Islands Economies
Most small island economies or ‘microstates’ have distinctly different characteristics from larger developing economies. They are more open and vulnerable to external and environmental shocks, resulting in high output volatility. Most of them also...
Working Paper
Financial Sector Development - Futile or Fruitful? An Examination of the Determinants of Savings in Sri Lanka
Using dynamic econometric techniques the paper investigates the determinants of private saving in Sri Lanka with a primary focus on the role of financial sector development. Empirical evidence is obtained indicating the existence of the Ricardian...
Working Paper
Donor Funding of Multilateral Aid Agencies
The paper reports an empirical study of the factors affecting burden sharing among OECD’s 22 DAC members in ‘bankrolling’ the multilateral aid agencies. These are the UN agencies, World Bank’s IDA and non-IDA programmes, regional development banks...
Working Paper
Asylum Migration and Implications for Countries of Origin
The purpose of this paper is to synthesize what is known about the influence of asylum migration on countries of origin. It combines an analysis of data, a review of the literature and empirical examples from our own research. In the first section we...
Working Paper
Development Path of China and India and the Challenges for Their Sustainable Growth
The segmentation of global manufacturing and services provided China and subsequently India with a golden opportunity to make full use of their absolute advantage—low cost yet educated labour—to integrate into the world economy within a comparatively...
Working Paper
Reducing People’s Vulnerability to Natural Hazards
The concepts vulnerability, resilience and community are widely used and abused in the literature on natural hazards and disaster risk reduction. This paper seeks to bring greater rigour in their use. In particular, vulnerability must be understood...
Working Paper
China’s Economic Growth
This paper investigates the institutional reason underlying the change in the trajectory of economic growth in post-reform China, and argues that the trajectory of growth was much more normal during the period of 1978-89 than in the post-1989 era. In...
Working Paper
Innovation Capacity and Economic Development
Both China and India, the emerging giants in Asia, have achieved significant economic development in recent years. China has enjoyed a high annual GDP growth rate of 10 per cent and India has achieved an annual GDP growth rate of 6 per cent since...
Working Paper
Export Productivity, Finance, and Economic Growth
Using a panel of 139 countries over the period 1992-2003, we analyse the links between export productivity, economic growth and financial development indicators. We then investigate whether the links observed in China, India and Brazil systematically...
Working Paper
Developing Countries in the New Economy
Past breakthroughs in communication technology—the invention of the printing press and the telegraph—led to major economic upheavals. What are the implications of the more recent information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the developing...