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Green Growth: A Win-Win Approach to Sustainable Development?Danielle Resnick and James Thurlow The concept of ‘green growth’ is one which has understandable political currency, highlighted by its prominence in...
Danielle Resnick and James Thurlow The concept of ‘green growth’ is one which has understandable political currency, highlighted by its prominence in...
Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
James Thurlow UNU-WIDER recently hosted an international conference on ‘Climate Change and Development Policy’. We were motivated by the apparent...
Yongfu Huang The climate change crisis and development needs of the world's poor require us to acknowledge the necessity and urgency for both...
Andrés Solimano Chile underwent a free market revolution initiated by the Pinochet regime in the 1970s and 1980s. A very similar model, with some...
Lucy Scott and Annett Victorero The ReCom—Research and Communication on Foreign Aid programme held its first results meeting on the topic of ‘Aid...
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...
Milla Nyyssölä Behavioural economics, an approach combining the insights of psychology and economics, is coming to the fore in development economics...
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...
Lucy Scott Bangladesh has made some remarkable strides in development and poverty reduction since independence. Yet the country is in many ways a...
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...
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...
Robert J. Strom Interest in the study of entrepreneurship has flourished among scholars in recent years. This research has brought to light, among...
16 December 2014 John Page On 20 November 2014 the United Nations celebrated the 25th Africa Industrialization Day. But perhaps ‘celebrate’ is not...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
David L. Richards Over the past decades, the terms ‘human rights’ and ‘human development’ have been characterized as being: complementary to one...
Tony Addison, Tseday Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott, Finn Tarp, Tuuli Ylinen To meet development objectives, aid recipients and their donor...
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...
21 September 2012 The intricate dynamic between foreign aid to Africa, democratic transitions and consolidation is the topic of a series of research...
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...
Finn Tarp The current global development agenda is centred on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), established at the turn of the Millennium. They...
15 January 2013Martin Rama from The World bank discusses the process behind the World Development Report 2013 on jobs, which he directed.He emphasises...
24 June 2013 Minister Gunilla Carlson Like every political agenda, the post-2015 agenda must be firmly based in a reality check. The current...
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...
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)...
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But...
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But...
Duncan Green Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose the...
Carl-Gustav Lindén The research project ReCom-Research and Communication on foreign aid, which is co-ordinated by UNU-WIDER with funding from the...
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen The Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, was the venue for the launch on 16 June 2012 of the just...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Markus Jäntti and Juhana Vartiainen Finland is an example of a late but successful state-led industrialization that was carried out rapidly. The...
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan China and India have become global economic powers. Even at the market exchange rate, China overtook Japan...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Book Achieving Development Success
In a recent article in the International Journal of Educational Development we present the results of a systematic review conducted to identify policy...
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
William Lazonick Defined as the act of forming a new business, entrepreneurship is viewed as a prime way in which individualism can contribute to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In academic discourse, it has become almost ritualistic to begin a piece on foreign aid by highlighting the sharp controversies over its effectiveness...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Journal Special Issue Economics of climate change impacts on developing countries
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...
Augustin Fosu and Wim Naudé African economies have been shaken by the global economic downturn which followed the US-centered financial crisis of 2008...
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...
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...
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...
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen In October the London School of Economics and Political Science hosted the launch of Urbanization and Development...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid, Education Policy, and Development
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The 2016 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank occur during uncertain times for the “African Growth Miracle.” After...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In April 2001 the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) approached the Supreme Court of India arguing that the government has a duty to provide greater relief in the context of mass hunger. The litigation has now become the best known precedent...
With the aid of an analytical framework of the Lewis model revised to reflect the experience of China, this paper examines the country’s dualistic economic development and its unique characteristics. The paper outlines the major effects of China’s...
This paper estimated models for GDP growth rates, poverty levels, and inequality measures for the period 1990–2000 using data on 54 developing countries at five-yearly intervals. Issues of globalization were investigated by analysing the differential...
The literature on aid has come a long way in recent years, and as a result we now know much more about aid effectiveness than possibly ever before. But significant gaps in knowledge remain. One such gap is the effectiveness of aid in the so-called...
Part of Book Social Mobility in Developing Countries
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid for Gender Equality and Development
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
African countries face huge challenges in building democratic and cohesive societies that will enhance the wellbeing of their citizens. Even after...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Journal Special Issue Fiscal Policy, State Building and Economic Development
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...
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...
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)...
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...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Part of Journal Special Issue Sustainability of External Development Finance
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
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...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
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...
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...
Part of Book Industries without Smokestacks
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...
Part of Book Towards Gender Equity in Development
Manufacturing production in both developed and developing economies tends to be highly geographically concentrated in cities and industrial clusters...
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has been praised as an important development tool, especially for countries at low levels of industrial development...
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...
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...
The financial intermediation-growth nexus is a widely studied topic in the literature of development economics. Deepening financial intermediation may promote economic growth by mobilizing more investments, and lifting returns to financial resources...
One of the most pressing challenges in development policy is to bring about rapid, sustained, and inclusive growth in developing countries. Apart from...
This paper models the inter-temporal allocation of foreign development aid to Papua New Guinea (PNG). A formal theoretical model of aid allocation is developed, in which aid to any one country is determined jointly with aid to all other recipient...
Technological catch-up is bringing new asynchronies to development pathways. What does this mean for employment, globalization, and inequality? A...
Policy makers seeking inclusive growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural transformation, which is potentially...
To celebrate its 35th birthday, UNU-WIDER has looked back at some of its greatest achievements. As the year closes, Armida Alisjahbana, Kunal Sen...
The developer’s dilemma is thus: developing countries seek inclusive economic development — i.e., structural transformation — sufficiently broad-based to raise the income of the poor. Inclusive economic growth requires falling income inequality to...
This special issue presents new research on the state and its links to economic and social development. The special issue focuses on the processes of institutional transformation of the state, looking at how fiscal states arise in the developing...
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...
The management of revenues from exhaustible natural resources involves a number of challenges. In this paper, we argue that the standard policy advice to managers of resource revenues has been dominated by short-termism and the lack of a perspective...
Part of Book Inequality in the Developing World
by Christina Boswell, Jeff Crisp and George Borjas The globalization of the world economic and social structure - in terms of increased volumes of...
by John LangmoreDespite the weakness of the outcome document, called the Monterrey Consensus, a sense of modest hope grew during the International...
by Anthony L. Venables Economic activity is distributed extremely unevenly across space. At the international level there are rich countries and poor...
by Jukka Pekkarinen Empirical investigations of the growth of nations give some support to the hypothesis that smallness as such is a factor that...
by Robert J. McIntyre When the transition began in 1989 in the former Socialist economies it was widely assumed that the small enterprise sector would...
by Tony Addison Economic Development underpins Democracy and Human Rights Democracies have now replaced authoritarian regimes in many parts of the...
by Jorge Saba Arbache Over the last twenty years, Brazil has experienced profound economic changes. Following the international economic instability...
Part of Book Development Finance in the Global Economy
Part of Book Social Provision in Low-Income Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue The CFA Franc Zone 10 Years After Devaluation
Part of Book Social Provision in Low-Income Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue The New Economy
30 October 2013 Roger Williamson The UNU-WIDER meeting held last week in New York on the topic of fragility and aid argued forcefully that you cannot...
Part of Book Non-Traditional Export Promotion in Africa
Part of Book Perspectives on Growth and Poverty
Part of Book Poverty, Income Distribution and Well-Being in Asia during the Transition
Part of Journal Special Issue WIDER Symposium on Analyzing the Socioeconomic Consequences of Rising Inequality in China
Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue The Rise of China and India
Part of Journal Special Issue The Rise of China and India
Part of Journal Special Issue Policy Arena: Small Island Developing States
Development assistance to fragile states and conflict-affected areas can be a core component of peacebuilding, providing support for the restoration of government functions, delivery of basic services, the rule of law and economic revitalization...
Part of Journal Special Issue Development Assistance for Peacebuilding
Part of Journal Special Issue Development Assistance for Peacebuilding
A secure environment is an important component of successful economic development initiatives. Policing reforms in African states have been disappointing; the image of state policy and police–community relations remain poor. States that have enacted...
Part of Journal Special Issue Development Assistance for Peacebuilding
Current development practice focuses too much on the form institutions take, at the expense of worrying about function. A focus on strict rules that aim to curb corruption and inefficiency can diminish the amount of experimentation and adaptation...
Conflict depletes all forms of human and social capital, as well as supporting institutions. The scale of the human damage can overwhelm public action, as there are many competing priorities and resources are often insufficient. What then should be...
The programme did lead participating households to use improved seeds. Food consumption scores did not improve after the programme. However during the programme participating households moved to more sustainable strategies to cope with food shortages...
Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. The outcome document of the recent 2011 Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness further reflects these commitments. In a...
The three Nordic development agencies Danida (Denmark) Sida (Sweden), and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland (FMFA) all recognise gender mainstreaming as an important part of the policy-making process. Gender equality is a well-funded...
There are over 900 million working people who earn less than US$2 a day, while 200 million people are unemployed. Unemployment is a bigger problem in high-income countries, in low-income countries unemployment is rarer as work is essential for...
Phillip Michael Kargbo's UNU-WIDER working paper, 'Impact of Foreign Aid on Economic Growth in Sierra Leone: Empirical Analysis' examines the impact of foreign aid on growth in Sierra Leone using a variety of econometric approaches. The paper finds...
In 2008 Doucouliagos and Paldam published a paper, hereafter known as DP08, based on a meta-analytic approach to the aid-growth question. Working with a database including 68 studies on the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth they...
Revenues from taxation gain importance to finance economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. Extortion of bribes by public officials can provide one obstacle for tax compliance. This paper uses micro-level data from the Afrobarometer to analyse how...
This paper provides a basic understanding of the nature of emerging key information and communication technologies, and establishes the distance of countries from high-quality access to the internet—the necessary threshold one needs to cross in order...
Aid has had positive effect on growth and poverty reduction on average in the long term. There is no evidence of aid systematically increasing infl ation or reducing the amount of credit available to private industry. In general aid that is channeled...
The question of whether aid is effective in promoting economic growth is a complex and controversial one. While there is a general consensus around the idea that aid can have positive effects at the micro and meso levels, recent studies, such as...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
In the WIDER Working Paper ‘Decentralized Service Delivery in Nairobi and Mombasa: Policies, politics and inter-governmental relations’ Winnie V. Mitullah assesses the major obstacles to providing critical services, such as solid waste management and...
It is commonly acknowledged that developing economies are characterized by large differences in output per worker across sectors. For such economies the shift of resources from low productivity to high productivity is the key potential driver of...
Diversification of household activities away from agriculture is a key characteristic of economic development. We examine the extent of diversification among Vietnamese households, from agriculture into waged employment and entrepreneurship and...
This study documents the local transformation of rural Vietnamese communes in 12 different provinces from 2006 to 2014. Three key areas are considered, namely occupational and agricultural choice; provision of public goods and infrastructure as well...
This paper examines gender inequality and female empowerment in rural Vietnam. Using an extensive panel dataset on 2,181 households, we examine how the welfare of women living in rural areas has evolved during a period of dramatic rural...
The donor community is becoming increasingly focused on two goals; increasing aid supply and improving aid effectiveness. These two goals are clearly interdependent as in order for aid to be increased both politicians and the public must be convinced...
Historically nations have developed at their own pace without assistance or aid. This kind of self-development has its obvious upsides, namely in guaranteeing the ‘ownership’ of countries over their development process. None the less, due to the...
The natural resource sector in Liberia has failed to produce links to other important sectors of the economy, and in particular has failed to create jobs for the large majority of the population. Creating new and productive jobs is key to national...
Development practice continues to operate on the assumptions of an outdated theory of modernization. Developing countries often sustain legitimacy by imitating other successful modern institutions without actually developing the functionality of the...
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...
China’s importance as a major donor outside the traditional Western donors has been increasing and this has helped to bridge the funding gaps in developing countries. At the same time, South-South financial assistance still comes with less...
This paper exploits five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to investigate issues of social and political capital in rural Vietnam. I analyse membership of the Communist Party, ‘mass organizations’ (Farmers’ Union...
This paper provides an assessment of what aid has actually been doing in the area of environment in Tanzania through a critical review of the flows, modalities and management of aid. Focusing on the funding for environmental degradation projects, the...
In the more than two decades since democratic elections signalled a new era in Mozambique, a great deal has been accomplished. Nearly all development...
Does foreign aid promote aggregate economic growth? In contrast to widespread perceptions, academic studies of this question have been rapidly converging towards a positive answer. We employ a simulation approach to (i) validate the coherence of...
A new methodology, Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows (TUFF), allows us to systematically gather open-source information—e.g. news reports, case studies, project inventories from embassy websites, and grant and loan data published by recipient...
Supermarkets are a key route to market for many suppliers of food and household consumable products. The growth of supermarket chains in southern...
Why and how some states transition successfully from fragile to more robust—and some do not—are both topical and age-old questions. This volume of The ANNALS addresses these questions with particular attention to the role of foreign aid, offering new...
This position paper on Aid and Gender Equality was prepared by UNU-WIDER under the ReCom programme of Research (Re) and Communication (Com) on foreign aid. It aims to provide a coherent up-to-date overview and guide to a complex issue in the...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
Part of Journal Special Issue Aiding Government Effectiveness in Developing Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Current international agricultural development and food security systems are ill-prepared to address the global agriculture, food and nutrition problems. Structural reforms are necessary to deliver the essential international public goods for...
Part of Journal Special Issue Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Part of Journal Special Issue Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Part of Journal Special Issue Foreign Aid Heterogeneity
The goal of economic growth combined with environmental protection in developing countries requires not just financial and technological resources, but also the local capacity to design and implement successful policies. Aid programmes for capacity...
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China
Some recent literature in the meta-analysis category where results from a range of studies are brought together throws doubt on the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses what meta-analysis has to say...
A number of small, isolated countries are not experiencing the rapid economic growth of larger, more connected economies due to weak governance and isolation. Small, isolated economies require more aid to alleviate poverty than rapidly developing...
Some recent literature in the meta-analysis category where results from a range of studies are brought together throws doubt on the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses what meta-analysis has to say...
The notion that economic development in African states requires minimal levels of security has become widely accepted in the international development community. Reforming non-functioning policing systems is an important step toward achieving...
Three-quarters of the world’s poor (however defined) live in countries classified as middle-income. Donors need not assume their only option is to abandon countries once they cross the arbitrary threshold in per capita income. The thresholds...
Part of Journal Special Issue Prospects for Renewable Energy in Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
Part of Journal Special Issue Aiding Government Effectiveness in Developing Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue Aiding Government Effectiveness in Developing Countries
Rwanda and Burundi have both emerged from civil wars over the past 20 years and foreign donors have provided significant contributions to post-conflict reconstruction and development in the two countries. Yet although Rwanda and Burundi share several...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
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...
The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro- and meso-levels, recent literature doubts the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses the aid-growth literature...
The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro and meso-levels, recent literature doubts the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses the aid-growth literature...
During the 2000s, Brazil experienced slow economic growth and a substantial improvement in labour market indicators. From 2001 to 2012, Brazil grew less than the Latin American average. However, the unemployment rate decreased, the employment...
Since the 1990s, gender mainstreaming has been a widely accepted strategy for promoting gender equality within governments, multilateral agencies, and development NGOs, although critics continue to question its premises and results. This paper...
This paper discusses shifts in development assistance for health (DAH) since 1990, analyses the nature of the current distribution of funding, and considers future implications. Based on Jamison et al. (1998) and Frenk and Moon (2013), we introduce...
This paper analyses the role of foreign aid to assist development in two oil-rich countries: Indonesia and Nigeria. This paper seeks to understand the way foreign aid provided assistance to transform Indonesia from a ‘fragile’ state in the 1960s into...
Agriculture is a main contributor to pro-poor growth in Africa, but gender inequalities in the sector hold back agricultural growth and affect household welfare negatively. The sector has been characterized by a lack of gender-disaggregated data and...
Institution-building in Somalia has met with high levels of failure for two decades. But successes have occurred in other Somali-inhabited regions of the eastern Horn, and have been especially present at the local and municipal level. The most...
During Sudan’s ‘interim period’ from the end of civil war in January 2005 until South Sudan’s independence in July 2011, foreign development agencies provided extensive support and billions of dollars in aid—for which institutional development and...
The aid-growth literature has been explored using a wide range of econometric methodologies. The evidence of the effectiveness of aid to promote economic growth is mixed, suggesting that the link between aid and growth is complex and may not be well...
The paper examines why the efforts to promote gender justice by development aid have not succeeded in dealing with deeply-rooted structural injustices which prevent the realization of social justice and gender equality. The study analyses the...
Public sector reforms are commonplace in developing countries. Much of the literature about these reforms reflects on their failures. This paper asks about the successes and investigates which of two competing theories best explain why some reforms...
The World Bank is uniquely positioned to identify and disseminate innovative development practices. Based on his thirty-year experience as a World Bank staff member, the author takes an institutional perspective on the innovation climate at the World...
The purpose of this paper is to capture the impact of foreign capital inflows (which include foreign aid and foreign direct investment) on economic growth in Cameroon. Using the autoregressive distributive lag approach to cointegration and time...
The foreign aid landscape has undergone a paradigm shift in the last few decades, with changes in the behaviour of ‘traditional’ donors and a new focus on selectivity in aid disbursement, as well as ‘new’ donors and South-South co-operation playing...
The prevailing aid orthodoxy works well enough in stable environments, but is ill-equipped to navigate contexts of volatility and fragility. The orthodox approach is adept at solving straightforward technical or logistical problems (paving roads...
by Amelia U. Santos-Paulino Trade and financial liberalisation have been a feature of the world economy in recent decades. Multilateral tariffs...
by Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Ravi Kanbur, and Elinor OstromThe constructed opposites of formality and informality have dominated the development...
by Wim Naudé The development crisis faced by Africa has been described as the ‘greatest tragedy of our time’. The continent’s generally poor growth...
by Ha-Joon Chang Mainstream economists used to treat institutions as mere ‘details’ that gets in the way of good economics. Then from the mid-1990s...
by Tony Addison This year is set to see a new chapter open in Africa’s debt story and, for once, it looks like a positive story—as the region begins...
In the recent UNU-WIDER working paper 'Aid and Growth Accelerations: Vulnerability Matters' Patrick Guillaumont and Laurent Wagner aim to address the shortcomings they see in the current literature on growth accelerations, periods where growth speeds...
Tony Addison and George Mavrotas This has been a roller-coaster year for global capitalism. Financial markets – flush with liquidity just last year –...
Wim Naudé In the run-up to the Group of 20 (G-20) Summit that was held in London on 2 April 2009, many institutions (including governments...
Wim Naudé External shocks can have devastating consequences for development, as the recent earthquake in Haiti, the Asian Tsunami of 2004 and other...
Machiko Nissanke and Erik Thorbecke Despite the enormous potential of globalization in accelerating economic growth and development through...
Since joining the International Monetary Fund in 1945 as an original founding member, Egypt has signed four stabilization agreements with the Fund. These agreements were: a credit facility in May, 1962, which collapsed fairly rapidly; a stand-by...
Peru ran out of cash in July 1984; a year later President Garcia rejected an IMF agreement and limited debt service payments to 10 per cent of export earnings; and in mid-1986 the President said that Peru would pay 'when it chose and when it could1...
By the time Mexico declared a suspension of debt service payments in August 1982, it had already begun a process of external adjustment that was to prove in the short run outstandingly successful compared with that of other countries, but was based...
Three major phases of economic policy can be distinguished between 1980 and 1985: from 1980 to 1982, when the government reacted to deteriorating external conditions (the debt crisis and world recession) by liberalizing imports, relaxing fiscal...
Turkey is not the shining example of successful adjustment that it is often made out to be. The stabilization and adjustment policies followed since 1980 have actually undermined the structure of its economic development without correcting its...
Although Kenya avoided the disastrous plunge in real GNP that many other African countries suffered in the first half of the 1980s, standards of living of nearly all sectors of the population fell because economic growth slowed to less than half of...
Although the economy expanded very rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, with the manufacturing sector growing three-fold, the great majority of the people were excluded not only from the fruits of this economic progress but also from any participation in...
From 1984 until its fall in February 1986 the Marcos government attempted to implement a standard IMF-type stabilization and adjustment programme. In some respects the programme was startlingly successful: inflation was brought under control and the...
The Republic of Korea's growth rate averaged nearly 6 per cent in 1981-85, jumping to 10-12 per cent a year in 1986-87. Inflation was cut from 26 per cent in 1980 to around 3 per cent in mid-1987.The author of the following monograph, Dr Alice Amsden...
India's first two bouts of orthodox stabilization policy following independence were quite different. The first, prompted by a prolonged drought at home and the wars with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965, was relatively mild in form. The rupee was...
Argentina has had successive stabs at stabilization since the mid-1970s. Throughout most of this time it has had to wrestle with acute problems of hyperinflation, capital flight, rising external debt, a stop-go pattern of output, and for a long time...
Brazil has undergone three stabilization programmes since 1980: without the IMF in 1981-82; with the IMF in 1983-84, and the Cruzado Plan of 1986. The first two could be said to have been more orthodox in character, given the political and social...
This paper reviews the literature on the forces driving urbanization in developing countries. It presents a model outlining how globalization can lead to the evolution of an urban structure which may approximate Zipf’s law. Policy implications are...
I am looking forward to WIDER Annual Lecture 18, held 18 November in New York not only because I expect that Peter Timmer will make a distinguished...
30 October 2014 Dominik Etienne and Annett Victorero The last decade has witnessed a revival of concern over the impact of high-income concentration...
Roger Williamson The Danish State Secretary for Development Policy Charlotte Slente, welcomed the participants and contributors to the meeting and...
21 February 2014 Tony Addison Development researchers live in a world where research on development, not just in economics but also political science...
26 March 2014 Tony Addison The Nordic countries have a long-standing commitment to development, and their work in peace-building has taken Nordic...
The adoption of the value-added tax has arguably been one of the most important tax policy measures worldwide, but is also one of the most heatedly debated. While some argue that the VAT has served as a useful tool to boost government revenue, others...
27 August 2014 In this interview Justin Lin, Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER, talks about how the state can enable the process of...
23 April 2014 Jukka Pirttilä In conventional economic theory, agents are assumed to be able to make rational choices, unaffected by emotions and not...
24 September 2013 Tony Addison As Helsinki moves into a crisp sunny autumn, Angle brings you news of two big UNU-WIDER events. ‘Egalitarian Principles...
Tony Addison As the snow continues to lie deep across Helsinki, UNU-WIDER is putting the last touches to the ReCom results meeting on ‘aid and the...
Tony Addison We start the new year at a fast pace, preparing for the ReCom results meeting on ‘Aid and the Social Sectors’ in Stockholm on 13th March...
This study combines household survey data from the Beninese Demographic and Health Survey with school supply statistics in order to investigate regional and gender disparities in primary school attendance rates in Benin. Despite almost unparalleled...
Governments can play great roles in their countries, regions, and cities; facilitating or leading the resolution of festering problems and opening new pathways for progress. Examples are more numerous than one might imagine and raise an important...
Average adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If...
World leaders are now meeting at a special UN summit from 25–27 September to formally adopt the SDGs, which will then be implemented from 1 January...
This article is part of UNU’s “17 Days, 17 Goals” series, featuring research and commentary in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development...
The celebration of the 30th Anniversary of UNU-WIDER presented the ideal opportunity to look back, take stock, and plan ahead. Where else can a group...
UNU-WIDER had a busy September. We celebrated our 30th birthday with some 600 people at our three-day conference on ‘Mapping the Future of Development...
Energy is linked to most of the major global challenges of the twenty-first century. Poverty eradication, climate change, ecosystem management, world health and security are all influenced by energy, its availability, cost, emissions and other...
24 September 2009 Finn Tarp, New Director at UN University-WIDER* ‘Some of us believe in analysing, some of us believe in humanising’ - Donovan...
This paper reviews Finland’s growth strategy in the postwar decades. Finland was able to initiate an impressive mobilization of resources during this period, reflected mostly in a high rate of capital accumulation for manufacturing industries. This...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid, Social Policy and Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid, Social Policy and Development
There is some scepticism about Korea as role model of development as the Korean model involved a considerable degree of state activism, unacceptable in today’s global environment. This paper propose a ‘capability-based view’ of the country’s catch-up...
This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor...
During the 1950-70s Norway had relatively low GDP per capita compared to the OECD average and even more so compared to Denmark and Sweden. During the 1970s there was a significant catch-up in incomes and from the early 1990s a ‘take-off’ in relative...
Japan was the first non-western country to accomplish successful industrialization, and the dominant perception of its ‘industrial policy’ had over-emphasized specific characteristics of Japan. However, from the perspective of today’s development...
Although Denmark shares with the other four Nordic countries certain attributes, such as pragmatic protestant religion, small and homogenous population, strong social democratic parties and ambitious welfare states, it also has its own...
We examine the case of the Czech Republic, which has been frequently cited as one of the most successful cases of transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Despite the costs related to the break-up of Czechoslovakia in late 1992 and...
Why many transition economies succeeded by pursuing policies that are so different from the radical economic liberalization (shock therapy) that is normally credited for the economic success of central European countries? First, optimal policies are...
Entrepreneurship has emerged as an important element in the organization of economies. This emergence did not occur simultaneously in all developed countries. Differences in growth rates are often attributed to differences in the speed with which...
This paper discusses the characteristics and determinants of entrepreneurial behaviour in Uganda. It is based on a recent survey of urban and rural entrepreneurs, executed in May 2008. The main dependent variables are business success, gestation...
Over the last few years we have observed a prominent flourishing of empirical studies on the determinants of new business creation and its effect on the economy. The present study focuses on an important determinant of entrepreneurship: the quality...
Improved governance and lower start-up costs may not be sufficient for encouraging the type of entrepreneurship that matters for economic growth. Using panel data on 60 countries spanning the period 2003-07 this paper establishes that (i) opportunity...
Following the financial crisis that broke in the US and other Western economies in late 2008, there is now serious concern about its impact on the developing countries. The world media almost daily reports scenarios of gloom and doom, with many...
Maria Minniti and Wim Naudé In recent years, the rate of new business formation by women has significantly outpaced the rate of new business formation...
Mulu Gebreeyesus and Michiko Iizuka Industrial policy can be defined as the policies that stimulate specific economic activities and promote...
The much heralded growth and transformation of many economies in sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade continues to receive prominent attention in academic scholarship and among policy practitioners. An apparent feature about this transformation...
It's imperative to demolish myths around the economic achievements of China and India and get a better sense of the real challenges. The author of the...
Set against a background of almost continuous economic decline since independence in 1957, the stabilization and adjustment programme pursued by Ghana since 1982-83 is a qualified but also a considerable success. Certainly it has achieved...
Two factors make the Chilean experience of stabilization policies interesting. One is that probably no other government in Latin America (and perhaps also elsewhere) has been more diligent in pursuing liberal economic policies than the one which took...
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...
Preventable and treatable childhood diseases, notably acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases are the first and second leading causes of death and morbidity among young children in developing countries. The fact that a large proportion...
Purposeful, well-targeted and successful transformation policies will be elusive for a country or region that does not understand the relative importance of its sectoral sources of growth. This study aims at eliciting our understanding in this...
Using a panel vector autoregressive model this paper investigates the dynamic and endogeneous contribution of tourism to output based on a sample of 40 African countries for the period 1990–2006. Results from the study confirm tourism to be an...
This chapter examines the country-level dynamics of long-run growth in Africa between 1975 and 2005. We are primarily interested in examining how growth has affected mobility and the distribution of income among countries. We analyse changes in the...
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...
The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of institutional reforms on the revival of African economies. We study the impact of positive changes in business environment indicators of the Doing Business project and the Economic Freedom Index of...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid to Support Fragile States
In recent years, randomized controlled trials have become increasingly popular in the social sciences. In development economics in particular, their use has attracted considerable debate in relation to the identification of ‘what works’ in...
The paper examines the role of foreign aid in building capacity to address climate change. While the experience with this topic is relatively recent and not yet extensive, analogous questions have arisen in many other areas of foreign aid. It is...
There is a growing interest in the debate on aid effectiveness for assessing the impact of aid not only on economic growth and poverty reduction, but also on intermediate outcomes such as health and education. This paper reviews evidence from recent...
The aim of this paper is to explain the divergent developmental outcomes between South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam. Whilst US aid has correctly been cited as key factor in explaining the rapid post-war development of South Korea and Taiwan, the...
The Yemen Social Fund for Development (SFD) was established in 1997 with the support of the international community, and in particular the World Bank, to combat national poverty and reinforce the limited existing social safety net. Since its...
This paper analyses the distribution of total aid and aid to the social sectors between 2009 and 2011. Its key findings are four-fold. First, despite the stated objectives of donors, total aid disbursements are broadly neutral, favouring neither the...
This paper investigates the role of non-traditional aid in meeting global challenges in improving gender equality and gender-related socioeconomic needs in the twenty-first century. We define non-traditional aid as private donations from individuals...
This paper contributes to the debate on aid effectiveness by looking at the ‘how’ of aid effectiveness. In other words it provides an assessment of whether aid only filled a financing gap or whether it, in addition, helped influence the political...
Rising standards for accurately inferring the impact of development projects has not been matched by equivalently rigorous procedures for guiding decisions about whether and how similar results might be expected elsewhere. These ‘external validity’...
Donor support for decentralization comes in two main categories: recommendations at the policy level and project activities at the programming level. At the policy level, donors promote decentralization by recommending greater autonomy for...
Following an overview on the fast changing global context of agriculture, and food and nutrition security, this paper provides a framework for identifying the set of essential international public goods for a well-functioning world agriculture and...
The current climate change crisis has repeatedly alerted mankind to the urgency of tackling this pressing global challenge before it is too late. Developing countries, which have contributed negligibly to the present climate change problem are...
The majority of the world’s poor, by income poverty and multi-dimensional poverty, now live in countries officially classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries. Of course nothing happens when a country crosses a (somewhat) arbitrary...
The Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, was critical in making gender equality a development goal and adopted gender-mainstreaming as its primary mechanism to achieve this. Effective implementation of gender-mainstreaming...
Giới thiệu Việt Nam là một nước đông dân ở khu vực Đông Nam Á với lịch sử lâu đời và đặc trưng về kinh tế, chính trị và xã hội.2 Sau khi kết thúc chiến tranh với Hoa Kỳ năm 1975, Việt Nam đã có những tham vọng lớn về tương lai; song mặc dù có nhiều...
The paper considers the experience of the European Investment Bank and addresses policy lessons for developing countries as they seek finance for development. The paper argues that the key lesson for developing countries is that the traditional role...
In many African countries, decentralization has long been viewed as a means for improving local service delivery. Yet, despite various decentralization initiatives, poor service delivery continues to be problematic in two of Kenya’s largest cities...
I discuss how aid can support growth in small, isolated economies. Small markets frustrate scale economies and competition. Combined with high transport costs, essential inputs become prohibitively expensive. Breaking the coordination problem...
Aid is not generally aimed at the poorest people, though most multilateral or bilateral agencies would like to think they get included. However, donors’ strategies are generally blind to differentiation among the poor, and have not improved in this...
Recent years have seen a growing interest among donors on taxation in developing countries. This reflects a concern for domestic revenue mobilization to finance public goods and services, as well as recognition of the centrality of taxation for...
This paper evaluates the impact of an integrated rural development programme on farming techniques and food security in the Gaza area of rural Mozambique. We examine the impact of a group-based approach, in a country with few impact evaluations of...
This paper provides a survey of six widely used non-experimental methods for estimating the impact of programmes in the context of developing economies (instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, direct matching, propensity score matching...
The experience and lessons of the last two decades have shown that ignoring the key differences between the economics of peace and the economics of development has been a major reason why countries relapse into conflict. This paper briefly analyses...
In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term task. Countries like Haiti...
Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look...
This paper addresses the issue of the impact of aid supply on aid effectiveness. We proceed in two steps. First, we review research works that deal with the problem of governance in donor-recipient relationships and are susceptible of highlighting...
Various development objectives are worthy, but to my mind, one objective dominates all others: reducing the scourge of absolute economic misery in the world. In this paper, I focus on an important but relatively underemphasized approach to poverty...
This paper confronts three conundrums. First, does the relationship between aid and growth fade over time when aid is successful? Second, why are aid inflows neglected in the literature on growth acceleration (or episodes). Third, why is country...
This paper argues that official development assistance (foreign aid) is partly responsible for the lack of structural change in Africa. Africa’s development partners have devoted too few resources and too little attention to two critical constraints...
Most rich countries developed without aid, and this ‘self-development’ has some intrinsic advantages. In today’s massively unequal world, however, such an approach would imply very low levels of human development for several generations for many poor...
Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. Despite this consensus, ‘good governance’ is an extremely elusive objective: it means different things to different...
The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro and meso-levels, recent literature has turned decidedly pessimistic with respect to the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth. Policy implications...
This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on economic growth in Sierra Leone, a country where an empirical econometric study on aid effectiveness is yet to exist. Using a triangulation of approaches involving the ARDL bounds test approach and the...
Globalization has led to a precarization of labour, which especially manifests in the unstable working conditions, a lower labour share in national income as well as in a growing income inequality, with the exception of some countries with high...
Why do some states, with foreign assistance, transition from ‘fragile’ to ‘robust?’ Scholars in state-building have argued that neotrusteeship is an effective strategy by which external organizations might build post-conflict states. This working...
We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of an agricultural extension program in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility for the program reduced the incidence of malaria by 8.8 percentage points, with...
Average adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If...
This paper examines the questions of why and how foreign assistance was utilized successfully in South Korea but less so in Ghana, with a focus on the role of aid in the process of state building and state transition in these two countries. Before...
After the Second World War, both Greece and Italy experienced a Left-Right political polarization and a reproduction of earlier patterns of political patronage. Both Italy and Greece received international aid, including emergency relief, interim...
Taxation is a crucial source of revenue for countries around the world and plays an important role in development efforts. In order to truly foster...
Part of Journal Special Issue Developing Countries in the WTO Regime
Part of Journal Special Issue Developing Countries in the WTO Regime
Part of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have been successfully used as an industrial policy tool in many countries. Efforts to create SEZs in Tanzania began in 2002, and were stepped up through the establishment of the Export Processing Zone Authority (EPZA)...
by S. Mansoob Murshed The WIDER research project on 'Globalization and the Obstacles to the Successful Integration of Vulnerable Economies' is...
by Veli-Pekka Niitamo Great challenges must be over come if the emerging ‘mobile information society’ is to be affordable and accessible worldwide...
by Danny T. Quah For the last fifty years, economists and development practitioners have viewed the accumulation of physical capital-machines...
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...
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...
Electric vehicles (EVs) are confidently expected to decarbonize road transportation, contribute substantially to the net zero agenda, and so help to...
In a series of high-level UN Roundtables, in which I participated in 2021, experts and stakeholders explored the risks and opportunities presented by...
Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet On May 13 and 14, 2010, UNU-WIDER invited around 200 development economists from all over the world to Helsinki...
Ha-Joon Chang Many people believe that the lack of entrepreneurship is one of the main causes of poverty in developing countries. However, anyone who...
Part of Book Wider Perspectives on Global Development
Part of Journal Special Issue A Collection of UNU-WIDER articles in Chinese
The great transformation undertaken by the countries of the former communist bloc exhibits immense diversity in terms of initial conditions, shifting target models, consistency, paths, speed, progress to date, and economic performance. This is the...
Offers information about how three developed countries have utilized technology in their advancement in the post-World War II period. Japan, Finland and Greece are assessed in terms of economic growth and structural factors, along with an examination...
Part of Journal Special Issue Sustainability of External Development Finance
For much of the last 30 years the global economy has had a limited impact on poverty alleviation. But there are now grounds for optimism. Presently, global liquidity is ample, pushing investors into parts of the world they previously avoided, and...
More than a billion people live in extreme poverty. Many face the risk of never escaping from poverty. These risks are exacerbated by natural hazards, ill-health, and macroeconomic volatility. Consequently, vulnerability has become the defining...
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Entrepreneurship and Conflict
Part of Book Achieving Development Success
Part of Book African Youth and the Persistence of Marginalization
17 October 2013 In this video we interview the Rector of the United Nations University (UNU), David Malone from Canada, who has held both diplomatic...
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty and Inequality in China
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty and Inequality in China
Part of Journal Special Issue Focus
Part of Journal Special Issue Focus
This paper models the inter‐temporal allocation of foreign development aid to Papua New Guinea (PNG). A formal theoretical model of aid allocation is developed, in which aid to any one country is determined jointly with aid to all other recipient...
A broad definition of innovation input is used, in which R&D is one of several sources of innovation. A quantitative innovation output measure is used in the analysis, which is based on a large representative sample of firms, including small firms...
Part of Book Foreign Aid for Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality in Latin America
Part of Journal Special Issue Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality in Latin America
Part of Book Achieving Development Success
Part of Book Urbanization and Development