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From The Editor's Desk (October 2012)Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
24 September 2013 Carl-Gustav Lindén At the recent UNU-WIDER conference here in Helsinki on inclusive growth in Africa, the quality of national...
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 It’s now February, and Helsinki remains deep in snow. We had an extended blizzard last weekend, with temperatures hovering around minus...
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
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...
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
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...
Malokele Nanivazo and Lucy Scott The first gender equality workshop under UNU-WIDER’S ReCom—Research and Communication in Foreign Aid project was held...
This is the second of a two-part article presenting key discussion points from the UNU-WIDER gender equality workshop held 12-13 July 2012, in...
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...
Annett Victorero Latin America has for a long time been synonymous with high inequality, economic instability and authoritarian politics. However...
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 As we come to the end of November, the snow has yet to arrive in Helsinki. We continue to enjoy clear skies and spectacular sunsets...
Poverty reduction has become the central goal of development policies over the last decade but there is a growing realization that the poorest people rarely benefit from poverty reduction programmes. Microfinance programmes can help poor people...
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...
24 September 2013 Roger Williamson Another big weekend for UNU-WIDER. The stage was well set on Thursday 19 September for a consideration of...
15 January 2013Martin Rama from The World bank discusses the process behind the World Development Report 2013 on jobs, which he directed.He emphasises...
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
Part of Book Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
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...
Duncan Green Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose the...
Alice Amsden, Alisa DiCaprio, and James Robinson To understand what role elites play in the process of economic development, we need to establish...
Changes in relative prices of commodities consumed in different shares across income groups can be expected to alter real income differentials between these groups. Using Mozambican household budget survey and price data from 2002/03 and 2008/09, we...
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...
We adapt the standardized Poverty Line Estimation Analytical Software (PLEASe) computer code stream based on Arndt and Simler’s (2010) utility-consistent approach to analyse poverty in Ethiopia in 2000, 2005, and 2011. Several data-related issues...
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...
In Sub-Saharan Africa we find some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. Nevertheless, we generally know very little about the historical development of inequality. In this paper we look at how inequality developed in colonial and...
Researchers often rely on household survey data to investigate health disparities and the incidence and prevalence of illness. These self-reported health measures are often biased due to information asymmetry or differences in reference groups. Using...
The degree of choice households have over their consumption expenditure is critical in deciding their economic class. Applying our measure to Egyptian household budget surveys, we estimate the population size of the middle class in Egypt and assess...
This paper attempts to measure the extent of inequality within households and its contribution to overall levels of inequality in child well-being. The paper analyses the distribution of resources (outcomes) between girls and boys for four indicators...
This paper examines the relationship between trade (exports), growth, and inequality, using a panel of 100 countries over 30 years (1980 to 2010). As there is no clear theoretical relationship between trade (exports) and inequality, and as inequality...
The UNU-WIDER project on 'Spatial Disparities in Human Development' has collected and analyzed evidence on the extent of spatial inequalities within developing countries. The studies find that spatial inequalities are high, with disparities between...
The democratic government in South Africa has developed a system of social grants to combat the high levels of poverty and inequality inherited from the apartheid regime. With the help of modest economic growth and an associated increase in per...
Local institutional and structural (meso) factors can play a role in mediating the returns to a macro-social policy. I focus on the Brazilian cash-transfer-programme Bolsa Familia and check how contextual features influence the returns to transfers...
Wim Naudé and James C. MacGee Globally, wealth is very unequally distributed, both within countries and between countries. The UNU-WIDER project on...
We provide a comprehensive approach for analyzing the evolution of poverty using Mozambique as a case study. Bringing together data from disparate sources, we develop a novel 'back-casting' framework that links a dynamic computable general...
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...
Globalization offers new opportunities for accelerating development and poverty reduction, but also poses new challenges for policymakers. And there is much concern about the distribution of benefits; in particular whether the poor gain from...
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...
Human capital models imply that both the distribution of education and returns to education affect earnings inequality. Decomposition of these ‘quantity’ and ‘price’ components have been important in understanding changes in earnings inequality in...
This paper investigates how two effects drive wedges between nominal and real inequality estimates. The effects are caused by (i) differences in the composition of consumption over the income distribution coupled with differential inflation of...
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 evaluates fairness in educational achievements through the ordered pair (WEEOp, IEOp) whose components provide: (i) A measure of social welfare which accounts for the achievement of less-advantaged pupils and (ii) a synthetic index of...
Using the 2004–2005 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs) and non-SCSTs across the earnings...
Ghana’s status as one of the African Lions is linked to the country’s remarkable growth performance, which culminated in the attainment of lower middle-income status. However, employment response to growth has been weak. Additionally, growth has been...
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...
Jane Harrigan Donor political interests have heavily influenced aid flows to North Africa in the past. This has reduced the effectiveness of aid which...
In simple language and with numerous concrete examples, this policy brief analyses the impact - among others - of key ex-ante factors such as acute 'horizontal inequality' between social groups in the distribution of assets, state jobs, social...
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...
This WIDER Policy Brief examins issues such as liberalizing migration policies; protecting refugees in regions of origin; addressing the root causes of migration and refugee flows; influencing perceptions of the costs and benefits of migration; and...
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in West Africa, poor in natural resources, and with low levels of human development. Its economy remains agricultural and focused on food crops and cotton production. Over the last twenty years it has experienced...
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...
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Getting an accurate picture of poverty and inequality trends and patterns in the world's most populous country is central to understanding changes in global inequality and poverty – these alter significantly when China is included or excluded...
Globalization offers new opportunities for accelerating development and poverty reduction, but also poses new challenges for policymakers. And there is much concern about the distribution of benefits; in particular whether the poor gain from...
Getting an accurate picture of poverty and inequality trends and patterns in the world’s most populous country is central to understanding changes in global inequality and poverty – these alter significantly when China is included or excluded. China...
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...
The paper proposes an analysis of the recent distributional dynamics in Uganda. This analysis is performed by endorsing an opportunity egalitarian perspective, in order to evaluate the outcome dynamics of specific groups of the population and infer...
This paper presents new evidence on the study of income mobility in Ecuador over the period 2004–11. We utilize longitudinal data of individual income tax returns to measure income mobility both at the top and at the middle of the income distribution...
Changes in relative prices of commodities consumed in different shares across income groups can be expected to alter real income differentials between these groups. Using Mozambican household budget survey and price data from 2002/03 and 2008/09, we...
We reconcile, both theoretically and empirically, changes in inequality with panel income changes over periods of economic growth and decline. We also explore what factors account for the trends of short-run inequality and of inequality in individual...
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...
The paper reviews the extent of the income inequality decline that took place in Latin America in 2002-10 and then focuses on the factors that may explain such decline. These include a lowered skill premium following an expansion of secondary...
This paper summarizes a comprehensive revision and update of UTIP’s work on the inequality of pay and incomes around the world, from 1963 to 2008. The new UTIP-UNIDO (University of Texas Inequality Project-United Nations Industrial Development...
A key aspect defining the contemporary income distribution is the (increasing) share the top holds compared to the rest. This paper shows that income concentration increases towards the very top of the distribution, while the shares the middle- and...
This paper evaluates the impact of education on measured inequality across the wage distribution using pooled records from the 2005 and 2010 Cameroon labour force surveys, wage equations and standard inequality measures. Returns to education...
Survey-based tools for determining inequality in Africa south of the Sahara have been critiqued for being too expensive, and oftentimes unsuitable to the realities of the region. The need for a reliable alternative for determining wealth distribution...
The phased elimination of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement has been one of the most compelling trade policy reforms of the early twenty-first century, and has brought in significant changes in the industrial structures of the countries of the global south...
We introduce two separate datasets—the Global Consumption Dataset and the Global Income Dataset—containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The benchmark version...
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the growth performance of the Cameroonian economy from independence in 1960 to date, and then to use this as a background for the analysis of poverty, inequality, and non-monetary outcomes. The analysis of...
This paper aims at measuring and analysing for the first time inequality in the distribution of expenditures among households in Togo according to the characteristics of household heads. The study is based on the most recent survey (QUIBB 2006) and...
Our hypothesis is that Nigeria is going through a process of economic polarization. An analysis of this type is new for Nigeria; the limited availability of comparable data has hindered an investigation that requires data series not too close in time...
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...
This paper examines the changing nature of occupational labour-market trends in South Africa and the resulting impact on wages. We observe high levels of demand for skilled labour that have intensified a trend already established before 1994. Over...
Changes in the relative prices of commodities consumed in different shares across income groups are known to influence real measures of inequality. Using household budget survey and price data in Mozambique from 2002/03 and 2008/09, we show that...
Post-apartheid poverty and inequality trends have been the subject of intensive analysis, yet relatively little attention has been devoted to the impact of differential price movements on the measurement of poverty and inequality. This paper aims to...
This paper seeks to measure and explain changes in incomes, inequality, and poverty in Kenya. It starts from a very long-term perspective covering the last century, but then focuses on a more detailed analysis of the recent period for which data from...
While the economic opportunities offered by globalization can be large, a question is often raised as to whether the actual distribution of gains is fair, in particular, whether the poor benefit less than proportionately from globalization and could...
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 paper discusses different approaches to the measurement of global interpersonal in equality. Trends in global interpersonal inequality during 1975-2005 are measured using data from UNU-WIDER’s World Income Inequality Database. In order to better...
We study a model of human capital driven growth, where the parent’s human capital serves as a productive input in the child’s human capital production only when that of the former exceeds a minimum level required to intellectually contribute to the...
This study focuses on growth, poverty and inequality in Rwanda. We take a broad perspective, in two respects. First, we consider a long time period so as to compare the current situation with the pre-war situation, allowing us to assess whether the...
We use Arndt and Simler’s (2010) utility-consistent approach to calculating poverty lines to analyse poverty in Madagascar in 2001, 2005 and 2010. Because two major political crises occurred between the survey periods, the snapshots of national...
Disappointment was widespread when rapid economic growth since 2005, coupled with a smallholder-targeted fertilizer subsidy program, failed to significantly reduce poverty in Malawi. Official estimates for 2011 showed a 1.7 percentage point decline...
Burkina Faso has experienced quite significant aggregate growth over the past two decades, but that growth has not been transformed into poverty reduction. The key obstacles preventing large-scale escape from poverty are very high population growth...
We use Arndt and Simler’s utility-consistent approach to calculating poverty lines to analyse poverty in Ethiopia in 2000, 2005, and 2011. Poverty reduction was steady but uneven, with gains greatest in urban areas in the first half of the decade...
This paper discusses dimensions of inequality in sub-Saharan Africa and their causes. It starts with a review of the empirical evidence about inequality during the colonial period as well as the post-independence era. Then it discusses the forces...
This paper examines the distribution of top incomes in 15 former British colonies in Africa, drawing on evidence available from income tax records. It seeks to throw light on the position of colonial elites during the period of British rule. Just how...
The slowdown and in some years reversal of poverty reduction in China forcefully demonstrates that growth is not sufficient for combating poverty even if that growth is of unprecedented magnitude. Policy initiatives should take into consideration...
The slowdown and in some years reversal of poverty reduction in China forcefully demonstrates that growth is not sufficient for combating poverty even if that growth is of unprecedented magnitude. Policy initiatives should take into consideration...
Gender equality is one of the cross-cutting concerns of the UNU-WIDER work programme 2014-18. In this interview economists Elizabeth Asiedu and Jean...
The economies in transition are experiencing unique changes in the distribution of assets. The growth in the share of private ownership is occurring through the privatization of state-owned assets and through the birth of private firms. The changes...
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...
This paper illustrates how the use of microeconometric techniques can be used to uncover the micro dynamics behind macro shocks. Using Mexican micro data we find out that—controlling for everything else—between 1994 and 1998 returns to personal...
This note points to certain similarities of orientation and outcome between Derek Parfit’s quest for a theory of beneficence and Amartya Sen’s quest for a suitable real-valued representation of poverty. It suggests that both projects, in a certain...
In a heterogeneous population which can be partitioned into well-defined subgroups, it is plausible that the extent of measured aggregate poverty should depend upon the distribution of poverty across the subgroups. A judgment in favour of an equal...
This paper discusses the emergence of two new middles since the Cold War, namely middle-income countries and people living above absolute poverty but below a security-from poverty-line. The paper sets out what has happened. It is argued that although...
We analyze the relation between inequality, corruption and competition in a developing economy context where markets are imperfect. We consider an economy where different types of households (efficient and inefficient) choose to undertake production...
This paper examines the causes of conflict in Burundi and discusses strategies for building peace. The analysis of the complex relationships between distribution and group dynamics reveals that these relationships are reciprocal, implying that...
Using a CGE model, PRCGEM, with an updated 2002 I/O table, this paper explores how earnings will be affected in each of 40 separate industries across 31 regions (or 8 regional blocks) of China for the period 2002–07. Labour movement between regions...
The impact of globalization on global and local inequality is hotly debated in the recent literature. This study considers the separate issue of the impact of globalization on poverty through quantifying explicitly the responsiveness of poverty to...
This paper presents a simple model to show how distributional concerns can engender social conflict. We have a two period model, where the cost of conflict is endogenous in the sense that parties involved have full control over how much conflict they...
The literature on the economics of happiness in the developed economies finds discrepancies between reported measures of wellbeing and income measures. The ‘Easterlin paradox’, for example, shows that average happiness levels do not increase as...
International Women’s Day on 8th March 2016 is a time to celebrate. It is also a time for reflection. We must constantly remind ourselves that while...
This paper points to some elementary conflicts between the claims of interpersonal and intergroup justice as they manifest themselves in the process of seeking a real-valued index of poverty which is required to satisfy certain seemingly desirable...
Trade liberalization, by aligning domestic prices with world prices, is envisaged to bring welfare gains to a country. In the case of Indian agriculture, owing to the vastness and diversity of the sector, the impact is likely to be profoundly unequal...
This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of interrelationships among the determinants of the quality of life (QOL). We show that various measures of well-being are highly sensitive to domains of QOL that are considered in the...
Typical welfare and inequality measures are required to be Lorenz consistent which guarantees that inequality decreases and welfare increases as a result of a progressive transfer. We explore the implications for welfare and inequality measurement of...
This paper proposes a concept of inequality comparisons with ordinal multidimensional categorical data. In our model, one population is more unequal than another when they have common arithmetic median outcomes and the first can be obtained from the...
This study traces the interactions between economic growth, income inequality and consumption poverty in a sample of African countries during the 1990s. It draws on the much-improved household data sets now available in the region. It finds that...
In this paper we present two composite indices of globalization. The first is based on the Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine and the second is obtained from principal component analysis. They indicate which countries have become most globalized and...
This paper analyses regional data on inequality and poverty in Russia during 1994-2000 using published series from the regionally representative Household Budget Survey. The paper finds that the share of inequality in Russia coming from the between...
This paper reports levels of income inequality and poverty in four Central and Eastern European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Unlike many previous researchers who examine transition economies, we aggregate the detailed...
This paper uses six nationally representative household consumption surveys to develop successive poverty profiles for Indonesia over a fifteen-year period of sustained high growth followed by rapid contraction. Adopting a ‘cost-of-basic-needs’...
Based on a statistical procedure that combines household survey data with population census data, this paper presents estimates of inequality for three developing countries at a level of disaggregation far below that allowed by household surveys...
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...
A considerable literature exists on the measurement of income inequality in China and its increasing trend. Much less is known, however, about the driving forces of this trend and their quantitative contributions. Conventional decompositions, by...
This paper constructs and analyses a long-run time-series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late...
We argue that spatial inequality of industry location is a primary cause of spatial income inequality in developing nations. We focus on understanding the process of spatial industrial variation—identifying the spatial factors that have cost...
It is often argued that multi-dimensional measures of well-being and poverty—such as those based on the capability approach and related views—are ad hoc. Rankings based on them are not, for this reason, robust to changes in the selection of weights...
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...
A plethora of what are loosely described as social and political indicators of well-being exist. Both the range and country coverage of these indicators has increased appreciably in recent years. In this paper we ask what contribution these...
The capabilities approach has emphasized that inequalities can be analyzed in various dimensions of human functioning. Indicators of these inequalities can be incorporated into assessments of well-being. The capabilities approach also highlights the...
This paper discusses the measurement of poverty and well-being. A historical overview is given of the last fifty years. This is followed by discussion of three groupings of indicators: those measures based primarily on economic well-being; those...
During the past three years NATSEM has developed pathbreaking spatial microsimulation techniques, involving the creation of synthetic data about the socioeconomic characteristics of households at a detailed regional level. The data are potentially...
This essay aims at a broad, main-stream account of the literature on inequality and poverty measurement in the space of income and, additionally, deals with measures of disparity and deprivation in the more expanded domain of capabilities and...
Bourguignon and Fields (‘Poverty Measures and Anti-Poverty Policy’) and Gangopadhyay and Subramanian (‘Optimal Budgetary Intervention in Poverty Alleviation Schemes’) have derived optimal budgetary rules for the redress of poverty through direct...
This paper is a review and commentary, from both ethical and informational perspectives, of some known results in optimal anti-poverty budgetary rules for two kinds of intervention, direct income transfers and wage employment programmes.
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 establishes the principles which should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria—the ‘equity preference’ condition and the ‘compensation principle’—are shown to be fundamentally...
The transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (FSU) has been associated with greater inequality and social stratification. Living standards have fallen for the majority of people, unemployment and poverty are high...
On 23 March researchers, policy makers, and politicians gathered at the Stockholm School of Economics (or joined online via the webcast) to hear...
The COVID-19 crisis — the pandemic, restrictions, and recession — has not been a grand leveler. While all of us, rich and poor, faced the fear and...
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 this paper I examine the trend in income inequality and poverty among the self-employed workers in Mexico over the last two decades (1984–2002). This is the period over which Mexico opened its economy to the global market through trade and...
Informality is a pervasive phenomenon in the labour markets of developing countries. Two billion workers, representing 61.2 per cent of the world’s...
This paper investigates some major changes in the wealth distribution in China using the data from two national household surveys conducted in 1995 and 2002. The surveys collected rich information on household wealth and its components, enabling a...
This paper depicts the trend of regional inequality in rural China for the period 1985-2002. The total inequality is decomposed into the so-called within- and between-components when China is divided into three regional belts (east, central and west)...
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...
This study provides the first country-wide research evidence that an affirmative action policy may induce a backlash. I exploit the timing of the implementation of castebased electoral quotas across and within the states of India. The results show...
All countries in transition experienced increases in inequality. They have also undertaken massive privatization of key asset housing, often on give-away terms. Are these two phenomena related? Has transfer of ownership rights to residents slowed...
This paper examines the nature and extent of global and regional income distribution and inequality using the most recent country level data on income distribution drawn from World Bank and UNU-WIDER studies for the period 1993-2000. The methodology...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid for Gender Equality and Development
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...
The economic reform policies in the 1980s and the 1990s under the so-called Washington Consensus have recently led to growing concern for inequality. This paper looks at some of the labour market outcomes of the economic reform policies in terms of...
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 paper studies the evolution of Venezuelan inequality since 1970. It finds a striking increase in Venezuelan inequality that has been due mainly to the rise in capital's share of GDP. It shows that the increase can be traced back to the coupling...
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...
The dispersion of racial incomes in South Africa has been declining since the mid 1970s. This has been accompanied by rising within-group inequality, especially amongst blacks, driven by growing unemployment. Consequently, there has been little...
The recent rise in inequality in the distribution of disposable income in many, although not all, countries has led to a search for explanations, particularly since for much of the postwar period falling inequality has been the norm. In OECD...
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...
For developing and transitional countries we explore trends in rural-urban, intrarural and intraurban inequality of income, poverty risk, health and education. In particular, we ask whether behind generally rising inequality post-1980 lie offsetting...
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
Mozambique has now enjoyed eight years of peace after a 16-year war that massively damaged the economy, caused over a million deaths, and displaced more than 3 million people. This paper aims to improve our understanding of how rural societies...
Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorer countries undergoing transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. Unlike its neighbour Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan followed a rather radical reform strategy, introduced liberal macroeconomic reforms and large...
Groundwater resources in Gujarat (India) have been depleting at an darning rate in recent years. The most visible symptom of this phenomenon is the decline of water tables in large pats of the state. The scarcity of groundwater is most severe during...
A very large amount of activity occurs within groups (that is within families, firms, co-operatives, conununities or governments). Yet most economic analysis focuses on market transactions between these agents. The purpose of the study is to analyse...
The paper finds that a new system of social stratification is emerging in rural China in the wake of economic reforms, one that is far less equal than what preceded it. As part of this trend, wealth inequality has increased markedly in a short period...
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...
Recent mainstream analyses of changes in income distribution over the post World War II period have concluded that income inequality within countries tends to be stable, that there is no strong association between growth and inequality and that...
This paper's goal is to increase the understanding of the inequality trends during the transitional period in China. From 1978 to 1995, China has been undergoing 18 years far-reaching economic system reform and opening to the outside world nationwide...
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...
We present a unified structural equation modelling framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with a simple ordinary least squares regression. The structural...
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 examines group functioning in the management of common pool resources, such as forests. In recent years community forestry groups have mushroomed in South Asia. But how participative, equitable and efficient are they? Many have done well...
Statistical and sociological evidence is gathered to display changes in social structure of the Czech society before and after 1989, with a special focus on economic inequalities. In the first part, frozen landscape of the communist regime is...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
At our 30th Anniversary Conference we took the chance to interview Martin Ravallion of Georgetown University—we asked him to discuss his recent work...
An equal distribution of assets is a crucial element in the process of economic transition from plan to market. In the socialist era most physical assets were owned by the state and private ownership was not very important for most individuals. When...
Income inequality has risen in many parts of the world during the past decades. Rising inequality is no longer a problem of only Latin American and Sub-Saharan African countries. Some OECD countries, and recently also East Asian countries, have...
The transition from plan to market has fundamentally transformed the social structure in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The small Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan exemplifies these changes.Using data from nationally...
Already in the 1950s it became clear that, in spite of its widespread use, the per capita gross national product is an insufficient measure of the well-being of citizens. Thus, in 1954, an expert group within the United Nations suggested that one...
Over the past two decades, Ghana’s economy experienced an average annual growth rate of 5.8 percent, and became a low-middle income country in 2007...
Stochastic dominance and Lorenz dominance are examples of orderings which require unanimous agreement among an infinite set of indices. This paper considers various subsets of inequality measures that respect Lorenz dominance, and assesses the extent...
by Tony Addison The period 1990-2000 saw 19 major armed-conflicts in Africa, ranging from civil wars to the 1998-2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia...
by Cecilia Ugaz and Catherine Waddams Price How have consumers fared from the sale and introduction of competition to the traditional ‘public...
by Anthony L. Venables Economic activity is distributed extremely unevenly across space. At the international level there are rich countries and poor...
by Ravi KanburThe last 30 years in the analysis of inequality and poverty has seen a phase of conceptual advancement (1970-mid 1980s) followed by a...
by Machiko Nissanke and Erik Thorbecke The process of globalization provides a golden opportunity for mankind to contribute to a major reduction of...
by Kaushik Basu 1. Forbes Online, 27 February 2003 (1), offers some information about the world’s ten richest people. Much of the information would...
by James K. Galbraith I t is well-known that economic inequality rose drastically in Russia during the transition (Sheviakov and Kiruta 2001). For...
by C. Peter Timmer & Ashley S. TimmerIt is always exciting to be present when new and provocative ideas are launched, especially when they are in the...
by Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Anthony Shorrocks and Rolph van der HoevenThe last decade has witnessed a blossoming of research on poverty-related topics...
Part of Book Social Provision in Low-Income Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue The New Economy
Part of Journal Special Issue WIDER Symposium on Analyzing the Socioeconomic Consequences of Rising Inequality in China
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 Inequality and Development in Asia
Part of Journal Special Issue Policy Arena: Small Island Developing States
Part of Journal Special Issue Globalization-Poverty Channels and Case Studies from Sub-Saharan Africa
Official development assistance to women’s equality organizations and institutions is effective in increasing women’s political empowerment. In contrast, aid targeting reproductive health and family planning does not appear to impact women’s...
We conduct a lab experiment to assess whether gender of dictators and recipients, and distributional preferences affect allocations in a modified dictator game where both parties perform a cognitive task and the resulting pie to be split is the sum...
We conduct a lab experiment to assess whether gender of dictators and recipients, and distributional preferences affect allocations in a modified dictator game where both parties perform a cognitive task and the resulting pie to be split is the sum...
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...
Donor political interests have heavily influenced aid flows to North Africa in the past. This has reduced the effectiveness of aid which, with the exception of Tunisia, has not been associated with sustained economic growth. The Arab Spring provides...
In Mali aid has had a positive impact on some areas of democratic consolidation such as strengthening the economy and civil society, election support and conflict resolution. Three significant structural problems were not addressed properly by donors...
Using the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs), and non-SCSTs across the earnings...
2015 marks the 30th anniversary of UNU-WIDER. The Institute opened its doors in 1985. It has been quite a ride ever since. We have had thousands of...
I’m writing this editorial from Dar es Salaam, while at the 20th anniversary workshop for Tanzania’s REPOA, one of our research partners. UNU-WIDER...
James B. Davies, Professor of Economics at the University of Western Ontario, played a key role in UNU-WIDER’s pioneering research into global...
So we have reached April. The year is starting to move fast. I’m writing this from New York, having just participated in an event on the sustainable...
At the UNU-WIDER Inequality conference September 2014 we interviewed Murray Leibbrandt, Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town on...
In this interview Professor Nora Lustig, Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics at Tulane University, talks about the importance of...
And so we come to the summer Angle. We have just passed the longest day (midsummer) in Helsinki, with 19 or so hours of daylight. The seagulls nesting...
In the more than two decades since democratic elections signalled a new era in Mozambique, a great deal has been accomplished. Nearly all development...
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 Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia
Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China
Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia
Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia
Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia
Revisiting foundational feminist work on the concept of empowerment from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper draws on the findings of a multi-country research programme, ‘Pathways of Women’s Empowerment’, to explore pathways of positive change in women’s...
In this episode of In Focus, we tackle the issue of growing inequality in Africa amidst impressive economic growth rates with Prof. Finn Tarp...
In the run up to the announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) in September every development issue is clamouring for attention. The...
In this interview C. Peter Timmer, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, reflects on the conditions of possibility of structural transformation in...
by Guanghua Wan Introduction Inequality in income and consumption has been increasing dramatically in China since mid- 1980s. In particular, China’s...
Much attention has recently been focused on estimates of the world distribution of income by World Bank researchers and others. The global...
by Richard Jolly During the 18th and 19th centuries ,political economists wrote about inequality as a central issue of their time, important as a...
by Nancy Birdsall The world is becoming ‘flat’ says Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, in his new bestseller The World Is Flat: A Brief...
by Markus Jantti Finland is now a solid member of the European Union and the OECD. While Finland is not one of the richest countries, as measured by...
by Kirk Hamilton Can poverty reduction be sustained? The end of the twentieth century saw a renewed commitment to ending poverty embodied in the...
While the richest 10% of adults in the world own 85% of global household wealth, the bottom half collectively owns barely 1%. Even more strikingly...
by Guanghua Wan Poverty reduction can be achieved through growth and/or improved distribution. However, growth can lead to a decrease or increase in...
by Paul Collier Alarge group of smallish countries totalling about a billion people have sheered off from the rest of mankind. As the world becomes...
Zhicheng Liang The Chinese economy has experienced impressive growth over the last two decades. However, this rapid growth has been accompanied by...
Machiko Nissanke and Erik Thorbecke Despite the enormous potential of globalization in accelerating economic growth and development through...
27 August 2014 Vladimir Popov Modern economic growth started in the West, not because of the efficiency of various capitalist institutions...
18 December 2014 Roger Williamson In an earlier article I reviewed a number of the high-profile contributions to the September 2014 conference on...
8 October 2014 by Roger Williamson Michael Keen from the International Monetary Fund addressed the UNU-WIDER Development Conference in September 2014...
30 October 2014 Dominik Etienne and Annett Victorero The last decade has witnessed a revival of concern over the impact of high-income concentration...
30 October 2014 by Roger Williamson In this interview Professor Anthony Shorrocks describes the methodology to research global household wealth...
Roger Williamson The Danish State Secretary for Development Policy Charlotte Slente, welcomed the participants and contributors to the meeting and...
26 March 2014 Tony Addison The Nordic countries have a long-standing commitment to development, and their work in peace-building has taken Nordic...
In the great majority of Latin American countries in the 2000s, economic growth took place and brought about improvements in almost all labour market indicators and consequent reductions in poverty rates. Across countries, economic growth was not all...
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...
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...
24 January 2014 In this interview Professor Armando Barrientos reviews the recent UNU-WIDER project on inequality in Latin America which looks at the...
27 August 2014 Jukka Pirttilä and Tony Addison The last few months have seen major research activity in the area of inequality at UNU-WIDER. An update...
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 paper introduces a concept of inequality comparisons with ordinal bivariate categorical data. In our model, one population is more unequal than another when they have common arithmetic median outcomes and the first can be obtained from the...
The white-painted cluster of traditional style buildings might suggest that this was a farm on the South African veldt. Not so however—it was Trade...
This paper provides an historical overview of aid flows to North Africa. It assesses the aid allocation process and argues that past aid flows to the region have been heavily influenced by donor political interests. This has reduced the effectiveness...
We are now into 2015, and the year is already gathering speed. 2015 is of course the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, and a major year in...
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...
In this paper, we address the question of whether official development assistance promotes gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa region by examining the effects of aid to Women’s Equality Organizations and Institutions on women’s...
This study investigates the ethnic disadvantage in rural Vietnam, focusing on the magnitude of the majority–minority gap and the constraints on ethnic minority households that contribute to the gap. Using a biannual panel dataset spanning the period...
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...
Mali long seemed a model, low-income democracy. Yet, in a few short weeks in early 2012, more than half of the territory came under the military control of an Islamist secessionist movement, and a military coup deposed the democratically-elected...
Based on China Household Income Project rural data, this paper aims to study the changes of rural household income mobility in transitional China. The results show that with the economic reform and development, income mobility between 2007 and 2009...
Professor Stephen Jenkins (this issue) has conducted an extremely careful and insightful analysis of two datasets, WIID and SWIID. In this short response, we focus on his review of the WIID, maintained and published by UNU-WIDER in agreement with 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...
Inequalities between ethnic or racial groups, defined as horizontal inequalities, are pervasive and persistent. They persist due to cumulative and reinforcing inequalities arising from unequal access to different types of capital. Affirmative action...
Part of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
There has been a serious deficit of good news in Mozambique for quite some time. The recent release of Mozambique’s Fourth Poverty Assessment, based...
by Frances Stewart The number of humanitarian emergencies has been escalating since the early 1990s. Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s...
by Vladimir Mikhalev The transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (FSU) has been associated with increased...
by Richard Jolly The gap between rich and poor nations is now at its highest ever level. OECD Research by Angus Maddison shows that differences in...
by Anthony Atkinson Income inequality is rising in a large number of industrialised countries. The phenomenon first attracted attention in the United...
by Giovanni Andrea Cornia After four and a half years at UNU/WIDER, on 1 January 2000 I will be returning to Florence and the Innocenti Research...
by Nora Lustig Latin America went through a severe economic recession in the 1980s, and crises erupted again in the 1990s, most notably Mexico and...
by Branko Milanovic Issues of income inequality have recently gained prominence. Increasing inequality in North America and Western Europe in the...
by Rolph van der Hoeven Discussion of aid, both its level and effectiveness, overwhelmingly focuses on issues of national economic management. This is...
After tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, income inequality increased in many Latin American countries The tax reforms of the 2000s have been more equalizing in terms of income inequality: Argentina, Honduras and Nicaragua have seen the most...
24 September 2013 Roger Williamson Drawing on a lifetime’s analysis of specialist collection and interpretation of poverty data, Martin Ravallion...
Left-of-centre governments emphasized fiscally-prudent but more equitable macroeconomic, tax, social expenditure and labour policies A drop in the premium paid to skilled workers following a rapid expansion of secondary education decreased wage...
During the 1990s, inequality in Ecuador increased because of a natural disaster and deep economic and financial crisis, as well as the impact of liberalization of the trade and financial sectors on labour markets Falling income equality in Ecuador...
Social insurance has not succeeded in reducing fiscal deficits and expanding coverage to more beneficiaries in Latin America Social assistance has had a greater impact on poverty and inequality than social insurance In lower-middle-income countries...
Part of Book Wider Perspectives on Global Development
Part of Book Wider Perspectives on Global Development
Part of Journal Special Issue A Collection of UNU-WIDER articles in Chinese
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Book Achieving Development Success
This study uses five series of demographic and health surveys to answer the question: ‘Is horizontal inequality in education and wealth increasing or decreasing in the 20-year interval between 1991 and 2010?’. Horizontal inequality in education...
Getting an accurate picture of poverty and inequality trends and patterns in the world's most populous country is central to understanding changes in global inequality and poverty - these alter significantly when China is included or excluded. China...
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty and Inequality in China
This paper examines inter-country inequality in indicators of human well-being. It is primarily concerned with inequality in two gender-related, composite indicators of development levels proposed: the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the...
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 Journal Special Issue Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality in Latin America
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 Journal Special Issue Land and Property Rights
The paper investigates whether multi-party coalition government is better for the protection of socially backward classes, i.e. Scheduled Castes, in India. We have looked at the impact of types of government on the reduction of the gap between...
Part of Journal Special Issue Land and Property Rights
Part of Book Latin American Urban Development into the 21st Century
Part of Book Latin American Urban Development into the 21st Century
Part of Book Latin American Urban Development into the 21st Century
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring Poverty Over Time
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring Poverty Over Time
On 15 May, poet Neide Sigaúque was commissioned to perform two poems on the themes of the WIDER Development Conference The world at crossroads –...
Aqui não dá para dormir, quanto mais para sonharSou a Neide Sigaúque,mulher,oriunda do leito Austral do terceiro mundo,Moçambique, terra de boa gente...
In 2024, central banks worldwide are confronted with the challenges of juggling inflation control, economic growth, and the preservation of financial...
We provide the first estimate of the level and distribution of global household wealth. Mean assets and debts within countries are measured, partly or wholly, for 38 countries using household balance sheet and survey data centred on the year 2000...
This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of wellbeing—education and health—in Africa. We expected to find, as we did in Latin America, that progress in the provision of public services and the focus of public...
One of the contentious issues about the globalization process is the mechanism by which globalization affects poverty and inequality. This paper explores one of the various strands of the globalization–inequality–poverty nexus. Using microlevel...
Mandated political representation over the last twenty years has had a different impact on the reporting of crime by the low castes than what is observed for the reporting of crime by women. I exploit the timing of the implementation of mandated...
Using nationally representative, economy-wide data, this paper investigates the relative importance of trade-mandated effects on industry wage premiums; industry and economy-wide skill premiums; and employment flows in accounting for changes in the...
The last two decades has witnessed an increase in globalizing influences affecting most countries, Africa included. These influences have arisen partly as a result of domestic and international policies, such as trade policies, and partly as a result...
This paper argues that the reduction of horizontal inequalities (HIs) or inequalities between culturally defined groups should inform aid policy in heterogeneous countries with severe HIs. It shows how this would change aid allocation across...
Reducing child malnutrition is a key goal of most developing countries. To combat child malnutrition with the right set of interventions, policymakers need to have a better understanding of its economic, social and policy determinants. While there is...
We describe a new method of facilitating inequality and poverty analysis of grouped distributional data by allowing individual income observations to be reconstructed from any feasible grouping pattern. In contrast to earlier methods, our procedure...
We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results – based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust...
Economic growth in China and India has attracted many headlines recently. As a result, the literature comparing the two Asian giants has expanded substantially. This paper adds to the literature by comparing regional growth, disparity and convergence...
This study explores the extent to which inequality affects the impact of income growth on the rates of poverty changes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) comparatively with non-SSA, based on a global sample of 1977–2004 unbalanced panel data. For both...
Research on caste-based inequalities in India has generally focused on differences between large categories such as the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and the remainder of the population. We contribute to the literature on horizontal...
This paper focuses on measuring the extent to which publicly subsidized transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean redistribute income. The redistributive power of 56 transfers in eight countries is measured by their simulated impacts on poverty...
Any infrastructure reformers concerned with social issues in a developing country need to address two problems. The first is increasing access by the poor, and the second is ensuring consumption affordability, i.e. the ability of the poor to pay for...
The rapid development and diffusion of the information and communications technology (ICT) is the major driving force of the New Economy. While there is ample evidence to suggest that the ICT industry has contributed a great deal to the overall...
In this paper, we analyse which channels influence individual preferences concerning the choice of the official language in Zambia. We develop a theoretical framework, which is tested using data on elicited beliefs about the effects of changes in...
This paper describes approaches to the measurement and explanation of income-related inequality and inequity in health care financing, health care utilization and health and considers the applicability and the feasibility of these methods in low...
There has been much recent research on the world distribution of income, but also growing recognition of the importance of other contributions to well-being, including those of household wealth. Wealth is important in providing security and...
The Maoist insurgency in Nepal is one of the highest intensity internal conflicts in recent times. Investigation into the causes of the conflict would suggest that grievance rather than greed is the main motivating force. The concept of horizontal or...
Despite the growing interest in global inequality, assessing inequality trends is a major challenge because individual data on income or consumption is not often available. Nevertheless, the periodic release of certain summary statistics of the...
Based on analysing World Bank and other donor post-conflict reconstruction (PCR) loans and grants from rights-based, macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives, we conclude that few PCR projects identify or address gender discrimination issues...
This paper looks into the interrelation between economic growth, inequality, and poverty. Using the notion of pro-poor growth, this study examines to what extent the poor benefit from economic growth. First, various approaches to defining and...
The Millennium Development Goals have become the frame of reference for most of the development community: the standard by which performance will ultimately be judged. Given their importance, considerable attention has been paid as to whether these...
This paper re-asserts the importance of certain old-fashioned questions relating to international aid: what is the quantum of aid available in relation to the need for it? How may patterns of allocation, at both the dispensing and receiving ends of...
We use original 2005 household survey data from Fiji and Tonga to estimate the impact of migration and remittances on income distribution and measures of poverty, after controlling for selectivity in migration and endogeneity in the relationship...
This paper discusses issues that arise in the comparison of estimates of wealth holdings and their distribution in light of data for selected OECD countries. We find large differences in the level of wealth, depending on whether the mean or median...
How much does economic growth contribute to poverty reduction? I discuss analytical and empirical approaches to assess the poverty elasticity of growth, and emphasize that the relationship between growth and poverty change is non-constant. For a...
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
25 February 2013 Andy McKay, professor of development economics at University of Sussex, discusses the motivating factors behind UNU-WIDER’s Growth...
Christian Friis Bach We need to unite the world in a strong effort to eradicate extreme poverty, promote sustainable development and ensure the right...
Rachel M. Gisselquist There is much to commend in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as we approach their target deadline of 2015. In addition to...