UNU-WIDER : UNU-WIDER

UNU-WIDER at 40: The power of shared knowledge

Finnish launch of the World Bank report

Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet: Pathways Out of the Polycrisis

UNU-WIDER at the 2025 Dialogue on Public Finance and the SDGs

29-31 January 2025 at Columbia University in New York, US

New book lays out path for green growth from extractive industry in low-income countries

UNU-WIDER and ATI launch innovative Tax Gap Toolkit

148 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...

Blog

From The Editor's Desk (October 2012)

by Tony Addison October 2012

Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...

Blog

From the Editor's Desk (March 2012)

by Tony Addison March 2012

Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...

Book Chapter

Incomes, Inequality, and Poverty in Kenya

Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa

Blog

Poverty and Inclusive Growth in the Light of the Quintile Income Statistic

by Sreenivasan Subramanian December 2013

9 December 2013 S. Subramanian 1 Introduction It appears that the World Bank is planning to maintain and disseminate systematic information on a...

Blog

Multidimensional Poverty: Measurement and Implications: An Interview with James Foster

by Roger Williamson October 2013

17 October 2013 James Foster describes the importance of moving beyond income poverty as a way of assessing 'who is poor?' and 'how poor?'...

Blog

Microcredit and Poverty Alleviation: Can Microcredit Close the Deal?

by M. G. Quibria October 2012

M.G. Quibria In the wake of the worst famine of Bangladesh of the post-World War era Professor Muhammad Yunus launched a microcredit experiment in...

Journal Article

When do relative prices matter for measuring income inequality?

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...

Working Paper

Poverty and Ethnicity Among Black South Africans

This paper investigates inequalities across the major black ethnic groups in South Africa, accounting for 80 per cent of the country’s population. We demonstrate that there is an important ethnic gap in the poverty levels of the Xhosa and the Zulu...

Working Paper

Income Mobility in Ecuador

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...

Working Paper

Analysing Income Distribution Changes

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...

Working Paper

Measured as Poor Versus Feeling Poor

In this paper, we compare subjective and money-metric measures of poverty in South Africa using data collected in the 2008/09 Living Conditions Survey. In addition to collecting detailed information on expenditure, the survey asked respondents to...

Working Paper

Tax-benefit microsimulation in Ecuador

The aim of this study is to evaluate the feasibility to implement a tax and benefit microsimulation model for Ecuador using EUROMOD as an interface. We first present a detailed description of the main components of the tax and benefit system in...

Working Paper

Child deprivation and income poverty in Ghana

This study assesses temporal and spatial distribution of child deprivation and income poverty using the fifth and sixth rounds of the Ghana Living Standards Survey. The first-order dominance methodology was used to examine five dimensions of...

Blog

Income generation and malaria in Uganda

by Saurabh Singhal, Yao Pan December 2017

Several large-scale efforts have been made to combat malaria in the last decade under the Millennium Development Goals, and while these have led to a...

Working Paper

South Africa’s Emerging Black Middle Class

South Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of the black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the...

Working Paper

When do Relative Prices Matter for Measuring Income Inequality?

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...

Working Paper

Incomes, Inequality, and Poverty in Kenya

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...

Book Chapter

Implications of Accelerated Agricultural Growth on Household Incomes and Poverty in Ethiopia :

Book chapter in: P. Dorosh and S. Rashid (eds) Food and Agriculture in Ethiopia: Progress and Policy Challenges.Ethiopia’s economy has experienced rapid growth in recent years. Although growth in agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) from 1998 to...

Working Paper

On a Distance Function-Based Inequality Measure in the Spirit of the Bonferroni and Gini Indices

A natural way of viewing an inequality or a poverty measure is in terms of the vector distance between an actual (empirical) distribution of incomes and some appropriately normative distribution (reflecting a perfectly equal distribution of incomes...

Working Paper

On the ‘Inclusiveness’ of India’s Consumption Expenditure Growth

This paper reviews the evidence on the ‘inclusiveness’ of the growth in consumption expenditure that has occurred in India over the last four decades or so. The notion of dynamic inclusiveness is framed in terms of imagined normative allocations of...

Working Paper

Global inequality

In this paper, we estimate the recent evolution of global interpersonal inequality and examine the effect of omitted top incomes on the level and direction of global inequality. We propose a methodology to estimate the truncation point of household...

Annual Lecture

WIDER Annual Lecture 15 - New Structural Economics

Wed, 4 May 2011

Centro Internacional de Conferências Joaquim Chissano, Avenida Marginal 4441, Maputo, Mozambique

Past event

About

Photos - AL12

Selection of images from the WIDER Annual Lecture 12.

Video

WIDER Annual Lecture by Justin Yifu Lin

View the WIDER Annual Lecture on New Structural Economics.

About

Photos - AL15

Selection of images from the WIDER Annual Lecture 15.

Journal Article

Health Inequality and Deprivation

Part of Journal Special Issue Health and Development

UNU-WIDER organized two sessions during the 17th World Congress of the International Economic Association. Learning to Compete – Sunday 8 June 2014 Chaired by Finn Tarp Out of Africa: A comparative perspective on why Africa failed to industrialize...

Fri, 6 June 2014 – Tue, 10 June 2014

Dead Sea, Jordan

Past event

Book

Falling Inequality in Latin America

The book aims to document and explain the sizeable decline of income inequality that has taken place in Latin America during the 2000s. It does so through an exploration of inequality changes in six representative countries, and ten policy chapters...

Book Chapter

Inequality in Historical Perspective

Part of Book Advancing Development

Book Chapter

Health Improvements and Health Inequality During the Last 40 Years

Part of Book Advancing Development

Book Chapter

Household Income Dynamics in Rural China

Part of Book Insurance Against Poverty

Book Chapter

Risk, Insurance, and Poverty

Part of Book Insurance Against Poverty

Working Paper

The Danish Model and the Globalizing Learning Economy

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...

Working Paper

Ethnic disadvantage in Vietnam

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...

Working Paper

On the fertility transition in Africa

A consensus among social scientists is that fertility rates in Africa are declining. What determines these declines? I present fresh evidence that shows education, especially for women, is an important determinant of the fertility transition in...

Working Paper

Income and malaria

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...