Special economic zones (SEZs) in Africa are generally regarded as underperforming relative to their peers in the rest of the world. This study focuses on the design features of the SEZ in Africa that may help explain this underperformance. Literature...
This paper explores how Southern Africa can leverage its mineral resources to support growth and industrialization. It considers the aggregate and spatial effects of transport infrastructure improvements, and the relative benefits of financing these...
Investments in infrastructure – such as roads – typically aim to reduce transport costs, stimulate trade, and make new production activities viable...
COVID-19 has created a trade crisis in Southern Africa, with a dramatic slowdown in cross-border trade. The crisis, which exposed weaknesses and deficiencies in the trade facilitation regimes, presents an opportunity for the African Continental Free...
Japan has provided foreign aid for some 60 years. Japan’s aid has grown and evolved as it became richer and as the developing world changed too. Japan is a strong supporter of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and revised its ODA Charter in...
Where does the money come from to buy votes? We argue that an important source of funds for vote-buying comes from ‘contract clientelism’, or the provision of public contracts to private firms in exchange for campaign donations. Using quantitative...
China’s engagement in the so-called international fragmentation of production – namely ‘cross-border dispersion of component production/assembly within vertically integrated manufacturing industries’ – has become an increasingly important form of its...
Economist Imed Drine recently left UNU-WIDER and headed with his family for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to take up a new position as a senior economist with...
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, an attempt is made to identify some key challenges for infrastructure sectors in post-conflict reconstruction. In spite of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, infrastructure can be damaged in conflicts, and reconstructing infrastructure...
The African continent is facing the potential of a US$183.6 billion liability to repair and maintain roads damaged from temperature and precipitation changes related to climate change through 2100. As detailed, the central part of the continent faces...
This study examines the programme Redes Solidarias, a public-private initiative that connected to natural pipelined gas 4,000 households in the Great Buenos Aires Area during 2005. The main features of the institutional framework are described and...
The paper tests for external effects of local economic activity on consumption and income growth at the farm household level using panel data from four provinces of post-reform rural China. The tests allow for nonstationary fixed effects in the...
The clustering of industries in specific areas has improved industrial productivity in a number of countries. Since the mid-1990s in Tunisia, concerted policies have been introduced which focus on improving the efficiency of the labour force, and...
Somik V. Lall and Uwe Deichmann Following the terrible disaster which struck Haiti last month, in which more than 200,000 people are estimated to have...
The present study develops a reliability assessment method of wind resource using optimum reservoir target power operations that maximizes the firm generation of integrated wind and hydro power. A combined water resources model for a system of...
Methods: In 2010–2014, we used a situational analysis tool to collect data at district and regional hospitals in Bangladesh (n = 14), the Plurinational State of Bolivia (n = 18), Ethiopia (n = 19), Guatemala (n = 20), the Lao People’s Democratic...
Productivity gains are the prime engine of economic growth. This paper uses a rich amount of firms’ accounting information from the Single Information Collecting Centre in Senegal over the period 1998-2011. To investigate the two main obstacles to...
The success of Africa's exports, as well as its spatial development, depends on lowering transport costs. In this Policy Brief, we address a number of pertinent questions on transport costs in Africa, such as 'what are transport costs?', 'do...
Part of Journal Special Issue Economics of climate change impacts on developing countries
Part of Journal Special Issue Economics of climate change impacts on developing countries
Climate change scenarios for many Sub-Saharan African countries including Ghana indicate that temperatures will increase while rainfall will either increase or decrease. The potential impact of climate change on economic systems is well-known...
Part of Book Extractive Industries
Geography causes African countries to experience a ‘proximity gap’. To overcome this gap a ‘big push’ may be needed in infrastructure. The cross-border nature of such infrastructure requires regional cooperation in at least four issues: transport...
The construction sector plays a key role in providing structures for economies.This paper surveys the literature on key issues pertaining to the construction sector. It starts by summarizing our knowledge about differences in unit costs across time...
The research explores the structure and performance of Ghana’s construction subsector, in light of the country’s 2007 oil discovery. Using primary and secondary data resources, we discuss how marginal costs and expenditure shocks may vary within the...
The construction sector plays a critical role in delivering quality infrastructure, which in turn influences the use of natural resource revenues towards achieving structural change and industrial development. We use industrial organization and...
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...
Prior to 2009, there was no direct road connection between the southern regions of Mozambique—where the capital city is located—and the more agriculturally-productive central and northern regions. In this paper, we leverage the opening of a major...
This paper describes the scale and nature of development assistance to projects that sought to improve housing and living conditions for low income groups, including housing-related infrastructure and services such as water supply, sanitation and...
Discussions on the developing world’s industrial policies have largely neglected the role of state-owned entities. This paper argues that the resurgence of state capitalism has been, in part, the response of developing countries to the recent pattern...
Africa should industrialize. Without structural change it cannot sustain recent growth. Economies with more diverse and sophisticated industrial sectors tend to grow faster. But since 1980 Africa has deindustrialized. The paper shows that between...
This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over the period 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by tracking the evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and...
Bilateral trade of geographically distant countries is likely to be negatively affected by the distance separating them from their trading partners and positively affected by their remoteness, defined as the average weighted distance between two...
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...
We develop a poverty decomposition method that is based on a consumption regression model. Because this method uses an integral of the partial derivatives of a poverty measure with respect to time, the resulting poverty decomposition satisfies time...
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...
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...
This paper studies the growth performance of a large set of entrepreneurial firms in ten manufacturing sectors of eleven Sub-Saharan African countries. The focus of the paper is on identifying those entrepreneurs’ attributes and firm characteristics...
Local content policies in the context of extractive industries have attracted increased interest in recent years. Most countries with a significant extractive industry have included local content requirements either in their legislation or...
The central argument of this study is that given the magnitude of the investment in infrastructure that is required, especially in Africa, the role of foreign aid in the future should be distinctly different. While aid will be required to continue to...
Part of Journal Special Issue Prospects for Renewable Energy in Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
Part of Journal Special Issue Prospects for Renewable Energy in Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Policy Arena: Small Island Developing States
The term fiscal resource curse refers to countries’ inability to raise taxes from a broad base in the presence of natural resources. We employ a novel instrumental variable strategy to estimate the causal effect of resource revenues on non-resource...
Join the network
