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...
The paper reviews what we know about the possibilities of designing and implementing policy measures that raise the contribution of the extractive industries’ production/consumption links to economic growth and wellbeing, and reviews how policies...
Special economic zones (SEZ) in Africa are generally regarded as underperforming relative to their peers in the rest of the world. To explain this underperformance and to support success in the future it is important to analyse the key features and...
Historically, transport infrastructure connecting the most agriculturally productive areas of Mozambique and the richer southern region has been poor. A primary bottleneck was an unreliable ferry service over the Zambezi river, addressed by...
Using convolutional neural networks applied to satellite images covering a 25 km x 12 km rectangle on the northern outskirts of Greater Maputo, we detect and classify buildings from 2010 and 2018 in order to compare the development in quantity and...
We look at how improving roads can affect jobs and structural transformation. We use a novel geocoded dataset covering the universe of Ethiopian roads and match this information with individual data to identify the effects of improvements in road...
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...
Community-driven reconstruction (CDR) is an approach to post-war reconstruction that gives discretion to local community councils in establishing priorities and overseeing the implementation of reconstruction and development activities. A series of...
Climate change is a potential threat to Vietnam’s development as current and future infrastructure will be vulnerable to climate change impacts. This paper focuses on the physical asset of road infrastructure in Vietnam by evaluating the potential...
Producing electricity from wind is attractive because it provides a clean, low-maintenance power supply. However, wind resource is intermittent on various time scales, thus introducing variability in power output that is difficult for electric grid...
Climate change may damage road infrastructure to the potential detriment of economic growth, particularly in developing countries. To quantitatively assess climate change’s consequences, we construct a climate-infrastructure model based on stressor...
The African Development Bank has called for US$40 billion per year over the coming decades to be provided to African countries to address development issues directly related to climate change. The current study addresses a key component of these...
Part of Journal Special Issue African Development in an Urban World
Part of Book The Poor under Globalization in Asia, Latin America, and Africa
Part of Book The Rise of China and India
Examining the economic forces that will shape Africa’s future Africa’s Lions examines the economic growth experiences of six fast-growing and/or economically dominant African countries. Expert African researchers offer unique perspectives into the...
The paper investigates the impact of infrastructural development on poverty reduction in Nigeria. Specifically, the relative effects of physical and social infrastructure on living standards or poverty indicators are examined, with a view to...
This paper presents the results of the current study on the impact of climate change on the road and building infrastructure within South Africa. The approach builds upon previous work associated with the UNU-WIDER Development under Climate Change...
Part of Journal Special Issue Climate Change and Economic Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Climate Change and Economic Development
Part of Book Pathways to Industrialization in the Twenty-First Century
Part of Book Making Peace Work
This paper investigates the relationship between taxation and firm performance in developing countries. Taking firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) and tax data from the Government Revenue Dataset (ICTD/UNU-WIDER), our...
Part of Journal Special Issue Health and Development
Increased openness is seen by some as a panacea for development while for others it is a recipe for disaster for the poor. Using the example of Ethiopia, this paper discusses some of the key challenges faced by some of the poorest African countries...
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...
This study explores the on-going development of a global digital economy through a case-study analysis of its impact on and prospects in South Africa. It argues that four factors are key to understanding the impact of the digital economy on a...
This paper, using a cumulative growth model and a catch-up model, verifies the cumulative relationship between IT investment and economic growth, and then examines whether this relationship enlarges the differences in the economic growth among OECD...
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...
This paper presents a global perspective on infrastructure coverage and the poor that many people will think they have seen before but in fact have not. It is widely assumed that the poor in developing countries have fewer infrastructure services...
Part of Journal Special Issue Climate Change and the Zambezi River Valley
Part of Book Latin American Urban Development into the 21st Century
Jamie Bleck and Kristin Michelitch [1] Mali has continued to be in the news since its military coup in March 2012. Much of the news coverage on Mali...
22 August 2013 Roger Williamson Given the high growth rates since 2000 and low labour costs, Africa could develop manufacturing industry, agro...
Japan has an impressive history when it comes to aid, industrial policy, and infrastructure development, both as a country that saw meteoric development of its own, and as a country that has been one of the world’s largest donors for decades. Looking...
Lucy Scott Part 1 of this article, which appeared in last month’s issue, discussed the ‘Bangladesh Paradox’ that Bangladesh has made economic and...
All countries, especially developing countries with limited financial resources, face difficult decisions in prioritizing public funds for investment projects in order to achieve strategic public goals in the face of multiple demands. Effective...
Reconstruction from conflict is a complex and demanding task, and a major challenge for post-conflict countries as well as the international community. Countries and their donor partners face multiple priorities – rebuilding infrastructure, assisting...
Part of Book Utility Privatization and Regulation
It has long been recognized that the creation of an adequate infrastructure is vital for creating sustainable growth and reducing poverty in Africa. However the gap between the investment that is needed and the money currently available is too big to...
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