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From the Editor's Desk (June-July 2012)
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...
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Blog
From the Editor's Desk (January 2012)
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...
Blog
From The Editor's Desk (December 2012)
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...
Blog
After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Some Lessons on Transition
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London was the setting on 19 June 2012 for the launch of the...
Blog
Reflections on Transition: Twenty Years after the Fall of The Berlin Wall
Gérard Roland The above titled book, published by Palgrave Macmillan 2012, brings together contributions from a conference that took place in Helsinki...
Blog
Lessons from Africa's Democratic Upheavals
Danielle Resnick During the last month, three democracies in Africa witnessed incumbent presidents exit office in very different ways. The most...
Blog
Youth Employment: A Key Issue
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...
Blog
Can Entrepreneurship Make Peace Work?Tony Addison and Tilman Brück There is a special role for entrepreneurship to play in making peace work. The recently published UNU-WIDER study...
Working Paper
Can the Context Mediate Macro-Policy Outcomes?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...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Industry in UgandaThe paper looks at the evolution of industry in Uganda examining drivers and constraints since the pre-colonial period in the 1940s to date. It is argued that the state played a central role in industrialization during the pre-colonial and immediate...
Journal Article
Institutions and African EconomiesThis article presents an overview of the current special issue ‘Institutions and African Economies’. The findings include: (1) greater prevalence of democratic regimes improved both agricultural productivity and the overall growth of African...
Working Paper
A Quest for Institutional Foundations Towards Inclusive Development in Sub-Saharan AfricaThe paper explores the paths towards building institutional foundations for inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewing institutional configurations as a system of multiple equilibria, the concepts of endogenous institutions and...
Working Paper
Capacity Development for the Transformation of AfricaCountries need capacity for a variety of reasons, including sustaining economic growth, generating jobs, reducing poverty, effectively managing development programmes, and transforming societies and economies. A lot of effort has been expended to...
Working Paper
The industrial policy experience of the electronics industry in MalaysiaDespite the use of industrial policies to stimulate economic growth by several successful developers, latecomers have faced mixed experiences. Hence, this paper analyses the industrial policy experience of the electronics industry in Malaysia. A...
Blog
Africa’s Recovery from the Global Economic CrisisAugustin Fosu and Wim Naudé African economies have been shaken by the global economic downturn which followed the US-centered financial crisis of 2008...
Policy Brief
What Can the European Central Bank Learn from Africa?The 14-member Franc Zone in West and Central Africa represents the largest monetary union in the southern hemisphere, predating the European Monetary Union by decades. With monetary unions planned for other parts of Africa in the near future...
Working Paper
Développement, Aide, et ConflitLe génocide rwandais est le résultat final d'une combinaison de mécanismes dont aucun ne peut revendiquer être prioritaire ou indépendant des autres. Parmi ces mécanismes figurent une extrême pauvreté et la réduction des perspectives d'avenir pour la...
Policy Brief
Stranger than Fiction? Understanding Institutional Changes and Economic DevelopmentThe volume Institutional Change and Economic Development fills some important gaps in our understanding of the relationship between institutional changes and economic development. It does so by developing new discourses on the 'technology of...
Book Chapter
Terms of Trade and Growth of Resource EconomiesThe current paper demonstrates a dichotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade, employing as case studies the two African countries, Botswana and Nigeria. Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of...
Book Chapter
The African Economic Growth Record, and the Roles of Policy Syndromes and GovernanceThe current chapter, first, finds that although the post-independence growth of African economies has fallen substantially below that of other regions, this comparative evidence is less than uniform across time and countries. Second, it uncovers...
Working Paper
Decentralization, Local Bureaucracies and Service Delivery in UgandaFollowing close to two decades of political distress and economic decline, Uganda embarked, in the mid 1980s, on far-reaching reforms under Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. Decentralization was emphasized, with the new leaders...
Journal Article
What determines public education expenditures in Russia?Recent studies suggest that the allocation of expenditures in education is important for growth. The state of public education spending in many transition economies highlights the need for an assessment of the nature of education expenditures in...
Blog
From Conflict to Recovery in Africa
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...
Blog
Standards, Codes and Pension Flows
by Helmut Reisen The case for mutual benefits arising from the global diversification of portfolios holds well for funded retirement savings. While...
Working Paper
Taxation, social protection, and governance decentralizationGovernments do not have perfect information regarding constituent priorities and needs. This lack of knowledge opens the door for groups to lobby in order to affect the government’s taxation levels. We examine the political economy of decentralized...
Journal Special Issue
Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile StatesWhy and how some states transition successfully from fragile to more robust—and some do not—are both topical and age-old questions. This volume of The ANNALS addresses these questions with particular attention to the role of foreign aid, offering new...
Blog
Institutions and Impact – Some Reflections on the UNU-WIDER Method
I have spent much of the last two years on behalf of UNU-WIDER engaged in thinking about these two issues, but only on this current trip to Toronto...
Blog
From the Editor’s Desk (June-August 2015)
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...
Report
What Do We Know About Aid as We Approach 2015?The ReCom—Research and Communication on Foreign Aid—programme produced 240 original studies. Some 300 researchers from 60 countries came together and provided evidence on what does and could work in development, and what can be transferred and scaled...
Journal Article
Innovation Capacity and Economic DevelopmentPart of Journal Special Issue Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Position Paper
Aid, Governance and FragilityThis position paper on Aid, Governance, and Fragility was prepared by UNUWIDER under the ReCom programme of Research (Re) and Communication (Com) on foreign aid. It aims to provide an up-to-date overview and guide to two topics of central importance...
Journal Article
Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile StatesPart of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
Working Paper
Institutional Framework and PovertyThis paper focuses on the role of ‘institutions’ in poverty alleviation, where both poverty and institutions are interpreted broadly. The broadening of the poverty notion is important at least from the policy perspective. Even if one were convinced...
Working Paper
Governance and Policy in AfricaThe recent emphasis on governance in Africa is unique in that it was initiated by donors and not by domestic leaders under pressure from their own constituencies. Thus while many countries have embraced the market economy and liberalized their...
Book
Growth and Institutions in African DevelopmentRecent years have seen a sustained research effort exploring the African development experience. The extant literature has offered a large set of explanations as to why the African development record has lagged behind that of other regions of the...
Book
Institutional Change and Economic DevelopmentThe issue of institutional development has come to prominence during the last decade or so. During this period, even the IMF and the World Bank, which used to treat institutions as mere 'details', have come to emphasize the role of institutions in...
Displaying 48 of 229 results