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From the Editor's Desk (May 2012)![Placeholder](https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/styles/expert_45x45/public/tony_addison_87363af4b3de300e5211e81b8d521d70.png?itok=-MPVkzbW)
Tony Addison Finland traditionally celebrates the start of summer on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday), and UNU-WIDER currently basks in warm sunshine. At...
Tony Addison Finland traditionally celebrates the start of summer on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday), and UNU-WIDER currently basks in warm sunshine. At...
Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later...
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...
16 December 2014 John Page On 20 November 2014 the United Nations celebrated the 25th Africa Industrialization Day. But perhaps ‘celebrate’ is not...
9 May 2013 Carl-Gustav Lindén The world is a complex place where risk and uncertainty are an everyday challenge. Decision makers at all levels say...
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) give aid to Africa a new emphasis. Yet aid flows to Africa have trended downward over the last decade, and as a consequence more Africans now live in poverty. This is especially true of Sub-Saharan Africa. Any...
After the Second World War, Mozambique went through a series of transformations, from an incipient industrializing colonial society to an independent country with a central planned economy, plus a regional and internal war, and finally from 1994...
Part of Journal Special Issue Entrepreneurship and Conflict
This paper is a contribution to the literature on aid and growth. Despite an extensive empirical literature in this area, existing studies have not addressed directly the mechanisms via which aid should affect growth. We identify investment as the...
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
Studies of land property rights usually focus on tenure security and transfer rights. Rights to determine how to use the land are regularly ignored. However, user rights are often limited. Relying on a unique Vietnamese panel data set at both...
All centrally planned economies suffered from over-investment. Due to low capital productivity, reasonable growth rates in output could be maintained only with high investment/GDP ratios. Nevertheless, the sharp reduction in investment during...
Capital markets facilitate capital growth by mobilizing savings and converting them into investments, and they are therefore a stimulant of economic growth. There is evidence that countries with high savings rates tend to grow faster. Although most...
The financial intermediation-growth nexus is a widely studied topic in the literature of development economics. Deepening financial intermediation may promote economic growth by mobilizing more investments, and lifting returns to financial resources...
The socioeconomic fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore discussions on domestic resource mobilization (hereafter DRM)...
Aid’s future, its history, and its impact were the topics of a policy workshop held by UNU-WIDER in co-operation with the Embassy of Denmark in Dar es...
Using a panel vector autoregressive model this paper investigates the dynamic and endogeneous contribution of tourism to output based on a sample of 40 African countries for the period 1990–2006. Results from the study confirm tourism to be an...
I discuss how aid can support growth in small, isolated economies. Small markets frustrate scale economies and competition. Combined with high transport costs, essential inputs become prohibitively expensive. Breaking the coordination problem...
Over many past decades countries in sub-Saharan Africa have received extensive bilateral and multilateral aid in support of the production of relevant, timely, and good quality data and statistics. But assessing aid effectiveness in the statistical...
This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power on farmers’ agricultural investment decisions. Our main result is that households significantly...
Using a panel vector autoregressive model this paper investigates the dynamic and endogeneous contribution of tourism to output based on a sample of 40 African countries for the period 1990–2006. Results from the study confirm tourism to be an...
We examine the role of institutional investors in financial markets and in corporate governance. In many countries, institutional investors have become the predominant players in financial markets and their influence worldwide is growing, chiefly due...
The impact of aid inflows on relative prices and output is ambiguous. Aid inflows that increase domestic expenditure are likely to cause real exchange rate appreciation, ceteris paribus. However, if this expenditure raises the capital stock in the...
This paper is a survey of some key variables with an international dimension and implications for growth and development policies in selected Pacific island countries. Results from a simple growth accounting exercise show that factor accumulation is...
We investigate domestic private investment behaviour in a panel of 24 low-income and middle-income countries spanning a period of 1981-2000. The paper rigorously addresses (i) the cross-country heterogeneity in private investment behaviour, and (ii)...
This paper introduces a discrete-time intertemporal investment model in which the flow of profits affects the risk premium on the cost of finance, and, as a consequence, the rate of discount of future profits. While public investments, according to a...
This paper aims to investigate the relationship between financial liberalization on the one hand and saving, investment and economic growth on the other hand, using a new dataset for measuring financial liberalization for a sample of 25 developing...
This paper investigates the simultaneous causal relationship between investments in information and communication technology (ICT) and foreign direct investment (FDI), with reference to its implications on economic growth. For the empirical analysis...
Lucy Scott Women are increasingly seen as an important part of the international development agenda. Empowering women and promoting gender equality...
Part of Book Understanding Small-Island Developing States
Part of Book Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Economic Development
We investigate the marginal productivity of investment across countries. The aim is to estimate the return on investments financed by foreign aid and by domestic resource mobilization, using aggregate data. Both returns are expected to vary across...
Part of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Part of Book Resource Abundance and Economic Development
The paper examines the role of the multinational development banks in private sector financing with a particular focus on the International Finance Corporation (IFC). The aim of the paper is to bring to focus, in an analytical manner, the past...
Part of Journal Special Issue Focus
Part of Journal Special Issue Fragility and Development in Small Island Developing States
Part of Journal Special Issue Land and Property Rights
This paper uses annual aggregate data for 36 low or middle income countries covering the period 1995-2001 to investigate the effect of FDI on private investment. It also explores if the relationship between FDI and private investment is influenced by...
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 shows how organizational, technical, and environmental factors affected firm decisions to adopt Internet technologies during the early years of the commercialization of the Internet. Organizations that had made prior investments in client...
This paper analyses the impact of fiscal policy on private investment for a sample of thirty-three LDCs. The paper makes a number of important contributions to the existing empirical literature. Its main contribution is that it is the first attempt...
In this paper, we investigate the causal link between foreign direct investment (FDI), domestic investment and economic growth in China for the period 1988-2003. Towards this purpose, a multivariate VAR system with error correction model (ECM) and...
This paper considers the effect of financial liberalisation on access to investment finance using firm level data covering 57 developing and transition countries. An index is presented which measures financial market liberalisation along the...
Where the theory of free competition reigns, developing countries should open their arms to investments from all types of enterprises in order to maximize jobs. Ownership, measured by votes of shareholders or boards of directors, is immaterial to...
This paper sets out to explain the factors behind Ireland’s exceptional period of economic growth from the early 1990s to the mid 2000s. It suggests that an unbending commitment to economic openness and an on-going effort to establish quality...
Part of Book Information Technology, Productivity, and Economic Growth
It is commonly acknowledged that developing economies are characterized by large differences in output per worker across sectors. For such economies the shift of resources from low productivity to high productivity is the key potential driver of...
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...
Women are increasingly seen as an important part of the international development agenda. Empowering women and promoting gender equality are enshrined as global development objectives with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed in 2000...
4 July 2013 Roger Williamson On 4 June 2013 I attended an interesting effort on the part of UNU-WIDER to communicate research results to development...
24 June 2013 Tony Addison The Stockholm ReCom results meeting at Sida on 4 June was a lively exchange on all aspects of foreign aid and climate change...
28 May 2014 In this interview Carol Newman discusses the success of the Vietnamese economic transformation and lessons which can be drawn for Africa...
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...
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...
This paper argues that official development assistance (foreign aid) is partly responsible for the lack of structural change in Africa. Africa’s development partners have devoted too few resources and too little attention to two critical constraints...
This article examines the relationship between women’s economic and social empowerment in the context of extreme poverty. It is based on the findings of primary fieldwork on the char islands of north-west Bangladesh, investigating the processes...
Part of Book Financial Development, Institutions, Growth and Poverty Reduction
Part of Book External Finance for Private Sector Development
Part of Journal Special Issue The Rise of China and India
In the WIDER Working Paper ‘Aid and Investment in Statistics for Africa’ Jeffery I. Round discusses how the effectiveness of aid aimed at improving statistical capacity in Africa can be assessed. He begins by describing the reasons behind the...
A number of small, isolated countries are not experiencing the rapid economic growth of larger, more connected economies due to weak governance and isolation. Small, isolated economies require more aid to alleviate poverty than rapidly developing...
Part of Book Financial Development, Institutions, Growth and Poverty Reduction
Part of Book Ownership and Governance of Enterprises