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African Lions - Ghana's job creation successes and obstacles
Over the past two decades, Ghana’s economy experienced an average annual growth rate of 5.8 percent, and became a low-middle income country in 2007...
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African Lions - Tapping the potential of Kenya's economic growth
From 2000-2014, like many other sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya experienced high growth, at an average of 4.37 percent. Unfortunately, the 2007...
Blog
Microcredit and Poverty Alleviation: Can Microcredit Close the Deal?
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...
Blog
Why are workers getting a smaller share of the cake in Mexico?As with many other developed and emerging economies, in recent decades Mexico has experienced a long-term decline in the labour income share. In other...
Working Paper
Return International Migration and Geographical InequalityThis paper explores entrepreneurship amongst return migrants, how their business locations and characteristics differ from other businesses, and the implications for rural-urban inequality. First, we examine, amongst returnees, the determinants of...
Working Paper
Public Policies to Promote Productive Occupation and Increase Formality Among the Moderately PoorPublic policy aimed at building capacity among the extremely poor (support for food and nutrition; health; education and, more recently, financial services), combined with a stable macroeconomic environment, has proved to be successful for poverty...
Working Paper
Manufacturing Productivity, Deindustrialization, and ReindustrializationIn considering pathways to industrialization in the twenty-first century, cognisance needs to be taken of the fact that many countries have actually been deindustrializing. This paper analyses deindustrialization experiences internationally, by...
Working Paper
Structural transformation and sources of growth in TurkeyThis paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the supply and demand side of structural transformation in Turkey. Using the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, we find that labour productivity improvements explain more than half of...
Working Paper
The African LionsThis paper mainly analyses the drivers of economic growth in Kenya and the linkages to the labour market dynamics, with a focus on population growth, its structure, and the prospects of reaping a demographic dividend. This is in recognition that...
Working Paper
Understanding Ghana’s growth success story and job creation challengesGhana’s status as one of the African Lions is linked to the country’s remarkable growth performance, which culminated in the attainment of lower middle-income status. However, employment response to growth has been weak. Additionally, growth has been...
Blog
African Lions - Unpacking labor trends and growth in Mozambique
Mozambique, over the last two decades, has experienced explosive growth, with an average GDP growth rate of almost 8 percent between 1997-2015. Not...
Blog
Getting a high five - Advancing Africa’s transformative agenda
At his swearing in, the new African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina set out an agenda for the economic transformation of the continent...
Working Paper
Understanding Mozambique’s growth experience through an employment lensOver the past twenty years, Mozambique has achieved remarkable progress in promoting macroeconomic growth and stability. Nonetheless, poverty rates remain high and labour market activity is dominated by smallholder farming. We use recent household...
Blog
WIDER Annual Lecture 18: Managing Structural Transformation
18 December 2014 Roger Williamson At the UN headquarters in New York on 18 November 2014, Peter Timmer, emeritus professor from Harvard, showed how...
Blog
Transforming Economic Structures in Africa – An Interview with Margaret McMillan
25 June 2014In this interview Dr Margaret McMillan outlined the theory of structural transformation, which analyzes the underlying structure of the...
Working Paper
Development Aid and EmploymentGlobalization has led to a precarization of labour, which especially manifests in the unstable working conditions, a lower labour share in national income as well as in a growing income inequality, with the exception of some countries with high...
Journal Article
Return International Migration and Geographical InequalityPart of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa
Book Chapter
Globalization, Technology Transfer, and Skill Accumulation in Low-Income CountriesPart of Book Globalization, Marginalization and Development
Working Paper
Structural transformation, openness, and productivity growth in sub-Saharan AfricaThis paper examines the connections of structural change and economic openness to labour productivity growth using a panel data set of 41 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for the period 1991–2015. A dynamic panel model of cross-country productivity...
Working Paper
Reigniting labour productivity growth in developing countriesWhile the negative effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on labour productivity are still fresh in people’s minds, the COVID-19 pandemic raises concerns that productivity will continue to decline. To boost labour productivity and regain...
Working Paper
Productivity growth effects of structural reformsWhich structural reforms affect labour productivity growth in developing countries? This paper answers this question by combining the local projections method and the inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (LP-IPWRA) method. We find that...
Working Paper
Globalization, Technology Transfer, and Skill Accumulation in Low-Income CountriesGlobalization has drastically improved access of technological latecomers to advanced technologies and provides a unique opportunity for low-income countries to raise per capita income. This paper shows that low-income countries as a group have in...
Book Chapter
Deindustrialization and ReindustrializationPart of Book Pathways to Industrialization in the Twenty-First Century
Working Paper
ICT Diffusion and Skill Upgrading in Korean IndustriesWe examine the relationship between the directly observable indicator of new technology, ICT investment ratio, and skill upgrading by analysing changes in employment and wage structure of 25 Korean industrial sectors over the 1993-99 period. The...
Working Paper
Digital Divide and Growth GapThis 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...
Working Paper
Use of ICTs and the Economic Performance of SMEs in East AfricaThis paper assesses the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their impact on the economic performance of small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) of three East African countries: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Findings of the...
Book Chapter
Negotiated Land Reform as One Way of Land AccessPart of Book Access to Land, Rural Poverty, and Public Action
Working Paper
Private standards and labour productivity in the food sector in VietnamA rising number of firms from developing countries have adopted voluntary private standards in the last decade. This has become an area of active research, especially in terms of the impact of private standards on trade, organizational performance...
Displaying 35 of 35 results