
Blog
From The Editor's Desk (October 2012)
Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
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...
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tony Addison With our temperatures now well above zero, we head for the official end of the Finnish winter on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday). As...
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan China and India have become global economic powers. Even at the market exchange rate, China overtook Japan...
Using the 2004–2005 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs) and non-SCSTs across the earnings...
We explore a novel first-order dominance (FOD) approach to poverty mapping and compare its properties to small-area estimation. The FOD approach uses census data directly, is straightforward to implement, is multidimensional allowing for a broad...
This paper studies individual-level labour market transitions and their determinants in South Africa during the zenith and aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis using 2008 to 2010-2011 panel data from the National Income Dynamics...
We examine the implications of the rise of a middle class in East and Southern Africa for food consumption patterns and the food system. A unique classification of food items shows that highly processed food has one-third of the purchased food market...
We explore the relationship between connections and public transfers in decentralized poverty-targeting programmes. Using panel data from Vietnam we find evidence that households with connections to local government are more likely to be classified...
This study appraises non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the novel first order dominance approach developed by Arndt et al. (2012). It examines five dimensions of deprivation: education, water, sanitation, shelter, and energy-using...
Successful development programs rely on people to behave and choose in certain ways, and behavioral economics helps us understand why people behave and choose as they do. Approaching problems in development using behavioral economics thus leads to...
Although the impacts of violent conflict on investment, production, incomes and inequality have been widely studied on an aggregate level, comparatively less is known about the more diverse impacts of such conflict at the micro (particularly firm)...
Several large-scale efforts have been made to combat malaria in the last decade under the Millennium Development Goals, and while these have led to a...
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the growth performance of the Cameroonian economy from independence in 1960 to date, and then to use this as a background for the analysis of poverty, inequality, and non-monetary outcomes. The analysis of...
Official poverty figures in Uganda are flawed by the fact that the underlying poverty lines are based on a single national food basket that was constructed in the early 1990s. In this paper, we estimate a new set of poverty lines that accounts for...
In this paper we argue that the recent evidence on individuals’ decision making is of high relevance for the measurement of poverty when switching from a static and certain to a dynamic and uncertain framework. The numerous proposed measures of multi...
We develop an approach for making welfare comparisons between populations with multidimensional discrete well-being indicators observed at the micro level. The approach is rooted in the concept of multidimensional first order dominance. It assumes...
In this paper, we aim to analyse the learning by exporting hypothesis in the Mozambican context. Due to the presence of the born-global phenomenon among exporters, we address the endogeneity introduced by self-selection by combining a generalized BO...
Since the 1970s, Chile has exhibited a highly skewed income distribution accompanied with strong fluctuations over time. Although income distribution worsened notably in the 1970s-80s, a significant improvement was recorded in the first half of the...
This paper identifies the key causal factors behind farmers’ marketing decisions in Mozambique. A two-step decision making process is modelled. Farmers decide, first, whether or not to participate in the market and, second, how much to market. The...
Using the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs), and non-SCSTs across the earnings...
Part of Book Vulnerability in Developing Countries
Part of Book Vulnerability in Developing Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Diversification of household activities away from agriculture is a key characteristic of economic development. We examine the extent of diversification among Vietnamese households, from agriculture into waged employment and entrepreneurship and...
This paper examines gender inequality and female empowerment in rural Vietnam. Using an extensive panel dataset on 2,181 households, we examine how the welfare of women living in rural areas has evolved during a period of dramatic rural...
This paper exploits five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to investigate issues of social and political capital in rural Vietnam. I analyse membership of the Communist Party, ‘mass organizations’ (Farmers’ Union...
This paper uses five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to analyse land issues in Vietnam from a number of different angles. The VARHS provides panel data at plot as well as household level and I use this rich data set...
This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico’s Oportunidades programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via a bank account is found to have...
Part of Journal Special Issue WIDER Symposium on Adaptive Efficiency and Evolving Diversity of Enterprise Ownership and Governance
We explore a novel first order dominance (FOD) approach to poverty mapping and compare its properties to small area estimation. The FOD approach uses census data directly; is straightforward to implement; is multidimensional allowing for a broad...
We examine the case of the Czech Republic, which has been frequently cited as one of the most successful cases of transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Despite the costs related to the break-up of Czechoslovakia in late 1992 and...
This paper provides an overview of the characteristics of migrant households and analyses the effects of migration in Vietnam, on the basis of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey conducted in 2012 and 2014. The data reveal significant...
The vast majority of households in rural Vietnam undertake agricultural activities and for many this is their main livelihood. Moreover, this agriculture has become increasingly commercialized over time. This paper uses the five wave VARHS balanced...
This paper presents a descriptive analysis on the ownership of different types of technology—both agricultural machinery and information technology—within households in rural areas of Vietnam. We find that there has been little development in the...
We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of an agricultural extension program in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility for the program reduced the incidence of malaria by 8.8 percentage points, with...
While the majority of interventions against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria had positive short-term effects, these were frequently not translated into long-term sustainable results. Cash transfers may have the potential of reducing HIV...
Part of Book Transition and Institutions
This paper assesses the feasibility of simulating the distributional impacts produced by various tax and transfer instruments in Vietnam. Vietnam’s system of tax and transfer policies underwent frequent changes, in terms of diversity and adjustment...
Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises in Vietnam provides a comprehensive analytic contribution to a crucial topic within development economics. Based on fifteen years of continued data collection and research efforts it brings together nine up-to...