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Age composition of population and Covid-19The novel Covid-19 is affecting the advanced countries in the Western Hemisphere disproportionately more than developing countries. In this post, Basu...
74 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Blog
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
Urbanization and Development in Asia: Linkages with Globalization and Migration
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen The Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, was the venue for the launch on 16 June 2012 of the just...
Working Paper
Delayed marriage, contraceptive use, and breastfeedingThe rate of fertility decline has been slow in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using the Demographic and Health Surveys for 21 SSA countries between 1990 and 2014, we examine the within-country fertility patterns by wealth, applying the Bongaarts (2015)...
Working Paper
Population Ethics and the Value of LifePublic policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to...
Working Paper
Population Size, Per Capita Income, and the Risk of Civil WarA common finding in the empirical civil war literature is that population size and per capita income are highly significant predictors of civil war incidence and onset. This paper shows that the common finding of population size and per capita income...
Research Brief
Burkina Faso – growth without poverty reductionBurkina Faso is a landlocked country in West Africa, poor in natural resources, and with low levels of human development. Its economy remains agricultural and focused on food crops and cotton production. Over the last twenty years it has experienced...
Blog
Density and Disasters: Economics of Urban Hazard RiskSomik 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...
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
Long-Term Growth and Welfare in Transitional EconomiesThis 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...
Working Paper
The Transition's Mortality Crisis in East GermanySeveral studies have indicated an increase in men's mortality in East Germany between 1989 and 1991 in the wake of the reunification of 1990. For some age-groups, death rates soared by up to thirty per cent. This study investigates the evolution and...
Working Paper
Towards the Abyss?Towards the Abyss? The Political Economy of Emergency in Haiti analyzes the various factors that have contributed to create a protracted humanitarian emergency situation in Haiti. The first section deals with the economic causes, the interplay...
Working Paper
Social and Political Indicators of Human Well-beingA plethora of what are loosely described as social and political indicators of well-being exist. Both the range and country coverage of these indicators has increased appreciably in recent years. In this paper we ask what contribution these...
Book Chapter
The Prospects for an Imminent Demographic Dividend in AfricaFrom the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
Land Tenure and Agricultural Intensification in Sub-Saharan AfricaFrom the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
Informality, Growth and Development in AfricaFrom the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Working Paper
The Economics Of Complex Humanitarian EmergenciesThis paper, a draft from the early stages of an ongoing UNU/WIDER research project, outlines hypotheses for the economic cause of humanitarian disasters. Complex humanitarian emergencies are considered to be man-made crises, in which large numbers of...
Working Paper
Education Policy, Vocational Training, and the Youth in Sub-Saharan AfricaTechnical, vocational education, and training has remained an explosive topic because it can create a divided society in terms of education and the benefits associated with it. Internationally, it has always been a complex and controversial topic...
Working Paper
The Prospects for an Imminent Demographic Dividend in AfricaThis paper looks at the prospects of a demographic dividend in Africa in the near future. While acknowledging that the fertility declines which change population age structures and thus dependency ratios have been slow to begin and often seem to have...
Working Paper
Informality, Growth, and Development in AfricaThe informal sector makes up an overwhelming share of both gross domestic product and total employment in Africa. In this paper, we lay out some of the basic characteristics of the informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa, relevant institutions, and...
Working Paper
Changes in Land Tenure and Agricultural Intensification in Sub-Saharan AfricaDue to increasing population pressure on limited cultivable land in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), farm size has been shrinking, fallow periods have been shortened, and soil fertility has been declining. In accordance with the Boserupian...
Working Paper
Humanitarian EmergenciesThis Research in Progress report is divided into two parts. Part I studies the operationalization and indicators of the different elements of complex humanitarian emergencies. It includes discussions of what to try to measure when looking into the...
Journal Article
Ordinal Welfare Comparisons with Multiple Discrete IndicatorsWe 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...
Working Paper
Health Status and Health Policy in Sub-Saharan AfricaThis paper discusses the main changes in infant, child and maternal mortality which have occurred over 1960-1995 in Sub-Saharan Africa and analyses the main factors responsible for the observed shifts in these health trends. To do so, the paper...
Journal Article
Efficiency frontier and matching process on the labour marketThe purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of the inefficient functioning of the Tunisian labour market. The study takes advantage of the recent development in the stochastic frontier techniques and estimates, the matching function for...
Working Paper
Short- and Long-Term Determinants of Cardiovascular MortalityThis paper examines the short- and long-term determinants of the mortality due to cardiovascular diseases (CVD) among the working-age population in Russia. Why Russia? Why CVD mortality? Why the working-age population? Russia is the Eastern European...
Working Paper
Childhood Mortality and Economic GrowthThis paper investigates the extent to which the decline in child mortality over the last three decades can be attributed to economic growth. In doing this, it exploits the considerable variation in growth over this period, across states and over time...
Journal Article
Inferring the economic standard of living and health from cohort heightAverage adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If...
Working Paper
On the fertility transition in AfricaA consensus among social scientists is that fertility rates in Africa are declining. What determines these declines? I present fresh evidence that shows education, especially for women, is an important determinant of the fertility transition in...
Working Paper
Inferring the economic standard of living and health from cohort heightAverage adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If...
Book Chapter
IntroductionIntroduction Across the globe, today’s youth are often paradoxically considered both ‘agents of change’ who are driven by their aspirations for a better life and ‘a lost gen-eration’ who are trapped by their economic vulnerability. Nowhere is this...
Working Paper
South African population projection and household survey sample weight recalibrationThe existing sources of demographic data for South Africa have different strengths and limitations that make them inadequate for calibration of sample weights in post-apartheid South African household surveys. The official mid-year population...
Working Paper
Health Improvements and Health Inequality during the Last 40 YearsThis paper juxtaposes changes over the last forty years in income growth and distribution with the mortality changes recorded at the aggregate level in about 170 countries and at the individual level in 26 countries with at least two demographic and...
Working Paper
Globalization, Growth and Poverty in IndiaIn this paper an attempt is made to assess the impact of economic reforms on the incidence of poverty by decomposing the change in poverty ratio between two time points into growth/mean effect, inequality effect and the population shift effect. Based...
Working Paper
Variable Populations and the Measurement of Poverty and InequalityThe present paper is a selective overview, very considerably based on work in which the author himself has been involved, of the difficulties which can arise in the measurement of poverty and inequality when one compares populations of differing size...
Journal Article
Contemporary South African Urbanization DynamicsPart of Journal Special Issue African Development in an Urban World
Journal Article
Passage, Profit, Protection, and the Challenge of ParticipationPart of Journal Special Issue African Development in an Urban World
Book Chapter
Globalization, Growth, and Poverty in IndiaPart of Book The Poor under Globalization in Asia, Latin America, and Africa
Book Chapter
Identification of Regional Fundamental Economic Structure (FES) of IndiaPart of Book The Rise of China and India
Working Paper
On Some Problems of Variable Population Poverty ComparisonsThis paper demonstrates that the property of 'replication invariance', generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible...
Working Paper
Globalizing Households and Multi-ethnic Community Building in JapanThe East Asian countries are currently experiencing declining fertility rates and aging of their populations. The demographic transition is beginning to affect various societal functions, and increasing international migrants are becoming one of the...
Working Paper
Passage, Profit, Protection and the Challenge of ParticipationAccepting that successful ‘development’ is premised on a population’s participation in a collective undertaking, we must understand urban residents’ interactions and ambitions. In African cities being transformed by geographic and social mobility, it...
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