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From the Editor’s Desk (September 2012)
Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later...
124 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Blog
From the Editor's desk (November 2011)
Tony Addison As we come to the end of November, the snow has yet to arrive in Helsinki. We continue to enjoy clear skies and spectacular sunsets...
Blog
Making Finance the Servant not the Master
Tony Addison Today, there is much frustration with the financial sector. Society’s precious savings are not being put to the best of uses—investing...
Blog
Why the UN Arms Trade Treaty will be Good for Exporters
Alisa DiCaprio The global arms trade is a lucrative business. In 2010, total arms transfers were estimated at US$40 billion. Despite the global...
Blog
Bringing in Public Economics – An Interview with Jukka Pirttilä
29 March 2014 Quite a few prominent Finnish economists have been collaborating with UNU-WIDER throughout the years. One of them is Jukka Pirttilä, who...
Blog
Diversity debit vs. diversity dividend: Challenging the conventional wisdomIt is widely accepted in recent work in economics and political science that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on the provision of public goods...
Journal Special Issue
Development FinancingThe real value of official aid flows fell for much of the 1990s, and private capital flows to low-income countries remain mostly limited. The decline in aid flows may endanger the development process, since they finance much of the development budget...
Journal Article
Public Provision, Commodity Demand, and Hours of WorkThe theoretical analysis of optimal commodity taxation is advanced, but there is only limited empirical evidence to guide commodity tax policies. With this paper, we contribute to this body of literature by empirically examining, using Finnish...
Journal Article
How should commodities be taxed?The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This article examines the validity of this claim in an optimal...
Journal Article
Ethnic Politics in Ranked and Unranked SystemsThis article explores how ethnic politics may operate differently in societies with “ranked” versus “unranked” ethnic systems, where ethnicity and class correlate closely versus very little. It focuses on two hypotheses suggested, but not tested, in...
Journal Article
Ethnic Divisions and Public Goods Provision, RevisitedA considerable amount of recent work in political science and economics builds from the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity leads to poor provision of public goods, a key component of poor governance. Much of this work cites Alesina, Baqir and...
Working Paper
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in ZambiaThe hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on public goods provision is widely accepted. Notably, most work on this issue fails to distinguish adequately between national versus subnational governance. We find that subnational...
Working Paper
Why do women co-operate more in women’s groups?We examine a public goods game in 83 communities in northern Liberia. Women contributed substantially more to a small-scale development project when playing with other women than in mixed-gender groups, where they contributed at about the same levels...
Journal Article
Optimal taxation and public provision for poverty reductionThe existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in...
Working Paper
The Effects of Group Composition and Fractionalization in a Public Goods GameBehavioural economics highlights the role of social preferences in economic decisions. Further, populations are heterogeneous; suggesting that group composition may impact the ability to sustain voluntary public goods contributions. This parallels...
Working Paper
Cross-country Diffusion of the InternetThis paper investigates the factors which determine the diffusion of the Internet across countries. The Gompertz model of technology diffusion is estimated using data on Internet hosts per capita for the years 1995-2000. For a sample of the 0ECD...
Displaying 16 of 124 results