Millions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress’s promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains...
We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation, and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab...
Where does the money come from to buy votes? We argue that an important source of funds for vote-buying comes from ‘contract clientelism’, or the provision of public contracts to private firms in exchange for campaign donations. Using quantitative...
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...
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...
Alisa DiCaprio The global arms trade is a lucrative business. In 2010, total arms transfers were estimated at US$40 billion. Despite the global...
In this paper, an attempt is made to identify some key challenges for infrastructure sectors in post-conflict reconstruction. In spite of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, infrastructure can be damaged in conflicts, and reconstructing infrastructure...
This study, relying on an economic-theoretical approach to index numbers, proposes a framework for incorporating environmental indicators to the measurement of human well-being. Furthermore this study also proposes an improvement index which...
Basu and Foster (1998) characterized a sophisticated literacy measure using five axioms. In this paper we argue that if a measure satisfies three of their five axioms, namely, anonymity, monotonicity and externality, then also it becomes suitable in...
Countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Angola, and Sierra Leone are now attempting to recover from major wars, often amidst continuing insecurity. The challenge is to achieve a broad-based recovery that benefits the majority of people. The economic and...
In 1991 the Ethiopian Revolution Democratic Front (EPRDF) toppled the old ‘socialist’ regime that had ruled the country for seventeen years. In contrast to the previous policy regime of hard control, EPRDF initiated a wide range of reforms that...
Unlocking human potential requires a rich network of institutional arrangements in both private and public spheres. Opening the private sphere to entrepreneurship and complex market organization is well understood as a key to increasing the level and...
This paper argues that poverty originates in the structural injustices of a social order which incapacitates the poor from participating in the growth generating sectors of the economy and leaves them captives in the so called informal sector...
A growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a...
Determining whether well-being has improved is an important multidisciplinary task. It is important therefore to develop a multidimensional measure of well-being that reflects a wide spectrum of human needs. A new approach is presented in this paper...
This study attempts to determine the extent to which human potential may be unlocked by government or other formal sector actions that induce voluntary contributions by individuals to the activities of Indonesia’s posyandus or village health posts...
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