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...
The 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...
The 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...
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...
This 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...
A 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...
The 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...
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...
It is widely accepted in recent work in economics and political science that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on the provision of public goods...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid for Gender Equality and Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
Part of Book Towards Gender Equity in Development
Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later...
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...
This paper is part of a larger UNUIWIDER research project which examines the problems of the provision of basic social goods, such as health care, education, maternal care and safe water, in the developing countries. These services have...
The 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...
The paper assesses the potential of currency transaction taxes (CTT, widely known as the Tobin tax), to raise revenue for global development. Though Tobin proposed and others assessed CTTs in terms of reducing exchange rate volatility and improving...
22 August 2013 Tony Addison Angle returns from its Nordic summer break, to bring you more news and results from UNU-WIDER’s programme. Coming up in...
30 April 2013 Tony Addison As April closes, our thoughts turn to UNU-WIDER’s spring/summer programme. And it’s a busy one. June sees us back in...
29 June 2013 Tony Addison The June-July summer issue of Angle comes to you amid the 19 hours daylight of the Finnish mid-summer. Last week UNU-WIDER’s...
Tony Addison This month saw UNU-WIDER in Stockholm for the ReCom results meeting on ‘aid and the social sectors’, which took place at Sida on 13 March...
9 May 2013 Tony Addison With May ending, we head into a very busy June for UNU-WIDER (and midsummer). Next week we are back in Stockholm at Sida for...
31 October 2013 Tony Addison October finds Angle in New York, for our event on ‘Fragility and Aid–What Works?’ at the Permanent Mission of Germany to...
Afghanistan has received vast amounts of development aid, but results may not be sufficiently robust. There is a limited menu of acceptable options for institutional arrangements, leading to a high dependence on external resources, technical...
Initial high human development index scores and per capita income have a strongmimpact on the outcomes of aid to the health and education sectors. An increase in the share of the government budget allocated to education and health improves overall...
This paper discusses global public goods related to the world’s land resources, their current provision and likely future provision, their potential impacts on the world’s poorest households, as well as prospects for using foreign assistance to...
While developing countries have made some progress in achieving human development since the turn of the century, many are still lagging behind in important human development goals such as education, health, nutrition and access to clean drinking...
In recent years, randomized controlled trials have become increasingly popular in the social sciences. In development economics in particular, their use has attracted considerable debate in relation to the identification of ‘what works’ in...
Financing and the role of aid within the water sector are poorly understood. We estimate the levels of spending achieved in developing countries during the Millennium Development Goals period to be US$80 billion per year. Aid represented a...
There has long been an emphasis on the importance of decentralization in providing better quality public services in the developing world. In order to assess the effectiveness of decentralization I examine here the case study of Uganda, which has...
Water and sanitation sectors have been the ‘natural’ subjects of aid for several decades. However, these sectors also were among those most affected by changes in aid approaches and tools. The aim of this paper is to capture some of the complexity in...
There is a growing interest in the debate on aid effectiveness for assessing the impact of aid not only on economic growth and poverty reduction, but also on intermediate outcomes such as health and education. This paper reviews evidence from recent...
Following an overview on the fast changing global context of agriculture, and food and nutrition security, this paper provides a framework for identifying the set of essential international public goods for a well-functioning world agriculture and...
This paper argues that attempts at state-building in Afghanistan have led to institutions that are not robust. The state institutions and organizations continue to be highly dependent on external resources and technical expertise, and lack of...
Many concerns can be raised about the effectiveness of current aid programmes to developing countries. The appropriateness of aid is particularly questionable when one considers the likely character of the challenges that the global economy will...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid, Social Policy and Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid, Social Policy and Development
This paper analyses the distribution of total aid and aid to the social sectors between 2009 and 2011. Its key findings are four-fold. First, despite the stated objectives of donors, total aid disbursements are broadly neutral, favouring neither the...
Tanzania has been a relative success story in Africa in terms of political reform. While foreign aid has helped strengthen institutions that advance accountability, it simultaneously supports a status quo that undermines accountability and...
The “diversity debit” hypothesis – that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on social, economic, and political outcomes – has been widely accepted in the literature. Indeed, with respect to public goods provision – the focus of this article – the...
The 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...
Part of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
30 October 2013 Roger Williamson The UNU-WIDER meeting held last week in New York on the topic of fragility and aid argued forcefully that you cannot...
Part of Journal Special Issue Development Financing
Current international agricultural development and food security systems are ill-prepared to address the global agriculture, food and nutrition problems. Structural reforms are necessary to deliver the essential international public goods for...
Part of Book Democratic Trajectories in Africa
In examining the study of government performance, this paper asks whether field experiments can improve the explanatory precision of results generated by public opinion surveys. Survey research on basic health and education services sub-Saharan...
Part of Journal Special Issue Urban Governance and Service Delivery in sub-Saharan Africa
This special issue comprises UNU-WIDER research focusing on key governance challenges related to addressing gaps in urban service delivery in sub-Saharan Africa. First, due to decentralisation policies in much of Africa, the provision of services is...
Land-based services will become increasingly important as global public goods in the context of changing climate, particularly in terms of mitigation and adaptation. Carbon sequestration, irrigation, infrastructure and local environmental services...
Do aid projects affect citizens’ motivation to pay taxes? We address this question by combining fine-grained data on aid projects from AidData and survey data from the Afrobarometer for 34 African countries. We first employ a subnational analysis...
Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders’ quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for...
This 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...
Behavioural 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...
Using data from various rounds of the nationally representative NSSO survey between 1988 and 2012, we first construct national, state, and district-level figures for overall, within and between consumption inequality. We find an increase in...
This paper examines the concept of global public goods (GPGs) and in that context explores the extent of aid (ODA) presently being diverted to GPG provision and whether such diversion skews aid-flows towards some recipients and whether diverting aid...
Part of Book Making Peace Work
The post-independence Mozambican civil service, what was left of it following the exodus of Portuguese settlers in the mid-1970s, was poorly educated, with low incentives. In subsequent years, the combination of a war-ravaged economy, poor human...
The objective of this paper is to broaden the discussion on regulation in general and on the regulation of utilities in particular. Beyond the technical complexity involved in designing and implementing regulatory interventions, we focus our...
In spite of not being ‘public goods’ in the strict sense of the term, public provision has been a common way of supplying utilities services around the world. Among the major reasons underlying the dominant position of the public sector as the...
Little is known about the extent to which public spending is targeted towards the poor in Mozambique. The objective of the present paper is to assess whether public expenditures on education and health, in particular, are successful at reaching the...
The paper examines the evidence for various explanations usually offered for the differences in fertility behaviour across regions and over time in India. Female education has been found in other research to be the single most important factor...
The main contributions of the paper can be divided into five areas. (a) It tries to explain conceptually, the institutional arrangements for water supply in Chennai and whether the state government’s decision about improving the performance of the...
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