Working Paper
Natural resource revenues and public investment in resource-rich economies in sub-Saharan Africa
The general policy prescription for resource-rich countries is that, for sustainable consumption, a greater percentage of the windfall from resource rents should be channelled into accumulating foreign assets such as a sovereign public fund as done...
Working Paper
Which Types of Aid Have the Most Impact?
The paper uses an aid disaggregation approach to examine the impact of different types of aid on the fiscal sector of the aid-recipient country. It uses time-series data on different types of aid (project aid, programme aid, technical assistance and...
Working Paper
Financial Markets and R&D Investments
This paper introduces a discrete-time intertemporal investment model in which the flow of profits affects the risk premium on the cost of finance, and, as a consequence, the rate of discount of future profits. While public investments, according to a...
Working Paper
The Efficiency of States and Cities
In this study an attempt has been made to assess the potential of land as a municipal financing tool in four Indian cities, to enable better public service delivery and attainment of the MDGs. The institutional arrangements for land use are...
Blog
Four things to consider to improve public revenues in the Global South: New findings from the Government Revenue Dataset
by
Kyle McNabb, Annalena Oppel
October 2023
Across the Global South, governments continue efforts to increase domestic revenues and capacity for public spending. As concerns over debt distress...
Journal Article
The Efficiency of India's Cities
One reason for unsatisfactory public service delivery in Indian cities is that city finances are in poor condition. Recent research shows that given the fragmented institutional arrangements for land in India's cities, there is a case for...
Working Paper
Innovative Ways of Making Aid Effective in Ghana
There has been significant amount of aid inflows to developing countries including Ghana, but these have been very volatile. Aid flows have been associated with low domestic resource mobilization and have reduced Ghana to a country heavily dependent...
Working Paper
The External Debt-Servicing Constraint and Public Expenditure Composition
The paper explores the impact of a binding external debt-servicing constraint on the sectoral composition of government expenditures in the economies of Africa, where this constraint has traditionally been most prevalent. Applying seemingly unrelated...
Working Paper
The Burden of Government Debt in the Indian States
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (June 2013)
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...
Working Paper
On the Impact of External Debt and Aid on Public Expenditure Allocation in Sub-Saharan Africa after the Launch of the HIPC Initiative
In the wake of the current financial and economic crises, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa find themselves squeezed between likely reductions in official development assistance and the pressing challenge to eradicate poverty. Public expenditure...
Working Paper
Shadow prices for a small open economy under uncertainty
This paper re-examines the validity of using expected values to evaluate the social profitability of public investments under uncertainty. Departing from the usual assumption of an aggregate good, the setting is a small open economy that faces...
Journal Article
Aid Heterogeneity
Part of Journal Special Issue
Aid to Africa
Working Paper
The link between public debt and public investment in Tanzania
In a bid to realize its development aspirations, Tanzania has made concerted efforts to increase public investment, particularly in the last decade. A significant proportion of these investments are financed by contracting debt, manifested by the...
Working Paper
Debt Relief and Growth
This paper discusses some issues on how to evaluate the impact of HIPC debt relief in the cases of Tanzania and Zambia using two computable general equilibrium models. Within our relatively simple model framework, we found that the macroeconomic...
Working Paper
Prioritizing Rural Investments in Africa
Prioritizing public investments requires information on relative returns that are difficult to derive from disparate evaluation studies. This paper presents a ‘hybrid’ approach that combines ex post evaluation data with an economy-wide model for...
Working Paper
The Impact of External Debt on Economic Growth in Kenya
A group of low-income countries classified as HIPCs have continued to experience difficulties in managing and servicing their huge stocks of external debt. Most of these countries including Kenya are in Sub-Saharan Africa. The relatively high level...
Working Paper
Impact of Climate Change on Crops, Irrigation and Hydropower in the Zambezi River Basin
The past reliance on historical observed weather patterns for future investment in basic infrastructure planning (e.g., irrigation schemes, hydropower plants, roads, etc.) has been questioned considerably in recent years. For this reason, efforts to...
Working Paper
Fiscal Policy and Private Investment in Less Developed Countries
This paper analyses the impact of fiscal policy on private investment for a sample of thirty-three LDCs. The paper makes a number of important contributions to the existing empirical literature. Its main contribution is that it is the first attempt...
Journal Article
Poverty and Governance
Part of Journal Special Issue
Development Aid
Working Paper
Poverty and Governance
Countries compete with one another for funds distributed by nongovernment organizations (NGOs). We examine the competition over poverty and governance conducted by a NGO in the allocation of its funds among potential recipient countries. The NGO in...
Working Paper
The Impact of Adjustment-Related Social Funds on Income Distribution and Poverty
This study evaluates the impact of the over seventy Social Funds (SFs) which were introduced since the mid-1980s to offset the surge in poverty spurred by adjustment. SFs benefited from greater visibility and financial support by the donor community...
Research Brief
Aid, Debt, and Public Expenditure Allocation
It is predicted that the global financial crisis will negatively affect developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa both through a reduction in Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) caused by the shrinking (or stagnating) of the economies of many...