UNU-WIDER : UNU-WIDER

Book Chapter

Part of Book The New Regionalism and the Future of Security and Development

Blog

by Carl-Gustav Lindén January 2013

Economist Imed Drine recently left UNU-WIDER and headed with his family for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to take up a new position as a senior economist with...

Working Paper

The Brazilian regional development funds and economic growth

The regional development policy in Brazil materializes mainly in the regional development funds for the north-east (FNE), the north (FNO), and the centre-west (FCO), in which more than EUR36 billion was invested between 2004 and 2010. This paper...

Working Paper

Why Do Poverty Rates Differ From Region to Region?

This paper proposes a semi-parametric method for poverty decomposition, which combines the data-generating procedure of Shorrocks and Wan (2004) with the Shapley value framework of Shorrocks (1999). Compared with the popular method of Datt and...

Working Paper

Beyond the Notion of Security Community

African regional organizations’ increasing activity in security policy is usually approached through the concept of a ‘security community’, which can only partially clarify their difficult situation. A multilevel governance model is suggested as a...

Working Paper

Market Size, Linkages, and Productivity

One account of spatial concentration focuses on productivity advantages arising from market size. We investigate this for 40 regions of Japan. Our results identify important effects of a region’s own size, as well as cost linkages between producers...

Working Paper

Income Distribution and Labour Movement in China After WTO Membership

Using a CGE model, PRCGEM, with an updated 2002 I/O table, this paper explores how earnings will be affected in each of 40 separate industries across 31 regions (or 8 regional blocks) of China for the period 2002–07. Labour movement between regions...

Working Paper

Globalization and Regional Income Inequality

China’s recent accession to the WTO is expected to accelerate its integration into the world economy, which aggravates concerns over the impact of globalization on the already rising inter-regional income inequality in China. This paper discusses...

Working Paper

The Urban-Rural Income Gap and Inequality in China

Using new household survey data for 1995 and 2002, we investigate the size of China’s urban-rural income gap, the gap’s contribution to overall inequality in China, and the factors underlying the gap. Our analysis improves on past estimates by using...

Working Paper

Estimating Income Inequality in China Using Grouped Data and the Generalized Beta Distribution

There are two main types of data sources of income distributions in China: household survey data and grouped data. Household survey data are typically available for isolated years and individual provinces. In comparison, aggregate or grouped data are...

Working Paper

Forces Shaping China's Interprovincial Inequality

This paper explores the forces that shaped China’s interprovincial inequality in the last five decades of communist rule. In so far as the change in interprovincial inequality is the result of differential growth in the provincial GDP per capita and...

Working Paper

Income Risk and Welfare Status of Rural Households in Nigeria

This paper examines the impact of income risk on the level of well-being of rural households in Nigeria. While income risk is defined as the risks associated with variability in income well-being is defined in terms of the level of utility reached by...

Working Paper

Quo Vadis? Inequality and Poverty Dynamics across Russian Regions

This paper analyses regional data on inequality and poverty in Russia during 1994-2000 using published series from the regionally representative Household Budget Survey. The paper finds that the share of inequality in Russia coming from the between...

Working Paper

Globalization and Regional Income Inequality

China’s recent accession to the WTO is expected to accelerate its integration into the world economy, which aggravates concerns over the impact of globalization on the already rising inter-region income inequality in China. This paper discusses China...

Working Paper

Foundations of Minority Communities

This paper discusses the development of Korean communities in Japan from their origins in the late nineteenth century through their stabilization following the Second World War. Approaching the developing communities from a spatial perspective, the...

Working Paper

Regional Poverty and Income Inequality in Central and Eastern Europe

This paper reports levels of income inequality and poverty in four Central and Eastern European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Unlike many previous researchers who examine transition economies, we aggregate the detailed...

Working Paper

International Trade, Location and Wage Inequality in China

Models of economic geography predict that transportation costs directly affect demand for goods and the supply of intermediate inputs. One of the reasons that international trade is concentrated in the coastal provinces of China is that they have...

Working Paper

Economic Polarization Through Trade

The paper analyses the impact trade liberalization and economic integration have had on regional growth and regional disparities in Mexico over the last two decades. It is highlighted that the passage from an import substitution system to membership...

Working Paper

How Responsive is Poverty to Growth? A Regional Analysis of Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in Indonesia, 1984-99

This paper uses six nationally representative household consumption surveys to develop successive poverty profiles for Indonesia over a fifteen-year period of sustained high growth followed by rapid contraction. Adopting a ‘cost-of-basic-needs’...

Working Paper

Opening the Convergence Black Box

In this paper we address the issues involved with the use of microeconomic data, that is, household surveys, to compare the patterns of income growth among different regions instead of the commonly used aggregate data. In particular, we investigate...

Working Paper

Regional Output Differences in International Perspective

Accurate regional estimates of output are desired as an indicator of level of development and as a variable used to explain internal migration, demand patterns, fertility and other aspects of behaviour. This chapter explores one often neglected...

Working Paper

Are Neighbours Equal? Estimating Local Inequality in Three Developing Countries

Based on a statistical procedure that combines household survey data with population census data, this paper presents estimates of inequality for three developing countries at a level of disaggregation far below that allowed by household surveys...

Working Paper

Decomposing Spatial Differences in Poverty in India

Over the last decade, India has been one of the fastest growing economies, and has experienced considerable decline in overall income poverty. However, in a vast country like India, poverty levels vary significantly across the different states. In...

Working Paper

Divergent Means and Convergent Inequality of Incomes among the Provinces and Cities of Urban China

Two precisely comparable national household surveys relating to 1988 and 1995 are used to analyse changes in the inequality of income in urban China. Over those seven years province mean income per capita grew rapidly but diverged across provinces...

Working Paper

Income Inequality in Rural China

A considerable literature exists on the measurement of income inequality in China and its increasing trend. Much less is known, however, about the driving forces of this trend and their quantitative contributions. Conventional decompositions, by...

Working Paper

Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in China

This paper constructs and analyses a long-run time-series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late...

Working Paper

Industrial Location and Spatial Inequality

We argue that spatial inequality of industry location is a primary cause of spatial income inequality in developing nations. We focus on understanding the process of spatial industrial variation—identifying the spatial factors that have cost...

Working Paper

Growth and Recovery in a Time of Default

International narratives on Argentina’s recovery from the crisis of 2001-02 tend to emphasize the role of rising commodity prices and growing demand from China. Argentina is said to have been ‘lucky’, saved by global demand for its agricultural...

Working Paper

An Inquiry into Cities and Their Role in Subnational Economic Growth in South Africa

South Africa is characterized by significant inequality in spatial economic activity. Whether future growth and development on a subnational level in South Africa will be such as to reduce this inequality may depend on the economic growth and...

Working Paper

Crime, Isolation, and Law Enforcement

This paper investigates the relationship between criminal activity and geographical isolation. Using data from Madagascar, we show that, after we control for population composition and risk factors, crime increases with distance from urban centers...

Working Paper

Urban-Rural Inequality in Living Standards in Africa

In this paper we examine the relative importance of rural versus urban areas in terms of monetary poverty and seven other related living standards indicators. We present the levels of urban-rural differences for several African countries for which we...

Working Paper

National Taxation, Fiscal Federalism and Global Taxation

This paper considers lessons from the practice of fiscal federalism for guidance on new approaches to development finance. Despite the fact that inter-regional redistribution in a federation relies on a central government with strong fiscal powers...

Working Paper

Regional or National Poverty Lines?

Absolute poverty lines are often derived from the cost of obtaining sufficient calories. Where staples vary across regions, such poverty lines may differ depending on whether they are set using national or regional food baskets. Regional poverty...

Working Paper

Spatial Decomposition of Inequality

This paper reviews the theory and application of decomposition techniques in the context of spatial inequality. It establishes some new theoretical results with potentially wide applicability, and examines empirical evidence drawn from a large number...

Working Paper

Economic geography determinants of spatial wage disparities in South Africa

In this paper, we use the new economic geography (NEG) framework to estimate the extent to which spatial wage disparities in the South African manufacturing sector are an outcome of economic forces such as market access. To test the relationship, we...

Journal Special Issue

Spatial Issues in Africa

Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...

Journal Special Issue

Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia

Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...

Journal Special Issue

Spatial Inequality and Development

Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...

Research Brief

The effect of clustering in Tunisia

The clustering of industries in specific areas has improved industrial productivity in a number of countries. Since the mid-1990s in Tunisia, concerted policies have been introduced which focus on improving the efficiency of the labour force, and...

Journal Special Issue

Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America

Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...

Journal Special Issue

Inequality and Poverty in China

Getting an accurate picture of poverty and inequality trends and patterns in the world’s most populous country is central to understanding changes in global inequality and poverty – these alter significantly when China is included or excluded. China...

Journal Special Issue

African Development in an Urban World

In 2007 the number of urban inhabitants will surpass rural dwellers as a percentage of the total world population. By 2030 the proportion of people living in cities globally is expected to reach 61%, with almost 80% of urban dwellers living in less...

Regional economics

Journal Special Issue

South-South and North-South Trade Agreements

In this special issue, five articles address some of the challenges associated with integrating an existing S-S regional agreement with a new template that results from block negotiations with a northern partner. The compatibility issues this raises...

Working Paper

Social Transfers and Growth

The effects of social transfers on growth are still unclear. The limitations of aggregated data at sub-national levels have confined the analysis to the use of simulation models and household surveys. As an alternative, this paper contributes to the...

Policy Brief

Rising Spatial Disparities and Development

The UNU-WIDER project on 'Spatial Disparities in Human Development' has collected and analyzed evidence on the extent of spatial inequalities within developing countries. The studies find that spatial inequalities are high, with disparities between...

Working Paper

The Practice of Industrial Policy – Lessons for Africa

This paper draws on both successful and failing cases of industrialization in China to analyse the role of local governments in fostering the growth of light manufacturing. The broad spectrum of support types and the intimate knowledge of enterprise...

Working Paper

The Centre Cannot Hold

Our hypothesis is that Nigeria is going through a process of economic polarization. An analysis of this type is new for Nigeria; the limited availability of comparable data has hindered an investigation that requires data series not too close in time...

Working Paper

Utility-Consistent Poverty in Madagascar, 2001-10

We use Arndt and Simler’s (2010) utility-consistent approach to calculating poverty lines to analyse poverty in Madagascar in 2001, 2005 and 2010. Because two major political crises occurred between the survey periods, the snapshots of national...

Working Paper

Utility-Consistent Poverty in Ethiopia, 2000–11

We use Arndt and Simler’s utility-consistent approach to calculating poverty lines to analyse poverty in Ethiopia in 2000, 2005, and 2011. Poverty reduction was steady but uneven, with gains greatest in urban areas in the first half of the decade...

Working Paper

Disentangling the Pattern of Geographic Concentration in Tunisian Manufacturing Industries

In this paper, we examine the pattern of spatial concentration of manufacturing industries observed in Tunisia and explore the factors driving firms’ choices of location at the provincial level. We consider specialization and competition indicators...

Working Paper

The Rise of a Middle Class in East and Southern Africa

We examine the implications of the rise of a middle class in East and Southern Africa for food consumption patterns and the food system. A unique classification of food items shows that highly processed food has one-third of the purchased food market...

Working Paper

Regulatory Reform for Closing Africa’s Competitiveness Gap

Over the past decade, Africa has been experiencing an economic resurgence. Yet, the continent is facing several difficult challenges and many economies of the region continue to be among the least competitive in the world. Africa’s competitiveness is...

Working Paper

Spatial Horizontal Inequality and the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal is one of the highest intensity internal conflicts in recent times. Investigation into the causes of the conflict would suggest that grievance rather than greed is the main motivating force. The concept of horizontal or...

Working Paper

Longevity in Russia's Regions

This paper examines the impact of changes in poverty and public health spending on inter-temporal variations in longevity using a unique regional-level dataset that covers 77 regions of Russia over the period 1994-2000. The dynamic panel data model...

Working Paper

Spatial Inequality and Development in Central Asia

This paper focuses on inequality in living standards across oblasts and regions within Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Regional inequality is an important area of research and policy development. Inequality...

Working Paper

Changes in Spatial Income Inequality in the Philippines

The purpose of this paper is to establish some basic facts about income inequality in the Philippines, with a special focus on the importance of spatial income inequality. Despite major fluctuations in macroeconomic performances, income inequality...

Working Paper

Assessing Poverty and Inequality at a Detailed Regional Level

During the past three years NATSEM has developed pathbreaking spatial microsimulation techniques, involving the creation of synthetic data about the socioeconomic characteristics of households at a detailed regional level. The data are potentially...

Book Chapter

Regional Integration in Africa

From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.

Book Chapter

Regulatory Reform for Closing Africa's Competitiveness Gap

From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.

Blog

From The Editor's Desk (October 2012)

by Tony Addison October 2012

Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...

Blog

From the Editor's Desk (January 2012)

by Tony Addison January 2012

Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The...

Blog

The View from Buenos Aires

by Tony Addison September 2011

Tony Addison A visit to Buenos Aires in September provided a good vantage point to look at the euro zone’s deepening crisis. Angle readers will recall...

Working Paper

The Political Economy of the Peace Process in a Changing Middle East

Working Paper

Regionalization in Southern Africa

This state of the art paper reviews literature published up to the end of 1994 on economic, security and environmental regionalization in southern Africa. In the field of economic regionalization a distinction is made between three main integration...

Working Paper

Habitat II and the Urban Economy

The strategic conferences organized by the UN during the past 25 years have focused on assisting and mobilizing governments and other relevant actors of international life by enhancing collective thinking and action in those areas which may...

Working Paper

Regional Integration in Africa

Political motives, geography, and the uneven distribution of gains trumped the traditional efficiency gains across Africa’s Regional Economic Communities (RECs). The small, sparsely populated, fragmented, and often isolated economies across Africa...

Policy Brief

The Global Economic Crisis After One Year

One year into the global economic crisis, it has become clear that the paradigm for international development has changed irrevocably. With leadership, moral authority and the capacity of the West in international development diminishing, developing...

Policy Brief

Policy Responses to the Global Economic Crisis in Africa

Africa is the developing region most at risk from the global economic crisis. Its recent strong growth has been interrupted. Already home to the largest number of low-income countries in the world, the region is now likely to experience higher...

Policy Brief

Achieving Development Success

What can the less well-off developing countries learn from the ’successes’ of other developing countries? This Policy Brief highlights successful development strategies and lessons from in-depth case studies of select countries from the developing...

Working Paper

The New Regionalism

Working Paper

Conflict and Peace-building in Africa

Contemporary Africa reveals a range of causes, consequences and responses to conflicts which are increasingly interrelated as well as regional in character, as around the Great Lakes/Horn. Their economic and non-state features are undeniable, leading...

Journal Article

Agglomeration, Growth and Regional Equity

Traditional development models focus on the sector rather than location of growth. Advocates of agriculture-led strategies emphasise agriculture's strong growth linkages and potential to raise rural incomes. The new economic geography literature...

Working Paper

Export Diversity and Regional Growth

This paper provides empirical evidence on the relationship between exports, and in particular export diversity, and regional growth in a developing country context. Using export data for 19 sectors from 354 subnational (magisterial) districts of...

Working Paper

Financial Development, Growth, and Regional Disparity in Post-Reform China

Deepening financial development and rapid economic growth in China have been accompanied by widening income disparity between the coastal and inland regions. In this paper, by employing panel dataset for 29 Chinese provinces over the period of 1990...

Working Paper

Spatial Convergence in China: 1952-99

The purpose of this paper is to examine the convergence process in China by taking into account the spatial interaction between factors. The paper shows that there has been a dramatic increase in the spatial dependence of China’s per capita GDP in...

Working Paper

Coordinating Aid for Regional Cooperation Projects

For the Central Asian countries the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to economic disintegration as old coordination mechanisms disappeared and new national borders appeared. This paper analyses why it has been difficult to coordinate aid for...

Working Paper

Adverse Geography and Differences in Welfare in Peru

In Peru, a country with an astonishing variety of different ecological areas, with 84 different climate zones and landscapes, with rainforests, high mountain ranges and dry deserts, the geographical context may not be all that matters, but it could...

Working Paper

A Decomposition Analysis of Regional Poverty in Russia

This paper applies a new decomposition technique to the study of variations in poverty across the regions of Russia. The procedure, which is based on the Shapley value in cooperative game theory, allows the deviation in regional poverty levels from...

Working Paper

Producing an Improved Geographic Profile of Poverty

This paper implements a methodology for estimating poverty in Ecuador, Madagascar and South Africa, at levels of disaggregation that to date have not generally been available. The methodology is based on a statistical procedure to combine household...

Blog

Spatial Inequality and Development

by Anthony J. Venables 2003

by Anthony L. Venables Economic activity is distributed extremely unevenly across space. At the international level there are rich countries and poor...

Book Chapter

Poverty in Ethiopia, 2000-11

Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa

Working Paper

Evolving City Systems

This paper reviews the literature on the forces driving urbanization in developing countries. It presents a model outlining how globalization can lead to the evolution of an urban structure which may approximate Zipf’s law. Policy implications are...

Journal Article

Special section of Applied Energy

Part of Journal Special Issue Prospects for Renewable Energy in Africa

Working Paper

The expansion of regional supermarket chains

Over the past two decades, southern African countries have experienced rapid growth in the number and spread of supermarkets. Several factors have been attributed to this growth, including increasing urbanization, increased per capita income, the...

Blog

Regional Industrialization and Integration in Southern Africa - Reporting from TIPS Annual Forum

by Roger Williamson September 2015

The white-painted cluster of traditional style buildings might suggest that this was a farm on the South African veldt. Not so however—it was Trade...

Blog

Celebrating 30 years of research for development

by Roger Williamson September 2015

The celebration of the 30th Anniversary of UNU-WIDER presented the ideal opportunity to look back, take stock, and plan ahead. Where else can a group...

Working Paper

Lessons from the Transition Economies

Why many transition economies succeeded by pursuing policies that are so different from the radical economic liberalization (shock therapy) that is normally credited for the economic success of central European countries? First, optimal policies are...

Working Paper

National policies and regional integration in the South African Development Community

This paper focuses on the relationship between regional integration in the Southern African Development Community and national policies. Review of trade, industrial, agricultural, labour, and related policy areas, indicates that national policies can...

Research Brief

International Economic Integration and Growth in Latin America

Integration of Latin America into the international economy over the past quarter century has led to faster export growth, but not to faster GDP or productivity growth Contrary to mainstream analysis, under the current market reforms countries have...

What exactly is spatial inequality? Why does it matter? And what should be the policy response to it? These questions have become important in recent years as the spatial dimensions of inequality have begun to attract considerable policy interest. In...

Journal Article

Spatial Decomposition of Inequality

Part of Journal Special Issue A Collection of UNU-WIDER articles in Chinese

Book Chapter

To Be or Not To Be?

Part of Book National Perspectives on the New Regionalism in the South

Book Chapter

Divergent Means and Convergent Inequality of Incomes among the Provinces and Cities of Urban China

Part of Book Spatial Disparities in Human Development

Journal Article

Introduction

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development

Journal Article

Editors' Introduction

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa

Journal Article

Estimable Equilibrium Models of Locational Sorting and Their Role in Development Economics

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development

Journal Article

Aspects of the Rural-Urban Transformation of Countries

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development

Journal Article

Introduction to the Special Issue: Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia

Journal Article

Understanding Regional Poverty and Inequality Trends in China

Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China

Journal Article

Spatial Disparities in Developing Countries

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development

Book

The New Regionalism and the Future of Security and Development

This book is dedicated to the implications of the New Regionalism for global security and development. The fourth volume in the five-volume New Regionalism Series, it features contributions from the UNU/WIDER project on New Regionalism. Earlier...

Book

National Perspectives on the New Regionalism in the North

This is the second of five volumes reporting on the UNU/WIDER project on New Regionalism. Whereas the first volume dealt with the two processes of globalization and regionalization in more general terms, this volume presents various national...

Book

The New Regionalism and the Future of Security and Development

This book is dedicated to the implications of the New Regionalism for global security and development. The fourth volume in the five-volume New Regionalism Series, it features contributions from the UNU/WIDER project on New Regionalism. Earlier...

Book

National Perspectives on the New Regionalism in the North

This is the second of five volumes reporting on the UNU/WIDER project on New Regionalism. Whereas the first volume dealt with the two processes of globalization and regionalization in more general terms, this volume presents various national...

Journal Article

Beyond the Notion of Security Community

Part of Journal Special Issue Conflict and Peace-building

Journal Article

An Inquiry into Cities and their Role in Subnational Economic Growth in South Africa

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa

Journal Article

Urban–Rural Inequality in Living Standards in Africa

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa

Journal Article

Regional or National Poverty Lines?

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa

Journal Article

Crime, Isolation and Law Enforcement

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa

Journal Article

Spatial-Horizontal Inequality and the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia

Journal Article

A Decomposition Analysis of Regional Poverty in Russia

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia

Journal Article

Spatial Decomposition of Inequality

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development

Journal Article

Estimating Income Inequality in China Using Grouped Data and the Generalised Beta Distribution

Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China

Journal Article

Forces Shaping China's Interprovincial Inequality

Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China

Journal Article

Globalization and Regional Income Inequality

Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China

Journal Article

Income Inequality in Rural China

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia

Journal Article

Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in China

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia

Journal Article

Industrial Location and Spatial Inequality

Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia

Journal Article

Regional Dimensions of Conflict and Peace-Building in Contemporary Africa

Part of Journal Special Issue Explaining Violent Conflict

Working Paper

Poverty Incidence and Sectoral Growth

In recent decades, absolute poverty incidence declined in most countries of Southeast Asia, even though in some of these countries inequality increased at the same time. This paper examines the relationship between these outcomes and the rate of...

Working Paper

International Convergence or Higher Inequality in Human Development?

The concept of convergence is extended to the human development index. Evidence of weak absolute convergence is found over 1975-2002. The results are robust and verified by various conditional β-convergence models and also supported by the evidence...

Working Paper

Regional Inequality, Industry Agglomeration and Foreign Trade

How do foreign trade and foreign direct investment affect regional inequality? Foreign trade and investment may affect internal economic geography, and the resulting industry agglomeration may contribute to regional inequality. This paper provides...

Working Paper

Vulnerability to Globalization in India

The net impact of globalization on developing countries, and more specifically on the poorer sections of population in these countries, is complex and context dependent, and hence needs to be analysed empirically. This study in the context of...

Working Paper

The Development Implications of External Integration in Latin America

This paper analyses the links between the integration into the international economy and development in Latin America over the past quarter century. It argues that external liberalization led to faster export growth but not to faster GDP or...

Journal Article

Passage, Profit, Protection, and the Challenge of Participation

Part of Journal Special Issue African Development in an Urban World

Journal Article

Is There Such a Thing as a Post-apartheid City?

Part of Journal Special Issue African Development in an Urban World

Journal Article

Cityness and African Urban Development

Part of Journal Special Issue African Development in an Urban World

Journal Article

Introduction

Part of Journal Special Issue African Development in an Urban World

Book Chapter

Comparing Regional Development in China and India

Part of Book The Rise of China and India

Book Chapter

Identification of Regional Fundamental Economic Structure (FES) of India

Part of Book The Rise of China and India

Working Paper

Globalizing Shanghai

Cities are the focal point for the mobility of talents, located between the nations and firms, states and educational institutions. Shanghai, being regarded as the 'ultimate poster-child for the effects of globalization on cities and regions' by the...

Working Paper

Health and the Urban Transition

Recent efforts to reinvigorate the connections between urban planning and health have usefully brought the field back to one of its original roles. Current research, however, has focused on industrialized cities, overlooking some of the important...

Working Paper

The Excluded Poor

Constrained by resource limitations and challenged by the increasing incidence of poverty in the country, the Philippine government embarked on an anti-poverty programme that sought to identify where the poorest people were, what were their specific...

Working Paper

Fiscal Decentralization and Urbanization in Indonesia

Indonesia went through a process of fiscal decentralization in 2001 involving the devolution of several policymaking and service delivery functions to the subnational tiers of government (provinces and districts). This process is likely to have...

Working Paper

Passage, Profit, Protection and the Challenge of Participation

Accepting 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...

Working Paper

Is There Such a Thing as a Post-Apartheid City?

In an introductory section, this paper considers briefly the achievements and problems of urban governance in post-apartheid South Africa through an assessment of three categories: administrative reform, developmental issues and conflicts over...

Working Paper

Cityness and African Urban Development

This paper explores one possible argument for how to respond to the epistemic troubles in the production of knowledge about urban Africa. The problem I have in mind is the preponderance of policy-oriented research on the development challenges and...

Working Paper

Identity and Space on the Borderland between Old and New in Shanghai

China's urban geography has been dramatically altered over the past three decades. The co-presence of splinters in urban fabric—contrasting and continuously changing in terms of condition, use, and socio-cultural consistency—is symptomatic for the...

Working Paper

Entrepreneurship, Development, and the Spatial Context

Entrepreneurship has been a topical issue in the business administration literature, but in the past decade a wave of interest can be observed on the role of entrepreneurship in the economic growth literature. This paper aims to highlight the various...

Working Paper

Agglomeration Index

A common challenge in analyzing urbanization is the data. The United Nations (UN) compiles information on urbanization (urban population and its share of total national population) that is reported by various countries but there is no standardized...

Working Paper

Infrastructure and City Competitiveness in India

Do local improvements in infrastructure provision improve city competitiveness? What public finance mechanisms stimulate local infrastructure supply? And how do local efforts compare with national decisions of placing inter-regional trunk...

Working Paper

Urban Violence Is not (Necessarily) a Way of Life

As the world moves towards its so-called urban ‘tipping point’, urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The...

Working Paper

Urban Settlement

This paper examines data on urbanization. We review the most commonly used data sources, and highlight the difficulties inherent in defining and measuring the size of urban versus rural populations. We show that differences in the measurement of...

Working Paper

The effects of armed conflicts on local economic dynamics in the Mopti and Ségou regions of Mali

Armed conflicts significantly affect the social and economic conditions of societies in turmoil, disrupting the normal functioning of local economies. This study seeks to delve into the repercussions of armed conflicts on the dynamics of local...

Book Chapter

Place and Identity on the Borderland between Old and New in Shanghai

Part of Book Urbanization and Development in Asia

Book Chapter

National Taxation, Fiscal Federalism, and Global Taxation

Part of Book New Sources of Development Finance

Book Chapter

Lessons from Transition Economies

Part of Book Development Success

Working Paper

The (Declining) Role of Households in Sustaining China's Economy

Current explanations for private consumption’s diminished role in China focus on the expansion of exports and investments. Using structural path analysis, we find additional contributing factors. First, growth patterns during 1997-2007 favoured...

Journal Article

Measuring the Vulnerability of Subnational Regions in South Africa

Part of Journal Special Issue Vulnerability in Development

Book Chapter

Assets, Poverty Dynamics and Vulnerability

Part of Book Vulnerability in Developing Countries

Journal Article

Foreign Direct Investment and Regional Inequality in China

Part of Journal Special Issue FDI, Employment, and Growth in China and India

Working Paper

International and Intra-national Technology Spillovers and Technology Development Paths in Developing Countries

This paper analyses the paths of technology development among regions with heterogeneous economic and technological characteristics, focusing on the case of China. It finds that intra-national technology transfer, that is, the technology transfer...

Working Paper

Foreign Direct Investment and Regional Inequality in China

China’s economic miracle over the past three decades has been featured with its open-door policy, especially the absorption of foreign capital. One downside effect of economic reform has been the ever rising interregional inequality. As FDI is highly...

Working Paper

Comparing Regional Development in China and India

Economic growth in China and India has attracted many headlines recently. As a result, the literature comparing the two Asian giants has expanded substantially. This paper adds to the literature by comparing regional growth, disparity and convergence...

Working Paper

Asset-Based Poverty in Rural Tajikistan

Tajikistan’s rural sector has witnessed substantial development since the country began to emerge from civil conflict in 1999. Gross agricultural output increased 64 per cent from 1999 to 2003, and there were significant developments in the...

Working Paper

Entrepreneurship and Regional Economic Growth

Start-ups of new firms are important for economic growth. However, start-up rates differ significantly between countries and within regions of the same country. A large empirical literature studies the reasons for this and attempts to identify the...

Working Paper

International Integration and Regional Development in China

Concerns about the duration of China’s growth and hence the question of a permanent significant contribution of China to world economic growth relate, amongst other things, to the problem of reducing regional disparity in China. While China’s high...

Working Paper

Identification of Regional Fundamental Economic Structure (FES) of India

This study provides an understanding of the Indian regional economy utilizing the fundamental economic structure (FES) approach. The FES construct implies that selected characteristics of an economy will vary predictably with region size, as measured...

Working Paper

Measuring the Vulnerability of Subnational Regions

A small but growing literature has been concerned about the economic (and environmental) vulnerability on the level of countries. Less attention is paid to the economic vulnerability of different regions within countries. By focusing on the...

Working Paper

Regionalization in East Asia-Pacific?

This is a state-of-the-art report prepared within the UNU/WIDER project The New Regionalism and the International System - Implications for Development and Security, covering East and Southeast Asia. The report constitutes an initial inventory study...