Working Paper
Explaining the Poverty Difference between Inland and Coastal China
This paper proposes a decomposition framework for quantifying contributions of the determinants of poverty to spatial differences or temporal changes in poverty. This framework is then applied to address the issue why poverty incidence is higher in...
Working Paper
Gender differences in formal wage employment in urban Tanzania
This paper uses the latest Tanzania labour force survey—the Integrated Labour Force Survey—and a censored bivariate probit model to analyse gender differences in labour force participation and gender bias in formal wage employment in urban Tanzania...
Working Paper
Digital technology and productivity of informal enterprises
The lingering policy dilemma facing many governments in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years is what can be done in the short to medium term to boost the output and incomes of individuals and enterprises in the informal sector, given the size and...
Working Paper
Regional Income Inequality in Rural China, 1985-2002
This paper depicts the trend of regional inequality in rural China for the period 1985-2002. The total inequality is decomposed into the so-called within- and between-components when China is divided into three regional belts (east, central and west)...
Working Paper
Informal–formal workers' transition in Nigeria
This study evaluates the effects of the informal sector on Nigerian workers’ livelihoods and analyses workers’ transitions within the informal sector and between informal and formal employment. A binary logit model is applied to General Household...
Working Paper
Vulnerable employment of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Tunisian youth
Youths in the Middle East and North Africa face the highest unemployment rates in the world. Those who are employed are pushed to accept informal sector jobs that are insecure, unsafe, and lack non-wage benefits. Precarious employment is pervasive...
Working Paper
Do bigger health budgets cushion pandemics?
How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID...
Working Paper
The influence of household composition on leisure time in South Africa
This study considers how household composition influences the leisure time of men and women in South Africa, using the South African 2010 Time Use Survey. Studying leisure time is important since the allocation of time outside the market provides...
Working Paper
The recentered influence function and unidimensional poverty measurement
I discuss the applicability of the recentered influence function (RIF) to the analysis of poverty differentials between distributions (regression-based decomposition into composition and income structure effects). I show that the predominant approach...
Working Paper
E-business Model Innovation and Capability Building
A firm’s business model describes the way in which it creates, delivers, and appropriates value. In the debate about the ongoing demise of several e-commerce ventures, only a few analysts have looked at the relative sanity of innovative e-business...
Working Paper
Modelling Aid Allocation
There is a widespread view that political criteria have received less emphasis in aid allocation since the end of the cold war, with a greater share of aid subsequently being based on developmental criteria. An observed increase in aid effectiveness...
Working Paper
Measurement of a Multidimentional Index of Globalization and its Impact on Income Inequality
In this paper we present two composite indices of globalization. The first is based on the Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine and the second is obtained from principal component analysis. They indicate which countries have become most globalized and...
Journal Article
Agricultural extension, intra-household allocation and malaria
Can agricultural development programs improve health-related outcomes? We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of a large-scale agricultural extensionprogram in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility...
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...
Blog
Rethinking African debt and exploitation of natural resources
by
Michael Danquah, Albert Kwame Osei-Owusu, Edgar Towa
March 2023
In Africa, there is a distressing correlation between debt and the need to export raw materials. A new paradigm is needed in which African countries...
Working Paper
Macro-financial implications of public debt in South Africa
This paper examines the role of financial frictions in the public debt–growth nexus, documenting that a public debt shock has different macro-financial implications dependent on the state of financial markets in South Africa. A non-linear vector...