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Diversity debit vs. diversity dividend: Challenging the conventional wisdomIt is widely accepted in recent work in economics and political science that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on the provision of public goods...
60 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Working Paper
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in Zambia
– Further Evidence of a Subnational ‘Diversity Dividend’
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...
Working Paper
Supply-Side Constraints, Capital Goods Imports, and the Quality of Sub-Saharan African Countries’ ExportsIn the last decade, a large portion of capital goods imports of Sub-Saharan African countries is telecommunications equipment, and China is now the main source of equipment for 30 Sub-Saharan African countries. A connection between specific types of...
Working Paper
Fast-Food Consumption and Child Body Mass Index in China
– Application of an Endogenous Switching Regression Model
The rapid economic growth experienced within the past two decades in China highly correlates with childhood overweightness. The epidemic has become an issue of grave concern. A principal factor considered to be responsible for the epidemic in the...
Blog
Income generation and malaria in UgandaSeveral large-scale efforts have been made to combat malaria in the last decade under the Millennium Development Goals, and while these have led to a...
Journal Article
Evaluating multiple spatial dimensions of economic growth in Brazil using spatial panel data modelsThe goal of this paper is to evaluate the results of regional economic growth model estimations at multiple spatial scales using spatial panel data models. The spatial scales examined are minimum comparable areas, microregions, mesoregions and states...
Journal Article
On the Impact of Foreign Aid in Education on Growth
– How Relevant Is the Heterogeneity of Aid Flows and the Heterogeneity of Aid Recipients?
Part of Journal Special Issue Foreign Aid Heterogeneity
Journal Article
Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in China
– A Journey Through Central Planning, Reform, and Openness
Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia
Working Paper
The Pattern and Valuation Effects of Corporate Diversification
– A Comparison of the United States, Japan, and Other East Asian Economies
We document that firms in eight East Asian countries and Japan diversify into more segments and engage into more related businesses―as measured by the degree of vertical relatedness and complementarity―than firms in the USA. Using data for the 1990-6...
Working Paper
High-Growth Entrepreneurial Firms in Africa
– A Quantile Regression Approach
This paper studies the growth performance of a large set of entrepreneurial firms in ten manufacturing sectors of eleven Sub-Saharan African countries. The focus of the paper is on identifying those entrepreneurs’ attributes and firm characteristics...
Working Paper
Commercialization in agriculture in rural Vietnam, 2006-14The vast majority of households in rural Vietnam undertake agricultural activities and for many this is their main livelihood. Moreover, this agriculture has become increasingly commercialized over time. This paper uses the five wave VARHS balanced...
Working Paper
Income and malaria
– Evidence from an agricultural intervention in Uganda
We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of an agricultural extension program in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility for the program reduced the incidence of malaria by 8.8 percentage points, with...
Journal Article
Terms of Trade Shocks and the Current Account in Small Island StatesPart of Journal Special Issue Fragility and Development in Small Island Developing States
Book Chapter
Remittances and Financial Inclusion in DevelopmentPart of Book Development Finance in the Global Economy
Book Chapter
Regional Income Inequality in Rural China 1985-2002
– Trend, Causes and Policy Implications
Part of Book Understanding Inequality and Poverty in China
Book Chapter
Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in China
– A Journey Through Central Planning, Reform, and Openness
Part of Book Spatial Disparities in Human Development
Journal Article
The effects of taxation on income inequality in sub-Saharan AfricaARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use two-stage least squares and the instrumental variables...
Blog
Rethinking African debt and exploitation of natural resourcesIn 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
– The role of financial regimes
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...
Working Paper
The effects of taxation on income inequality in sub-Saharan AfricaThis paper investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use instrumental-variable two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable quantile...
Book Chapter
Informal–formal workers’ transition in Nigeria
– A livelihood analysis
Part of Book The Job Ladder
Book Chapter
The evolution of vulnerable employment in Egypt, Jordan, and TunisiaPart of Book The Job Ladder
Working Paper
Determinants of gender gaps in youth employment in urban MozambiqueIn this study, we explore the correlates of the employment gender gap among urban youth in Mozambique. Young people are confronted with simultaneous decisions about education, work and family life influenced by social norms around gender roles. Using...
Working Paper
Migration out of poverty
– The case of post-war migration in Mozambique
Internal migration plays an important role in the economic development of individuals, their families, and their country. This study describes Mozambique’s most common migration patterns from 1992 until 2017 using data from three population censuses...
Working Paper
Unravelling Africa’s raw material footprints and their driversThis paper applies an environmentally extended input–output analysis, leveraging the Eora database, to estimate the global raw material footprints of 51 African nations from 1995 to 2015. It employs least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and...
Working Paper
Explaining the Poverty Difference between Inland and Coastal China
– A Regression-based Decomposition Approach
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 TanzaniaThis 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
– Empirical evidence from Nigeria
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
– Trends, Causes and Policy Implications
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
– A livelihood analysis
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
– Trends and determinants
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?
– An empirical test of COVID-19 deaths across the world
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 recentered influence function and unidimensional poverty measurementI 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
The influence of household composition on leisure time in South Africa
– A gender comparison
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...
Research Brief
Firms with high-growth episodes in South Africa
– Are they persistently high-growth firms?
The analysis of firm growth has been a topic of consistent economic interest as a growing body of literature has lent support to the possibility that the majority of growth and new employment creation is the result of a small sub-sector of high...
Working Paper
E-business Model Innovation and Capability BuildingA 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
– Issues, Approaches and Results
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 InequalityIn 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...
Working Paper
Remittances and Financial Inclusion in DevelopmentIn this paper we focus on the relationship between remittance inflows and financial inclusion in developing countries. We present single equation estimates on remittances and financial inclusion, and system estimates in which economic growth is...
Working Paper
The External Debt-Servicing Constraint and Public Expenditure Composition
– Evidence from African Economies
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
Terms of Trade Shocks and the Current Account in Small Island StatesThis paper investigates the dynamic relationship between terms of trade shocks and the current account in selected small islands developing states. The findings show that the terms of trade explain a significant proportion of the variation in the...
Journal Article
Agricultural extension, intra-household allocation and malariaCan 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
– A Journey through Central Planning, Reform, and Openness
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
On the persistence of growth for South African firmsThe growth of firms has been shown to have a meaningful impact on the health of firms and the economy in general. As the body of literature dedicated to understanding high-growth firms has expanded, an interest in the persistence of growth has become...
Working Paper
A Unified Structural Equation Modelling Approach for the Decomposition of Rank-Dependent Indicators of Socioeconomic Inequality of HealthWe present a unified structural equation modelling framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with a simple ordinary least squares regression. The structural...
Working Paper
The Impact of Foreign Aid in Education Growth
– How Relevant is the Heterogeneity of Aid Flows and the Heterogeneity of Aid Recipients?
This paper examines whether foreign aid in education has a significant effect on growth. We take into consideration the heterogeneous nature of aid as well as the heterogeneity of aid recipients—we disaggregate the aid data into primary, secondary...
Working Paper
Differences in Food Insecurity between Girls and Boys
– Evidence from Zimbabwe
Using data from a 2004 household-based survey of children, we examine differences between boys and girls in self reports of food insecurity in Zimbabwe. Previous studies have taken only the views of the household head into consideration in...
Journal Article
Experimental and Non-Experimental Methods in Development Economics
– A Porous Dialectic
Part of Journal Special Issue Experiments in Development Economics
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