Blog
Science and Survival: Is an Agriculture-led Developmental Model the Way Forward for sub-Saharan Africa?
9 May 2013 Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen and Roger Williamson Pathways to Industrialization in the Twenty-First Century, (edited by Adam Szirmai, Wim...
Blog
China and India’s Development Strategies: Lessons for Developing Countries
by
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino, Guanghua Wan
October 2010
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan China and India have become global economic powers. Even at the market exchange rate, China overtook Japan...
Policy Brief
Promoting Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries
This policy brief provides some fresh perspectives on the relationship between entrepreneurship and development, and considers policy design issues. It reports on the UNU-WIDER two-year research project 'Promoting Entrepreneurial Capacity', which...
Journal Article
Institutions, Governance and Technology Catch-Up in North Africa
This paper aims to analyse the effects of institution quality on technology catch-up in five North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia) compared to 3 groups of developing and emerging countries (Sub Saharan Africa, Asia, and...
Journal Special Issue
Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Fast-growing developing countries have emerged as an important destination and source of trade, investments and technology. Furthermore, trade between developing countries has grown rapidly over the last decades, and is becoming more diversified...
Working Paper
Exporting and Productivity
In this paper, we investigate the relationship between exporting and productivity in the case of Vietnam using an extensive firm level panel dataset for the period 2005-11. We separate out productivity effects of exporting due to self-selection...
Journal Article
Technology Adoption and Food Security in Subsistence Agriculture
This paper evaluates the impact of an intervention to improve farming techniques and food security in the Gaza area of rural Mozambique. We examine the impact of a group-based approach to technology adoption in subsistence agriculture, using panel...
Working Paper
Innovation Capabilities for Sustainable Development in Africa
A sustainable pathway for Africa in the twenty-first century is laid out in the setting of the development of innovation capabilities and the capture of latecomer advantages. Africa has missed out on these possibilities in the twentieth century while...
Working Paper
Industrial policy, learning, and development
Industrial policies have played an important role in successful development. Through these policies, governments intervene in the market’s sectoral allocation of resources and choice of technologies. Earlier industrial policies had a narrow remit and...
Policy Brief
Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries
How does innovation impact on development? How, and under what conditions, do entrepreneurs in developing countries innovate? And what can be done to support innovation by entrepreneurs in developing countries? This policy brief addresses these...
Blog
Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Development: Lessons from Finland
by
Otto Toivanen
October 2009
Otto Toivanen At least since the 1950s it has been recognized that innovation is central to economic growth. It has also been well understood that...
Working Paper
Modeling Fuel Choice Among Households in Northern Cameroon
The present study aims to explore economic and socio-demographic factors that influence the household’s probability to switch from firewood to clean fuels in northern Cameroon. The paper employs an ordered probit model to construct cooking patterns...
Journal Article
Structural Transformation, Biased Technological Change and Employment in Vietnam
Employment in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia has grown more slowly than GDP over the last several decades. This means GDP per capita is rising. Vietnamese policymakers, however, are concerned that ongoing structural transformation is creating too few...
Working Paper
The Process of Economic Change
A good deal is known about what makes for successful economic development, but very little is known about how to get there - that entails an understanding of the process of economic change. The paper first examines the sources of successful growth...
Working Paper
Computers and Labour Markets
The rapid diffusion of computers has widely changed the consequences of computer use on the labour market. While at the beginning of the eighties knowledge of computers was an obvious advantage in a career, this same knowledge is now so commonplace...
Working Paper
The Role of Knowledge and Capital in Economic Growth
This paper discusses new ideas in growth theory focusing on how to make sustained growth feasible. It first reviews models that broadened the notion of capital to include human capital and the state of technology. The paper next surveys models which...
Journal Article
Technology Transfers, Foreign Investment and Productivity Spillovers
This paper explores the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and the productivity of host country domestic firms. We rely on a specially designed survey of over 4000 manufacturing firms in Vietnam, and separate out productivity gains...
Working Paper
Diffusion of Digital Mobile Telephony
Factors determining the diffusion of digital mobile telephony across 200 developed and developing countries in the 1990s are studied with the aid of a Gompertz model. The market size and network effects are found to play more important roles in the...
Working Paper
Love Thy Neighbour?
There is increasing evidence to suggest that a fundamental source of information for farmers on how to access and use new agricultural technologies comes from interacting with neighbours. Economic research on adoption of innovations in a rural...
Journal Article
Drivers of productivity in Vietnamese SMEs: the role of management standards and innovation
Using a rich panel dataset of small and medium scale manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) active in the manufacturing sector in Viet Nam, this paper investigates the drivers of firm productivity, focusing on the role played by international management...
Working Paper
Export Performance in Chile
Since the mid-1970s, Chile's exports have expanded at a fast rate, and the export basket has diversified considerably, away from copper towards other primary commodities and commodity-intensive manufactures. This paper explores the causal factors and...
Working Paper
Globalization, Marginalization and Development
This paper surveys issues related to globalization, and the obstacles to the successful integration of vulnerable economies. For many developing countries, the positive benefits of the increased globalization that has been taking place since around...
Book Chapter
Innovation Capabilities for Sustainable Development in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Blog
Fintech and domestic savings: A perfect match coming true in sub-Saharan Africa
by
Josphat Machagua
November 2022
Financial technology (FinTech) is a major force disrupting the structure of financial services in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and enabling access of...
Working Paper
Diffusion of agricultural innovations in Guinea-Bissau
This paper analyses the pathways of technology diffusion through social networks, following the experimental introduction of new technologies in Guinea-Bissau. In the context of an agricultural extension project, we document both the direct effects...
Blog
ICT and Economic Growth in Asia
by
Sailesh K. Jha
2002
by Sailesh K. Jha Exports have been one of the key drivers of economic growth in several Asian DMCs in the 1990s. During this period the composition...
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...
Book Chapter
Does Lack of Innovation and Absorptive Capacity Retard Economic Growth in Africa?
This paper reviews the innovative capabilities and absorptive capacities of African countries, and investigates whether they have played significant roles in the region’s slow and episodic economic growth. Results from cross-country regressions...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid and Sustainable Fisheries Management in Sub-Saharan Africa
The fisheries sector in sub-Saharan Africa has benefited from high and increasing amounts of foreign aid for over four decades. In the 1990s when evidence emerged that most stocks were overcapitalized and overfished, the effectiveness of fisheries...
Report
What Do We Know About Aid as We Approach 2015?
The ReCom—Research and Communication on Foreign Aid—programme produced 240 original studies. Some 300 researchers from 60 countries came together and provided evidence on what does and could work in development, and what can be transferred and scaled...
Working Paper
Explaining Positive Deviance in Public Sector Reforms in Development
Public sector reforms are commonplace in developing countries. Much of the literature about these reforms reflects on their failures. This paper asks about the successes and investigates which of two competing theories best explain why some reforms...
Working Paper
Innovation at the World Bank
The World Bank is uniquely positioned to identify and disseminate innovative development practices. Based on his thirty-year experience as a World Bank staff member, the author takes an institutional perspective on the innovation climate at the World...
Working Paper
Drivers of productivity in Vietnamese SMEs
Using a rich panel dataset of SMEs active in the manufacturing sector in Vietnam, this paper investigates the drivers of firm productivity, focusing on the role played by international management standards certification. We develop and test the...
Working Paper
Twenty Years Later and the Socialist Heritage is still Kicking
Only recently, 20 years after transition to a market system, has Russia regained a similar production level it had achieved on the eve of transition in 1991. This may sound surprising, given its low productivity under central planning which dropped...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurship and the National System of Innovation
Although very dynamic and flexible, Turkish SMEs are less innovative than their European counterparts. The analysis undertaken in this paper allows to assess whether this low level of innovative activities is related to a lack of entrepreneurial...
Working Paper
Globalization and the Human Development Trap
The feeble results of liberalization policies in Latin America are explained in terms of a multiple steady state model including a dynamic human development trap, endogenous technological change, technology transfer and trade. Divergent and...
Book
Technological Transformation in the Third World
Offers information about how three developed countries have utilized technology in their advancement in the post-World War II period. Japan, Finland and Greece are assessed in terms of economic growth and structural factors, along with an examination...
Blog
Productivity, IT, and the New Economy
by
Kevin J. Stiroh
2002
by Kevin J Stiroh The strength of the U.S. economy in the second half of the 1990s has led many observers to assert that something fundamental had...
Journal Article
The link between firm-level innovation and aggregate productivity growth
A broad definition of innovation input is used, in which R&D is one of several sources of innovation. A quantitative innovation output measure is used in the analysis, which is based on a large representative sample of firms, including small firms...
Journal Article
Innovation and performance in manufacturing industries
The availability of the new internationally harmonized innovation survey data collected from OECD countries has created some interesting opportunities for studying the following two key areas: (1) The determinants of innovation behavior at firm level...
Journal Article
Labor-use efficiency in Tunisian manufacturing industries
This paper investigates the process of adjustment in employment. A dynamic model is applied to a panel of six Tunisian manufacturing industries observed over a period of 25 years, from 1971 to 1996. Industries are assumed to adjust their labor inputs...
Blog
Does the New Economy Need All the Old IPR Institutions?
by
Paul A. David
2002
by Paul A David In the knowledge-driven economy the continuous search for new, reliable knowledge and the generation and absorbing of new information...
Book
Information Technology, Productivity, and Economic Growth
The often-advocated view that the information technology revolution will change the world must stem from the basic premiss that investment in IT has a visible impact on productivity and economic growth. But how can we measure this impact and how...
Journal Special Issue
The New Economy
The world economy is undergoing a fundamental structural change driven by the globalization of business on the one hand and by the revolution in information andcommunication technology on the other. The New Economy is the superior economic structure...
Book
Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Economic Development
Entrepreneurship and innovation are two of the most pervasive concepts of our times, yet there are still gaps in our understanding of the interactions between entrepreneurship and innovation, particularly in developing countries. This book is an...
Working Paper
A short history of India's economy
This paper is a short history of the Indian economy since 1968. India today is a changed country from what it was half a century ago, when Myrdal published his Asian Drama. The stranglehold of low growth has been broken, its population below the...
Working Paper
Corporate Governance, Innovative Enterprise, and Economic Development
The notion that good corporate governance means maximizing shareholder value derives from the neoclassical theory of the market economy. I explain why this perspective is highly problematic for understanding the operation and performance of the...
Book Chapter
India
Part of Book
Asian Transformations
Journal Special Issue
The New Economy in Growth and Development
The benefits from the New Economy should accrue as improvements in productivity and economic growth. But while the use of information and communication technology (ICT) seems to have had a substantial impact on the performance of the United States...
Working Paper
The political economy of energy innovation
This paper empirically investigates the effects of environmental policy, institutions, political orientation, and lobbying on energy innovation and finds that they significantly affect the incentives to innovate and create cleaner energy efficient...
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
The Economic Legacy of Civil War
This paper positions itself among the very rare microeconomic analyses on the consequences of civil war. Up to now, most analyses on this topic are based upon household surveys. The originality of the present study is that it investigates for the...
Working Paper
Does Lack of Innovation and Absorptive Capacity Retard Economic Growth in Africa?
This paper reviews the innovative capabilities and absorptive capacities of African countries, and investigates whether they have played significant roles in the region’s slow and episodic economic growth. Results from cross-country regressions...
Working Paper
New Economy in Growth and Development
The benefits from the New Economy should accrue as improvements in productivity and economic growth. But while the use of information and communication technology seems to have had a substantial impact on the performance of the United States economy...
Blog
The Weightless Developing Economy
by
Danny Quah
2000
by Danny T. Quah For the last fifty years, economists and development practitioners have viewed the accumulation of physical capital-machines...
Working Paper
Information Technology and the Dynamics of Firm and Industrial Structure
The Internet is often anticipated to have disruptive competitive impacts, causing upstart firms to overthrow incumbent market leaders. This paper uses the UK IT consulting industry as a test case to see whether such competitive impacts of the...
Working Paper
Comparative Advantage Patterns and Domestic Determinants in Emerging Countries
During the last two decades a number of emerging economies have become deeply engaged in technology-intensive production. This has been reflected in their international trade specialization shifting from labour-intensive goods towards capital...