UNU-WIDER : UNU-WIDER

Second Preparatory Committee Session for FfD4

UNU-WIDER at the Second Preparatory Committee Session for the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development

UNU-WIDER contributes to policy recommendations for the G20

Sub-Saharan Africa faces an alarming debt burden that could hinder progress on sustainable development goals

COVID-19 pandemic, household welfare and diversification strategies of smallholder farmers in Uganda

The billionaire tax – a (modest) proposal for the 21st century by Gabriel Zucman

WIDER Annual Lecture 28 Brief

UNU-WIDER launches a free online training course in tax-benefit microsimulation for Global South countries

27 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...

Journal Article

Identity Documents, Welfare Enhancement, and Group Empowerment in the Global South

Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality

Working Paper

Regulation of Social Services in the Least Developed Countries

The privatization trend affecting the state involvement in productive sectors is also challenging the role of the state in the provision of social services. And, as private participation in social sectors increases, a regulatory framework is needed...

Working Paper

The Transition from Official Aid to Private Capital Flows

India’s capital account displays a sharp swing in external financing from official assistance to private capital transfers in the 1990s. This paper examines the implications of this transition for the country. An analysis of the private resource...

Working Paper

Market Responses to Anti-Hunger Policies

The way markets respond to anti-hunger policies can have considerable bearing on their effectiveness. This paper investigates market responses to various policies, including direct transfer payments, relief work, food pricing policies, public grain...

Book Chapter

The politics of promoting social protection in Uganda

Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa

Working Paper

Can Food-for-Work Programmes Reduce Vulnerability?

Food-for-work (FFW) programmes have been widely heralded as a means of providing self-targeting transfers coupled with investment in public goods. This paper reviews the changing context that has sparked such interest in FFW, the simple theory that...

Working Paper

Assessing the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Poverty

Fiscal policy measures are a key means by which governments can influence distribution and poverty, but in fact the relationships between fiscal policy and poverty are not well understood. The most commonly used technique for assessing the...

Journal Article

Risk sharing and public transfers

We use public transfers in the form of food aid to test for the presence of risk sharing arrangements at the village level in rural Ethiopia. We reject perfect risk-sharing, but find evidence of partial risk-sharing via transfers. There is also...

Working Paper

The politics of promoting social cash transfers in Uganda

In 2015 the Government of Uganda agreed to start rolling out a social pension programme, and increasing its own contribution to it. This was driven by the highly politicized efforts of a transnational policy coalition, led by international donors and...

Working Paper

Worker retraining and transfer payments

We conduct an incentive-theoretical analysis of political economy considerations in the design of social protection programmes in developing countries to accompany economic reforms. We focus on two aspects of social protection—the provision of...

Journal Article

Institutionalizing Segregation

Part of Journal Special Issue Welfare and distributive effects of social assistance in the Global South

Working Paper

Institutionalizing segregation

Some claim that certain forms of social protection, conditional cash transfers in particular, result in perverse incentives for recipients in order to stay eligible for receiving benefits. This notion has a bearing on the design of social protection...

Working Paper

Redistribution Does Matter

Recent development literature has placed priority on poverty reduction, and on possible growth enhancement from a more equal distribution of assets and income. At the same time, empirical work consistently shows that economic growth is no more than...

Working Paper

Do Public Transfers Crowd Out Private Transfers?

The paper will use the data from the PROGRESA evaluation to show the extent to which such a programme crowds out private transfers. An interesting aspect of the paper is the fact that it can use the randomization (one-third of the villages in the...

Working Paper

A CGE Analysis of the Short-run Welfare Effects of Tariff Liberalisation in Uganda

The promotion of human welfare is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of economic development. To achieve this, many developing countries adopted trade liberalisation in the late 1980s, premised on the theoretical evidence based on the...

Working Paper

Poverty in India

Specification counts in the formulation of any economic problem, estimation of its magnitude and its assessment. This is particularly so for problems in the context of economic development. Solutions for poverty alleviation in developing countries...

Working Paper

Remittances and Vulnerability to Poverty in Rural Mexico

International remittances have been portrayed as the human face of globalization given their potential to alleviate poverty by directly increasing household income. Using a panel of rural households in Mexico from October 1998 to November 2000 this...

Having a birth certificate is a stepping stone to acquiring an array of rights and benefits, including other documents necessary to navigate in and outside of one’s home country. Despite its importance, many children in the developing world never...