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

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

Research Brief

Are employees in Vietnamese SMEs compensated for working in unfavourable conditions?

Working Paper

Gender Earnings Differentials and Regional Economic Development in Urban China, 1988-97

Gender earnings differentials in urban China by region and their changes during the first decade of economic reform are examined. It is found that the female–male earnings ratio increased during the early stage of reform. The male earnings premium...

Working Paper

Women and Food Security in South Asia

The food security scenario in South Asia has witnessed rapid progress over the last few decades, yet nutrition outcomes, especially those related to women and children, have failed to keep pace. This paper contends that the role of women in providing...

Working Paper

Human Capital and Wage Determination in Different Ownerships, 1989-97

This article evaluates the Chinese labour market by examining the role of human capital in wage determination. Using data from China’s Household Nutrition Survey, we estimate the returns to education in state-owned, collective-owned and private...

Working Paper

Spatial Inequality for Manufacturing Wages in Five African Countries

This paper uses data on individual earnings in manufacturing industry for five African countries in the early 1990s to test whether firms located in the capital city pay higher wages than firms located elsewhere, and whether such benefits accrue to...

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

Halving Poverty in South Africa

The United Nations Millennium Declaration commits to halving extreme poverty between 2000 and 2015. The South African government has set a goal of halving poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article...

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

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...

Working Paper

Schooling Inequality, Returns to Schooling, and Earnings Inequality

Human capital models imply that both the distribution of education and returns to education affect earnings inequality. Decomposition of these ‘quantity’ and ‘price’ components have been important in understanding changes in earnings inequality in...

Working Paper

Private Returns to Education for Wage-employees and the Self-employed in Uganda

The paper investigates the differences in private marginal returns to education between wage-employees and the self-employed in Uganda, using the Mincerian framework with pooled regression models. We use a two-wave household panel to estimate...

Working Paper

Wage Reform, Soft Budget Constraints and Competition

Since the beginning of the Chinese economic reforms in 1978, there has been a series of effort to reform the labour compensation practice in state- owned enterprises to strengthen the link between pay and productivity. Despite the reforms, however...

Working Paper

Pecuniary returns to working conditions in Vietnam

Using matched worker-firm data from three waves of the Vietnam Small and Medium Enterprises data, we examine whether workers are compensated with higher wages for working in vulnerable jobs and unfavourable working conditions. Wage equations indicate...

Blog

From the Editor's desk (October 2011)

by Tony Addison October 2011

Tony Addison As autumn moves into winter in Helsinki, it is time to bring you the October edition of UNU-WIDER’s newsletter, WIDER Angle. Regular...

Working Paper

How large is the wage penalty in the labour broker sector?

Public debate on the temporary employment services, or labour broker, sector in South Africa has focused on temporary workers’ wages and benefits. Empirical research is limited: temporary employment services cannot be accurately identified in recent...

by Annett Victorero, Dominik Etienne October 2014

30 October 2014 Dominik Etienne and Annett Victorero The last decade has witnessed a revival of concern over the impact of high-income concentration...

Book Chapter

Growth and Distributional Aspects of Poverty Reduction in South Africa

Book Chapter

An Investigation of the Labour Market Earnings in Deprived Areas

Part of Book Informal Labour Markets and Development

Book Chapter

Women and Food Security in South Asia

Part of Book Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure

Journal Article

Inequality of Wage Rates, Earnings and Family Income in the United States, 1975-2002

Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Multidimensional Well-being

Journal Article

Economic Reform, Skill Formation and Foreign Capital

Part of Journal Special Issue FDI to Developing Countries

Journal Article

Gender Earnings Differentials and Regional Economic Development in Urban China, 1988-97

Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China

News

SA-TIED hosts special session at ESSA Biennial Conference

SA-TIED hosted a special session at the Economic Society of South Africa's 2023 Biennial Conference, held from the 12th to the 14th of September at the CSIR Convention Centre in Pretoria. This event was a dynamic gathering of economists...

Wage differentials

Working Paper

Gender Wage Differentials in China's Urban Labour Market

This paper describes and decomposes wage differences between female and male workers. The results indicate that females receive low wages because of unequal pay within sectors, and that the wage gap caused by the difference in sectoral attainment is...

Working Paper

Inequality in Education

This paper provides original empirical evidence on the evolution of education inequality for the Latin American countries over the decades of 1990 and 2000. The analysis covers a wide range of issues on the differences in educational outcomes and...

Working Paper

The Impact of Multiple Imputation of Coarsened Data on Estimates on the Working Poor in South Africa

South African household surveys typically contain coarsened earnings data, which consist of a mixture of missing earnings values, point responses and interval-censored responses. This paper uses sequential regression multivariate imputation to impute...

Working Paper

A Decomposition of Inequality and Poverty Changes in the Context of Macroeconomic Adjustment

This paper proposes a microeconomic decomposition of the evolution of income inequality in Côte d'Ivoire in the 1990s, allowing the in-depth analysis of simultaneous contributions of four types of phenomena to the evolution of the distribution of...

Working Paper

Wage Determination in Rural Labour Markets

The nature of labour market in traditional rural societies has attracted a lot of attention in the recent years. One issue that has appeared particularly intriguing is the process of wage determination. After a good deal of theorising as well as...