The COVID-19 pandemic has now spread to over 180 countries, including several countries in sub-Saharan Africa.1 Kenya reported its first COVID-19 case on 13 March 2020. By 31 March the number of confirmed cases had risen to 59, with over 70 per cent...
In summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and...
Although the effect of fiscal drag is well studied in the industrialized world, empirical evidence from developing economies remains limited. Against this backdrop, this study aims to explore the effect of fiscal drag on income distribution and work...
Millions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress’s promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains...
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an exceptional social and economic crisis all over the world, with Africa among the hardest-hit regions. What are the...
Since it began, the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a number of challenges on Africa and the rest of the world. Following the recommendations of the World Health Organization, many countries imposed social distancing measures and cancelled non...
Community or interpersonal support as a critical source of livelihood sustenance in the Global South can exhibit unequal dynamics. An understanding of these practices is primarily tied to the conceptual space of poverty or small communities. Less is...
There is growing recognition around the world that tradable services can play a valuable role in economic development. Africa is no exception, with the need for multiple routes to growth, particularly vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic. Tradable...
Using hand-collected survey and experimental data, we examine the determinants of financial literacy as well as the link between self-reported risk and elicited risk preferences in a least developed African country, Guinea. We measure financial...
The focus of this study is rent in the diamond industry. Based on extensive datasets and a discussion of all relevant costs, we present resource rent statistics from the diamond industry in key producer countries in emerging economies such as Angola...
Community support is a critical source to sustain livelihoods in the Global South. At the same time, these practices can exhibit unequal dynamics such as disincentives, hierarchies, or adverse inclusion of individuals. However, an understanding of...
Inequalities in learning opportunities arise from both household- and school-related factors. Although these factors are unlikely to be independent, few studies have considered the extent to which sorting between schools and households might...
This paper analyses the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and related tax-benefit measures in 2020 in a cross-country comparative perspective for five African countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. We first estimate...
Education is associated with a range of positive micro and macro effects. It is hence no surprise that donors have recently increased the amount of official development aid specifically focused on restoring and maintaining education in less-developed...
This paper analyses the risks facing resource-dependent countries. These include: (i) economic mismanagement (the ‘resource curse’); (ii) political mismanagement; (iii) environmental damage (climate change and the destruction of natural capital). It...
Companies in the oil, gas, and mining sectors face ever intensifying scrutiny over their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices and impacts: from civil society but also from investment funds and other stakeholders with ESG mandates...
Using the Economic Transformation Database, this paper attempts to assess the magnitude of structural transformation and the effects of sectoral shifts due to structural transformation on the labour market performance of 18 sub-Saharan African...
Individuals are at their most mental plasticity in their impressionable years (ages 18–25 years) forming long-term attitudes and behaviours essential to functioning in a society, such as trust.In this paper we ask how exposure to natural disasters...
We examine the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated tax-benefit measures in seven sub-Saharan African countries, focusing on the onset of the crisis.We evaluate impacts on disposable incomes, considering variations across...
This paper argues that new technologies—for communication, such as mobile phones and the internet, but also for manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and transport—have the potential to bridge many of the productivity gaps between sub-Saharan Africa...
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Part of Book Industries without Smokestacks
DHS data is combined with school supply statistics to study primary school attendance in the 2005–06 school year in Benin, a country that has seen almost unparalleled increases in attendance since the 1990s. Results of a logistic regression model...
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Since the early 2000s international development agencies have actively promoted social protection as a new global public policy. This process can be understood as flowing from related shifts within the global political economy and of development...
Relative to developed countries, there are far fewer women than men in parts of the developing world. Estimates suggest that more than 200 million women are demographically ‘missing’ worldwide. To explain the global ‘missing women’ phenomenon...
This study combines household survey data from the Beninese Demographic and Health Survey with school supply statistics in order to investigate regional and gender disparities in primary school attendance rates in Benin. Despite almost unparalleled...
Since civil war and genocide left the country in ruins, Rwanda has undergone a remarkable transformation. Growth rates since 1995 have averaged 8 per cent annually, poverty rates have fallen, maternal and child health have improved, and...
As Africa continues to attract record numbers of international arrivals, there are industry undercurrents that influence the continent’s participation in tourism value chains. African tourism is characterized by high foreign demand, which elevates...
This paper develops a scenario-based model to identify and provide an array of electricity demand in Africa, and to derive them from the African power system of development. A system-based approach is performed by applying the scenario methodology...
Walk into any supermarket and you will find a mix of products to stock the kitchen. It’s easy to assume that many of the goods on offer are sourced...
Land registration and titling in Africa has been seen as a means of legal empowerment of the poor that can protect smallholders’ and pastoralists’ rights of access to land and other land-based resources. Land registration is also on the ethnojustice...
Part of Journal Special Issue Learning to Compete
There is no telling how long it will take to bring the COVID-19 coronavirus under control, or how many people will be affected. But African...
Service industries are increasingly important in international trade and offer additional paths to economic development. There are many opportunities to expand trade in services between South Africa and other African countries. Improvements in urban...
Inequalities in children’s learning are widely recognized to arise from variations in both household- and school-related factors. While few studies have considered the role of sorting between schools and households, even fewer have quantified how...
This study combines evidence from interviews in seven countries with (i) government institutions responsible for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), (ii) 102 multinationals (MNEs), and (iii) 226 domestic firms linked to these foreign...
Do aid projects affect citizens’ motivation to pay taxes? We address this question by combining fine-grained data on aid projects from AidData and survey data from the Afrobarometer for 34 African countries. We first employ a subnational analysis...
Working for an international organisation presents a host of challenges, given the vast nature of tasks that one must surmount in a fast paced and...
Millions of Africans lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but state social security systems were of little help to people who lost...
Why is it that in some countries the parents of a bride pay dowry, whereas in some others the groom has to pay for the bride? What is the impact of...
Do sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) contribute to Africa’s development? This paper assesses the objectives of SWFs (fiscal stabilization, productive investment, intergenerational saving) and discusses alternatives. We argue that fiscal stabilization...
While there is extensive literature examining the growth and development effects of foreign aid, very little attention has been paid to its potential impact on social mobility. Thus, this paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of...
Agricultural activities in many African countries are bedevilled by a range of risk factors. Using micro-level household datasets from a range of countries in Africa, we examine the drivers of agricultural risks, while exploring the role of context...
This 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...
An important stylized fact about African economic development is the phenomenon of urbanization without structural transformation. This paper provides a political economy analysis of the lack of structural transformation in African cities, drawing on...
Sub-Saharan Africa has abundant natural resources and a substantial market, with an estimated population of 1.2 billion. The population is projected...
This paper compares two important sources of tax revenue statistics for African countries, namely the Africa Tax Administration Forum’s African Tax Outlook and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research's...
Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) have become a symbol of national success and a means for global, commercial and geopolitical influence. But how well do...
Agricultural activities in many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are subject to various risk factors that the COVID-19 compounds. Earlier studies on the effect of COVID-19 on smallholders neglect the issue of comparison with non-farm households...
Improving tax collection is essential if developing economies are to avoid over-reliance on external donor funds and loans. Revenue authorities in the Global South have recently adopted new policy tools to improve domestic revenue mobilization...
This paper examines multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa and argues that grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges can help...
For decades now, Western development agencies and donors have been castigated for their colonial biases in providing aid to Africa. It is well established that donors provide considerably more foreign aid to their former colonies relative to other...
As the technology of climate-dependent energy sources is improving—both cheaper and more efficient—the energy sources are becoming more accessible for many of the nations in Africa. However, little is known about the underlying climate that would...
Regional power pools present a significant and potentially defining opportunity for African power systems to develop domestic energy resources, improve system reliability, and contribute to overall economic development. Hydropower is expected to play...
One key element in the reduction of poverty and (in Latin America) inequality has been the achievement of greater fiscal equity; we analyse one key part of this process, which is the earmarking of portions of tax revenue to be spent on progressive...
Sub-Saharan African exports of horticultural and processed agricultural products are growing in line with the major shift towards these products in world markets. Continued growth in these exports may be vitally important for expanding returns from...
Firms tend to cluster in close geographic proximity to each other to benefit from reduced transport costs, shared inputs, and productivity spillovers due to learning and technology transfers. Evidence from low-income countries suggests that such...
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