Journal Article
The individual poverty incidence of growth
The canonical approach to analyse the poverty impact of growth is based on the comparison of poverty before and after growth. Measurement tools endorsing this approach fail to capture the different experiences of poverty dynamic in the population...
Working Paper
The economic gains of closing the employment gender gap
The present paper sheds new light on the growth implications of gender inequalities in the Moroccan labour market. We confront two different approaches. The first one is based on firm data to estimate gender complementarity in production and uses...
Working Paper
Regional and subregional analyses of macroeconomic policy strategies for growth and equality in Southern Africa
We investigate the relevance of beta (β, absolute and conditional) and sigma (σ) convergence in the economies of the Common Monetary Area of Southern Africa and in the provinces of the Republic of South Africa using panel data, allowing an...
Working Paper
On the impact of inequality on growth, human development, and governance
Countering recent rises in many countries of inequality in income and wealth is widely recognized as a major development challenge. This is so from an ethical perspective and because greater inequality is perceived to be detrimental to key...
Working Paper
Firms’ resilience to financial constraints
We study the role of trade credit in enhancing the resilience of financially constrained firms from 2010 to 2017. Implicit borrowing in trade finance allows financially constrained firms to bridge the financing gap, expand employment by 8.26 per cent...
Working Paper
Size matters: measuring the effects of inequality and growth shocks
Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between...
Working Paper
Sources of output growth in the countries of the Common Monetary Area and provinces of South Africa
This paper aims to decompose the sources of growth in economies in the Southern African region’s Common Monetary Area and in the provinces of South Africa. Decomposition results for the Common Monetary Area reveal that the growth of aggregate and...
Journal Article
A proposal for a new universal development commitment
Most developed countries have accepted, in principle at least, the 50‐year‐old commitment of contributing 0.7 per cent of gross national income to supporting the development of developing countries. But what if all countries made a universal...
Working Paper
Learning from experience: Special Economic Zones in Southern Africa
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become common across Southern Africa in the past 20 years. In line with experiences in the rest of the world, they have had at best marginal success. Their essential premise is that it should be more efficient and...
Working Paper
Climate change and developing country interests
We consider the interplay of climate change impacts, global mitigation policies, and the interests of developing countries to 2050. Focusing on Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, we employ a structural approach to biophysical and economic modeling that...
Policy Brief
Industries without smokestacks
Our research shows that structural change in Africa is relying on a new set of economic activities, called ‘industries without smokestacks’, created by recent technological changes and a changing global market place. Adopting a broad concept of...
Working Paper
Intergenerational mobility, human capital accumulation, and growth in India
Productivity and socio-economic progress are inter-connected. Economic growth funds policies that promote socio-economic progress, while the latter serves as a growth engine. A society with high mobility is one where individual achievements are...
Working Paper
The individual poverty incidence of growth
The canonical approach to analysing the poverty impact of growth is based on the comparison of poverty before and after growth. Measurement tools that endorse this approach fail to capture the different experiences of poverty dynamics in the...
Book Chapter
Poverty, inequality, and growth
Reducing poverty and inequality and promoting inclusive growth are fundamental to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2015. The first target of SDG1 is to eradicate extreme poverty...
Working Paper
Will economic growth be sufficient to end global poverty?
In this paper, we present new projections for a range of global poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically, extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality, maternal mortality, and access to clean water and...
Working Paper
On the poverty–growth elasticity
Poverty–growth elasticities are frequently calculated to provide insight into the inclusiveness of the growth process. Mathematically, the formula employed to calculate the growth elasticity of poverty leads to lower values for higher initial poverty...
Journal Special Issue
Regional Growth Opportunities
This issue contains seven articles addressing the major changes underway in the integration of economies in southern Africa. This special issue is based on the UNU-WIDER project 'Regional growth and development in Southern Africa'. This project aims...
Working Paper
What might explain today’s conflicting narratives on global inequality?
How unequal is the world today? Is global income inequality falling, as many economists claim, or is it rising, as one often hears? This paper reviews the arguments and evidence. A number of concerns about the underlying data are identified, with...
Blog
The ins and outs of African industrialization: UNU-WIDER provides open access to a wealth of information
by
Heini Salonen
December 2018
The question ‘why is there so little industrialization in Africa?’ has been a key focus of UNU-WIDER researchers and research partners for the last...
Working Paper
Vietnam
This study takes as its starting point what Gunnar Myrdal had to say about Vietnam in the context of his seminal work, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968. Myrdal pointed to the decisive nature of the Vietnamese...
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
Escaping the periphery
Few non-western countries have reached the general prosperity of Western Europe and North America in the past two centuries. The core–periphery structure of the world economy created in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution has proved robust...
Working Paper
Pro-poor growth in Indonesia
This chapter addresses the unrelenting pessimism in Asian Drama about Indonesia’s development prospects. This pessimism was based on two key realities: the poor level of governance demonstrated by the Sukarno regime (partly a heritage of Dutch...
Working Paper
Socio-economic development in South Asia
The story of South Asia is a topsy-turvy one. Soon after independence from British rule, the region seemed to have a much better prospect than many other parts of the Third World; the prospects soon dimmed, however, as South Asia crawled while East...
Book
Industries without Smokestacks
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. By 2030 more than three quarters...