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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Journal Special Issue Regional Growth Opportunities
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Book Industries without Smokestacks
Part of Book Industries without Smokestacks
The Republic of South Africa faces the imperative of escaping economic stagnation. This paper seeks to synthesize results from a series of research efforts, including but not limited to the work conducted under the UNU-WIDER project on ‘Regional...
Giới thiệu Việt Nam là một nước đông dân ở khu vực Đông Nam Á với lịch sử lâu đời và đặc trưng về kinh tế, chính trị và xã hội.2 Sau khi kết thúc chiến tranh với Hoa Kỳ năm 1975, Việt Nam đã có những tham vọng lớn về tương lai; song mặc dù có nhiều...
Supermarkets are a key route to market for many suppliers of food and household consumable products. The growth of supermarket chains in southern...
This paper reviews the role of services in development and growth, the potential role of trade in services as a driver of the productivity performance of sectors that use services as inputs, and the links between services policies and domestic trade...
This study re-examines the determinants of redistribution in light of improved data and methods relative to earlier literature. In particular, we use the latest version of the UNU‐WIDER’s Income Inequality Database to have the best available...
The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented global crisis. The task for economic policy is to help keep people alive, enterprises afloat, and households out of poverty. The pandemic has macroeconomic dimensions. First, it affects macroeconomic...
Despite more than two decades of economic integration efforts, levels of spatial development inequality remain high within the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Owing to persistent delays in the implementation of the SADC integration...
Part of Book Inequality in the Developing World
An influential paper by Berg et al., ‘Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence’, uses the SWIID data to examine the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth in both developing and developed countries. It finds that while...
Comprehensive harmonization is crucial to eliminate inefficiencies that hamper free movement of goods and services in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Territorial collaboration between metropolitan clusters and rural areas...
The paper evaluates strategies for developing successful special economic zones and transnational zones for Southern African countries to spur growth and employment. Most special economic zones implemented in Southern Africa have largely failed to...
Resource mobilization continues to be an important policy challenge for developing economies, raising questions as to what determines differences in saving behaviour across countries. Using a panel of 47 economies with at least 40 years of continuous...
There is an increasing interest in the analysis of economic inequalities in least developed countries. This is not only the result of a general social preference for equality, but also the consequence of a growing sense that highly unequal societies...
Most Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 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 countries in the Global...
Reducing poverty and inequality and promoting inclusive growth are fundamental to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Much has changed in the global economy in recent decades and perspectives on progress made vary widely. This...
This paper proposes an empirical framework that relates poverty reduction to production growth. We use the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database to measure the contribution to growth of productivity improvements within sectors and...
The savings–growth nexus is widely acknowledged, both in policy and in the literature. But Kenya’s numerous policy initiatives to encourage savings mobilization are yet to yield the expected outcomes. This paper identifies the key drivers of domestic...
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