Gender gaps in labor force participation in developing countries persist despite income growth or structural change. We assess this persistence across economic geographies within countries, focusing on youth employment in off-farm wage jobs. We...
There is a widespread perception that taxing in sub-Saharan Africa has been and remains fraught with problems or government failure. This is not generally true. For more than a century, colonial administrations and independent states have steadily...
Female labour force participation rates have stagnated in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. This paper aims to explain this aggregate pattern by decomposing it into the labour supply behaviour of different birth cohorts and age...
This study explores the relationship between household poverty and depth of informality by proposing a new measure of informality at the household level. It is defined as the share of activities (hours worked or income earned) without social...
Gender gaps in labour force participation in developing countries persist despite income growth or structural change. We assess this persistence across economic geographies within countries, focusing on youth employment in off-farm wage jobs. We...
Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labor markets of many low- and middle-income countries. A key issue in this regard concerns the extent to which informality itself is a persistent...
This note introduces the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database (ETD), which provides time series of employment and real and nominal value added by 12 sectors in 51 countries for the period 1990–2018. The ETD includes 20 Asian, 9 Latin...
Vote-buying—or the pre-electoral distribution of private goods in exchange for support at the ballot box—is often blamed for the poor economic performance of many sub-Saharan countries. For instance, vote-buying may undermine accountability and the...
Part of Journal Special Issue Fiscal state capacity
Sub-Saharan African economies have experienced accelerated economic growth in the past two decades. In this paper we study the impact of trade-induced structural change on employment and value-added shares in sub-Saharan African economies. We find...
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)’s public debt burden remains a challenge to development. Key drivers of public debt include large-scale financing of infrastructure development, adverse impact of multiple shocks including COVID-19 pandemic, maturity...
Taxation can contribute to state-building through a tax bargain in which taxpayers are willing to increase compliance in return for improved government accountability. There is limited evidence for this in sub-Saharan Africa where it is argued that...
UNU-WIDER has worked for several years in collaboration with sub-Saharan African revenue authorities to facilitate the analysis of digital tax data...
Objective: To analyse the impact of community approaches to improving newborn health and survival in low-resource countries. Methods: We updated previous meta-analyses of published cluster randomized trials of community-based interventions for...
This paper puts sub-Saharan Africa’s economic development into perspective. While much did not go as hoped for at independence, much of the region has been on a more promising development trajectory since the mid-1990s, as we illustrate using growth...
Part of Journal Special Issue Female Autonomy and Women’s Welfare
The rights-based approach to development targets progress towards the realization of 30 articles set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In current practice, progress is frequently measured using the multidimensional poverty index...
Reducing child mortality remains a key objective in the Sustainable Development Goals. Although remarkable progress has been made with respect to under-5 mortality over the last 25 years, little is known regarding the relative contributions of public...
Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The...
Do intergovernmental transfers reduce revenues collected by local government authorities (LGAs)? There is already a well-established body of literature in public finance, which argues that intergovernmental grants “crowd out” local revenues. Most...
Growth in service exports has improved countries’ per capita incomes, reduced over-reliance on goods exports, and promoted economic diversification. However, the growth has not been uniform across regions and countries. Africa lags behind in service...
A key policy problem in most developing countries is the size of the informal sector and its persistence over time. In need to increase their tax revenues, policy makers face a trade-off between decreasing tax rates (making formalizing potentially...
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
The rights-based approach to development targets progress towards the realization of 30 articles set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Progress is frequently measured using the multidimensional poverty index. While elegant and...
We study the association between the gender of the highest-ranking manager (the CEO) and gender differences in employees’ outcomes using detailed linked employer–employee data from the formal sector in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal. Our...
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