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...
The primary policy response to suppress the spread of COVID-19 in high-income countries has been to lock down large sections of the population. However, there is growing unease that blindly replicating these policies might inflict irreparable damage...
Students’ expectations about their future wages are established in the literature as relevant determinants of the choices made for education progression and, at the university level, for the area and course to be studied. In this paper, the first...
Continued lockdown measures are straining the social contract between citizens and governments. As this column explains, in contexts where there are...
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic poses important risks for people’s health and economic wellbeing. While the full socio-economic consequences remain uncertain, the pandemic’s impact on the labour market has become an issue of global concern...
This paper examines the extent and determinants of structural poverty dynamics in South Africa, focusing on the socio-economically disadvantaged urban African population. The quantitative analysis using panel data is triangulated with evidence from a...
Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labour 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 paper examines the connections of structural change and economic openness to labour productivity growth using a panel data set of 41 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for the period 1991–2015. A dynamic panel model of cross-country productivity...
When it comes to reporting on Africa, the international news media has, over time, delivered very mixed messages. Yet there are still many who characterize sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a region of hunger, economic crisis, and political unrest. Over...
The COVID-19 pandemic poses risks not only for people’s health but also economic wellbeing. While the full socio-economic consequences remain uncertain, its impact on the labour market has become a key issue of global concern. Especially low-income...
The arguments that property rights and taxation positively affect development are well established in separate literatures, but the link between property rights and taxation is under-studied.To address this gap, we theorize that formalization of...
This paper contributes to the debate on domestic revenue mobilization and state-building in the Global South by asking whether there are fiscal states in sub-Saharan Africa. To answer this question, we review the diverse understandings of the fiscal...
The number of people living in poverty around the world is estimated to have increased by half a billion people due to the COVID-19 crisis. The...
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that African tax and social-benefit systems are currently ill-equipped to protect households from sudden income losses...
This paper investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use instrumental-variable two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable quantile...
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that many developing countries could not respond effectively to crises due to their limited capacity to diversify their social protection responses. Social protection systems depend mainly on government tax revenue...
This paper employs data from 103 developing countries between 1981 and 2012 to examine the determinants of private savings in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with a focus on the effect of financial liberalization on private savings. It also analyses why...
Expansion of social protection reach among workers in the large informal economy represents a persisting and thorny challenge in the development context. In Mainland Tanzania, several domestically led policy reforms have been introduced to...
Several sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have achieved substantial economic growth in the past 30 years. Likewise, access to education has considerably expanded, as reflected in rising enrolment rates for both men and women. Female labour force...
The population structure the world over is going through a demographic shift, and the elderly proportion is projected to increase with population growth. This change is a matter of concern for sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, where the majority...
This paper traces the development of fintech in sub-Saharan Africa, its evolution over time, and the unfolding benefits attained at each stage of its adoption and market evolution. From the onset, fintechs have revolutionized retail electronic...
There has been much discussion on climate change and its adverse effects on agriculture, including excessive loss of food production. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture is the major source of household livelihoods, shocks in...
Female labor force participation rates have been stagnating despite rising female education in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. Using representative and repeated census data from a heterogeneous sample of 13 sub-Saharan African...
Part of Journal Special Issue Clientelist Politics and Development
When seeking to increase their tax revenues, policy-makers face a likely tradeoff between decreasing personal income tax rates (making formalizing more attractive and potentially contributing to revenue) and alternatively raising tax rates...
This paper establishes how accountability quality might mediate the effect of tax revenue on sustainable development in 41 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1990–2019. The empirical evidence is based on three empirical strategies...
Part of Book The Job Ladder
COVID-19 cases were first confirmed in March 2020 in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. These countries put in place several stringent measures, including lockdowns, to contain the spread of the virus. Various policies were also rolled out to address...
Part of Journal Special Issue Fiscal state capacity
We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members’ activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios...
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, sub-Saharan African countries faced the dilemma of how to minimize viral transmission without adversely affecting the poor. This study proposes an index of lockdown readiness, taking into account housing conditions...
ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use two-stage least squares and the instrumental variables...
Public social insurance is part of the broader social protection “toolbox”, typically understood to comprise also social assistance measures (such as cash transfers, benefits in kind, fuel subsidies and so on), social services and public works (see...
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