Blog

We calculated a lockdown readiness index for Mozambique and the results don’t look good. If lockdown policies are needed to halt the spread of the...

Working Paper

The Bangladesh economy has undergone significant structural changes over the last four decades. The share of agriculture in GDP has declined, while the significance of industry and service sectors has increased. These structural changes have been...

• Bangladesh
• Structural transformation
• Inclusive growth

Working Paper

This paper estimates the distribution of personal wealth in South Africa by combining tax microdata, household surveys, and macroeconomic balance sheet statistics. We systematically compare estimates of the wealth distribution obtained by direct...

• Administrative data
• Households balance sheets
• income capitalization

Blog

The novel Covid-19 is affecting the advanced countries in the Western Hemisphere disproportionately more than developing countries. In this post, Basu...

• COVID-19
• Population

Working Paper

Inaccurate expectations of future wages are found in many contexts. Yet, existing studies overwhelmingly refer to high-income countries, and there is little evidence regarding the sources of expectational errors.Based on a longitudinal survey of...

• Job mismatch
• Mozambique
• Tracer study

Working Paper

Between 1981 and 2017, real gross domestic product in Thailand grew at an average annual rate of 5.7 per cent. Agricultural output grew more slowly than industry or services, and its gross domestic product share consequently declined. Industry’s...

• Inclusive growth
• Inequality
• Poverty reduction

Background Note

Several countries have enacted lockdown measures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to protect their health systems and reduce the number of mortalities. One of the most extreme national lockdown measures has been taken by the government of India...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Lockdown

Working Paper

This paper provides an overview of the energy transition in Asia. It sets out the underlying drivers and how these set energy transition priorities in China, India, and South East Asia. It particularly describes the role of (liquefied) natural gas in...

• Renewable resources
• Energy
• Energy utilities

Working Paper

Despite South Africa’s need for inclusive economic growth, we find that the income trajectories of the rich continue to diverge from the rest of the income distribution. We combine household survey data and tax data (which, unlike household survey...

• Top incomes
• Income distribution
• Tax data

Working Paper

Nowadays, tax depreciation allowances are used less as instruments of macroeconomic stabilization and more as long-term measures to stimulate investment. This paper tabulates the types of accelerated depreciation allowances in South Africa and...

• Tax depreciation allowances
• Tax investment allowances
• Tax expenditures

Blog

People who live through extreme events are, often deeply, altered by the experiences they have. Even when those experiences take place predominantly...

• COVID-19

Working Paper

This paper evaluates structural change, inequality dynamics, and industrial policy in South Africa between 1960 and the present day. We find that South Africa experienced growth-enhancing structural transformation until the early 1970s, before...

• Structural transformation
• Inclusive growth
• South Africa

Background Note

What has the government of South Africa done with respect to COVID-19 measures of mitigation and suppression? The first COVID-19 positive case was confirmed on 5 March 2020. Just ten days later, South Africa had 61 positive cases and President...

• COVID-19
• South Africa
• Government action

Blog

by Arkebe Oqubay April 2020

The response to Africa’s COVID-19 plight must be swift and at scale rather than too little, too late. In a world short of progressive global...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Economic Policy and Good Governance

Working Paper

This paper presents new evidence on the employment effects of a large increase in agricultural minimum wages in South Africa using anonymized tax data. We add to the minimum wage literature by differentiating employment effects resulting from the...

• Minimum wage
• Employment effects
• Non-compliance

Blog

Millions of migrant workers around the world provide valuable income for their families and contribute more broadly to the economies of both their...

• COVID-19
• Migration
• Global health

Working Paper

We study the determinants of stock market development and the growing migration of capital raising, listing, and trading activity to international exchanges. Economies with higher income per capita, sounder macro policies, more efficient legal...

• Capital market
• Globalization
• Stock exchanges

Blog

As the COVID-19 virus has spread across the globe, developing countries are starting to enact many of the same policies used in China, Europe, and...

• COVID-19
• Lockdown
• Mozambique

Journal Article

India has employed a variety of military, political and economic measures to combat the long running insurgency in Kashmir with little evidence on what contributes to stability in the region. This paper uses a variety of tests to detect structural...

• Conflict
• Multiple structural breaks
• Development programs

Blog

by Ludvig Wier April 2020

Corporate taxation is at the heart of economic development, and cardiac failure looms if international tax reform is not made globally inclusive There...

• International taxation
• Tax avoidance
• Tax havens

Background Note

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...

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Africa

Working Paper

The Employment Equity Act No. 55 of 1998 was introduced by the South African government to address the legacy of apartheid and ensure equitable representation of black people and women in the South African labour market. Although the impacts of the...

• Employment Equity Act
• Wage gap
• Industry networks

Report

View the latest ECUAMOD country report here. This report documents ECUAMOD, the SOUTHMOD micrososimulation model developed for Ecuador. The report describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model takes advantage of...

• Taxes
• Benefits
• Microsimulation

Blog

by Anna Schnupp May 2020

Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is often put forward as the solution to youth unemployment — but to prove its worth, better...

• Employment
• Graduate employability
• Education policy

Blog

by Arkebe Oqubay April 2020

COVID-19 is the greatest global threat the world has faced since the Second World War. It is not the deadliest or most infectious disease recorded...

• COVID-19
• Leadership charasteristics
• Global cooperation

Report

The research detailed herein was planned and implemented by researchers at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), the Develop-ment Economics Research Group (DERG) at the University of Copenhagen...

• Mozambique
• Education policy
• Employment

Report

A investigação aqui apresentada foi planeada e implementada por pesquisadores do United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), do Grupo de Pesquisa em Economia do Desenvolvimento (DERG) da Universidade de...

• Mozambique
• Education policy
• Employment

Working Paper

In many low-income transition countries, where formal institutions such as courts do not function effectively, informal institutions are often used by firms to minimize transaction risks. We examine the role of informal institutions, in the forms of...

• Firm productivity
• Informal institutions
• Relational contracting

Working Paper

This paper investigates the short- and medium-term impact of a randomized group-based early child development programme targeting parents of children aged six to 24 months in a poor, rural district of Rwanda. The programme engaged parents through...

• Child education
• Child development
• Parenting programme

Working Paper

Earnings growth in South Africa displayed a U-shaped pattern across the earnings percentiles between 2000 and 2015, resembling wage polarization in the industrialized world. We investigate whether the drivers of this example of wage polarization in...

• Inequality
• Minimum wage
• Recentered influence function

Working Paper

The purpose of this research is to investigate whether transport accessibility influences the employment duration of individuals in South Africa. The South African Revenue Service’s IRP5 administration datasets, which indicate employment duration and...

• Employment
• Employment duration
• Equality

Journal Article

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...

• Income mobility
• Poverty Dynamics
• Pro-poor

Blog

by Piotr Lewandowski May 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes an unprecedented shock for labour markets around the world. Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social...

Report

View the latest UGAMOD country report here. This report documents UGAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Uganda. The report describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions...

• SOUTHMOD
• UGAMOD
• Taxation

Working Paper

In this paper, we examine the relationship between childhood exposure to adverse weather shocks and nutritional and health outcomes of children in Tanzania. Using household panel data matched with spatially disaggregated data on weather shocks, we...

• Child nutrition
• Tanzania
• Weather shock

Blog

Today, we see clear trends in developing countries of a potentially troubling ‘new normal’ for economic development. We see tertiarization with rising...

• Structural transformation
• Economic development

Working Paper

Through rapid urbanization, Brazil—previously a country where most workers were in the agricultural sector—went through a strong process of structural transformation that lasted almost four decades until economic liberalization at the beginning of...

• Brazil
• import substitution
• Inclusive growth

Working Paper

The principal contribution of this paper is to investigate the relationship between policy uncertainty, caused by recent developments in international markets, and firms’ trade margins for the largest economy in Africa: South Africa. In particular...

• Brexit
• policy uncertainty
• Preferential trade agreements

Working Paper

COVID-19 causes extremely high mortality among the old. This motivates a comparison of the losses of future lifetime years and future lifetime years of work ensuing from a hypothetical 25,000 excess deaths in Italy, whose affluent population is one of...

• Age structure
• COVID-19
• Italy

Blog

by Wim Naudé May 2020

The rush to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fight against the pandemic may be an opportunity for developing countries to accelerate the...

• COVID-19
• Artificial intelligence
• Public health

Background Note

In this note, I will refer to current efforts to harness artificial intelligence (AI) in the push back against COVID-19, note its promises, limitations, potential pitfalls, and identify priorities for developing countries. Artificial Intelligence is...

• Artificial intelligence
• COVID-19
• Developing countries

Working Paper

Special economic zones (SEZs) in Africa are generally regarded as underperforming relative to their peers in the rest of the world. This study focuses on the design features of the SEZ in Africa that may help explain this underperformance. Literature...

• Design attributes
• Implementation
• Infrastructure (Economics)

Blog

by Kehinde Oluwaseun May 2020

While growing up, I was troubled by the scale of the socioeconomic gap between the haves and the have-nots in the community around me. I saw cases...

• Capacity building

Working Paper

This paper explores how Southern Africa can leverage its mineral resources to support growth and industrialization. It considers the aggregate and spatial effects of transport infrastructure improvements, and the relative benefits of financing these...

• Computable general equilibrium
• Infrastructure (Economics)
• Resource sector

Working Paper

The IRP5 and IT3(a) tax data from the South African Revenue Service have been made available to researchers through a joint project between the South African Revenue Service, the National Treasury, and UNU-WIDER. In this paper, I explain how to use...

• Employment
• Labour income
• South Africa

Working Paper

The objective of this research is to assess the extent to which export processing zones in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe integrate the Sustainable Development Goals in their implementation and operations. We focused on four Sustainable...

• Export processing zones
• Sustainable development
• Botswana

Working Paper

The purpose of the study is two-fold. First, it examines whether Internet usage converges across the geographical space comprising the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Second, it aims to expand the currently rather limited...

• Education
• Information technology
• Institutional economics

Research Brief

The design and implementation of industrial policy should be closely linked to spatial considerations. Firm output and productivity are often location-specific, with factors such as the availability of physical infrastructure, proximity to sources...

• Agglomeration
• Firm productivity
• South Africa

Research Brief

Service exports are the fastest growing portion of world trade and now account for nearly a quarter of global exports. Tradable services contribute to economic growth and development by bolstering industrial capabilities, facilitating productivity...

• Tradable sectors
• Services
• International trade

Research Brief

The success of an economy’s manufacturing sector is often critical to economic growth and development. As a major contributor to exports, site of innovation, adopter of international best practices, and engine of job creation, an internationally...

• Offshoring
• Firm-level data
• Linked employer-employee data

Working Paper

The impact of childbirth on women’s employment has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries. Constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and consequent fall in earnings are characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty’...

• child penalty
• Childbirth
• event study

Technical Note

This note, which forms part of a series of technical notes that complement Lastunen et al. (2021), reports the approach used to derive shocks to household expenditures from shocks at the individual-level labour incomes. Its structure is composed by...

• COVID-19
• Income
• Shocks

Technical Note

This note describes how the counterfactual datasets in the working paper by Lastunen et al. (2021) have been reweighted, for each country analysed, to the ‘pre-crisis’ time point of 31 March 2020. The procedure consists of five main steps. The note...

• COVID-19
• SOUTHMOD
• Microsimulation

Journal Article

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...

• Gender gap
• Youth
• Employment

Working Paper

This paper investigates gender inequality in vulnerable employment: forms of employment typically featuring high precariousness, inadequate earnings, and lack of decent working conditions. Using a large collection of harmonized household surveys from...

• Vulnerable employment
• Gender gap
• Developing countries

Working Paper

Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the...

• Public debt
• Interest rate
• Fiscal sustainability

Working Paper

This paper analyses the pathways of technology diffusion through social networks, following the experimental introduction of new technologies in Guinea-Bissau. In the context of an agricultural extension project, we document both the direct effects...

• Agriculture
• Technology
• Knowledge diffusion

Working Paper

The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions through a feminist political...

• Feminist economics
• Political economy
• Social reproduction

Working Paper

In this paper we use different sources of data on job task content to investigate the importance of occupations and the intensity of routine tasks embodied in them in explaining changes in employment and earnings in Brazil, in particular their...

• Brazil
• Inequality
• Polarization

Blog

by Ruby Richardson September 2021

The opening keynote of the recent WIDER Development Conference, COVID-19 and development – effects and new realities for the Global South, was given...

• COVID-19
• Poverty
• Human capital

Blog

by Timothy Shipp September 2021

In introducing Staffan Lindberg’s keynote at the WIDER Development Conference, UNU-WIDER Senior Research Fellow and political scientist Rachel...

• Democracy
• Democracy and human rights
• Autocracy

Blog

by UNU-WIDER September 2021

Kanika Mahajan, a researcher engaged in UNU-WIDER's project on 'The changing nature of work and inequality', is the August 2021 featured economist of...

• Inequality
• Labour economics
• Gender

Technical Note

This technical note presents a modelling approach used in Lastunen et al. (2021) where tax and benefit policies are scaled to reflect their actual duration during a single calendar year. It can be applied to tax-benefit microsimulation models...

• COVID-19
• Tax-benefit systems
• Poverty

Technical Note

This note sets out two different methods on how to adjust incomes in the microdata underlying the standard SOUTHMOD models to reflect a sudden shock, in this case the COVID-19 shock, as done in the accompanying working paper by Lastunen et al. (2021)...

• Imputation
• Income
• Survey data

Working Paper

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...

• Tax
• Revenue
• Sub-Saharan Africa

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Blog

In summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and...

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Blog

by Rachel M. Gisselquist October 2021

Around the world, the pandemic, and the measures taken to address it, have had far reaching effects on poverty, inequality, and governance. And even...

• COVID-19
• WIDER Development Conference

Policy Brief

• COVID-19
• Income distribution
• Poverty

Working Paper

There is limited research on the underlying institutional framework of tax policy and capacity: how tax collection efficiency changes over time and the importance of institutional factors in this process.This paper fills this gap by devising a...

• Fiscal capacity
• General-to-specific
• Tax policy

Working Paper

Between 2005 and 2018, 41 countries had at least one riot directly associated with popular demand for fuel. We make use of a new international dataset on fuel riots to explore the effects of fuel prices and price regimes on fuel riots. In line with...

• Fuel subsidies
• Riots
• protest

Working Paper

The paper builds a framework for the analysis of research and development (R&D) offshoring and outsourcing that encompasses several strands of the economics literature. It surveys the predictions from key theoretical models advanced in the literature...

• Contracting out
• International business enterprises
• Knowledge management

Working Paper

An often-neglected potential negative consequence of tariffs is the impact they may have on the misallocation of factor inputs. Trade protection can provide space for domestic firms to increase prices and mark-ups, allowing low-productivity firms to...

• Tariffs
• Productivity
• Misallocation

Working Paper

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...

• Inflation
• Income tax
• Fiscal drag

Working Paper

A plethora of work has been done on the effectiveness of foreign aid. However, virtually none of the previous studies has investigated the impact of aid on social cohesion. Yet, in order to promote the achievement of the targets in SDG 16, donors and...

• Social cohesion
• Foreign aid
• Panel data

Working Paper

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Kenya’s foreign trade using quarterly trade data for the period 2019 to the second quarter of 2021. The exploratory analysis shows that growth of Kenya’s merchandise exports remained resilient...

• Trade
• Kenya
• Exports

Blog

by Alan R. Roe October 2021

The transition to net zero over the next few decades will involve a large increase in the global demand for many metals essential to the renewables...

• COP26
• Climate change
• Extractive industries

Blog

by Amir Lebdioui October 2021

The economic decline of Nauru, an island in the Central Pacific, is a cautionary tale. Nauru was the highest GDP per capita country in the world in...

• COP26
• Climate change
• Extractive industries

Blog

by Tony Addison October 2021

The long-awaited COP26 in Glasgow is about to start. Billed as the most important COP to date, it is widely seen as a last chance to avoid a global...

• COP26
• Developing countries
• Climate change

Blog

The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) is seen as the last best chance for countries and companies to set out how they are actually...

• COP26
• Climate change
• Extractive industries

Blog

by Mahmoud Mohieldin October 2021

At the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, world leaders discussed the need to scale-up ambition to address key global challenges...

• COP26
• Developing countries
• Climate change

Working Paper

With data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, this paper examines how firm-level resilience capabilities interact with government support in the reduction of lay-offs among formal firms in Central America. We estimate two latent variables to...

• Capabilities
• Resilience
• COVID-19

Journal Article

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of the poor in a semi-rural setting in Bangladesh. We use an unusually rich dataset which tracks the economic and financial transactions of sixty poor and very poor individuals and...

• COVID-19
• Lockdown
• Livelihoods

Working Paper

A large share of the population in Zambia is living below the national poverty line. To reduce poverty, in 2019, the government initiated the Cash Plus reform, which aims to build on the existing Social Cash Transfer as a floor benefit with...

• Poverty
• Zambia
• Social protection

Blog

The situation of Afghanistan has drawn a picture of a poor, conflict-prone, doomed country. But this does not have to be the case. We have examples of...

• Least Developed Countries
• Productivity
• Sustainable development

Blog

by Kunal Sen October 2021

The next decade is a make-or-break for the world’s most vulnerable countries. To tackle the unprecedented confluence of COVID-19, climate, and...

• Least Developed Countries
• Sustainable development
• Research

Working Paper

Presumptive tax, a final tax on business income, was introduced in Uganda in 1997. The latest reform to the regime in July 2020 sought to make the system more progressive, simpler, and fairer to small firms. In this work, we evaluate the reform...

• presumptive tax
• Tax administration
• Small business

Blog

by Virgi Sari October 2021

Virgi Agita Sari joined UNU-WIDER as a visiting PhD fellow in the summer of 2017. Coming from Indonesia, Virgi joined five other fellows from across...

• UNU-WIDER PhD Fellowship
• Capacity development
• Capacity building

Blog

by Kunal Sen October 2021

This month we had the honour to co-host the first ever LDC Future Forum here in Helsinki. It was our first large-scale live event since the COVID-19...

• Least Developed Countries
• Research
• Sustainable development

Blog

How do crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic influence inequality and the other way around? This year’s UN Day Dresden put a spotlight on “Inequalities...

• Inequality
• COVID-19
• Crisis

Working Paper

We examine the patterns and correlates of the productivity gap between male-owned and female-owned firms for informal enterprises in India. Female-owned firms are on average 45 per cent less productive than male-owned firms, with the clearest...

• Gender
• Productivity gap
• India

Research Brief

• Risk-based approach
• Tax compliance
• Tanzania

Working Paper

The rise of the emerging southern economies – China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS) – as both economic and political actors, is having significant and far-reaching impact on the world economy. Notwithstanding the increasing amount of study...

• International economic relations
• International trade
• Restraint of trade