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Mozambique in post-election turmoil: Economic policies that could make a difference
Turmoil following presidential and parliamentary elections in Mozambique has been severe. Preliminary official results from the 2024 elections...
Sam Jones
Research Fellow
Sam Jones is a Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER based in Mozambique, on extended leave from his position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen. He is a versatile economist with expertise in macroeconomic analysis, development finance (including foreign aid), microeconomic empirical methods, education and labour markets.
Sam’s work has been published in leading journals, such as Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Food Policy, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Economic Inequality, World Development, Journal of Development Studies, African Development Review, and Journal of African Economies.
Much of Sam’s academic research has focused on sub-Saharan Africa and he has previously worked extensively in Mozambique, spending seven years as an advisor in the Ministry of Finance.
124 articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Journal Article
The gendered impact of digital jobs platformsTHIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study examines the impact of digital labor-market platforms on jobs outcomes using a randomized encouragement design embedded in a longitudinal survey of Mozambican technical-vocational college graduates. We...
Journal Article
Firm profitability and forced wage labour in Portuguese AfricaARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | Forced wage labour (FWL) in colonial-era Portuguese Africa came to encompass a majority of working age men and persisted until the early 1960s. On the basis of reconstructed financial records from the Sena Sugar Estates in...
Working Paper
Informed job entryHigh youth unemployment rates and long school-to-work transition times pose a threat to low-income countries’ sustainable growth prospects. Using a randomized control trial experiment conducted in Mozambique, we find strong evidence that providing...
Working Paper
The legacy of coercive cotton cultivation in colonial MozambiqueWe examine the long-term impact of forced labour on individual risk behaviour and economic decisions. For that, we focus on a policy of coercive cotton cultivation enforced in colonial Mozambique between 1926 and 1961. We combine archival sources...
Journal Article
Digital labour platforms as shock absorbersARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | Digital labour platforms have grown five-fold over the past decade, enabling significant expansion of gig work worldwide. We interrogate the critique that these platforms tend to amplify aggregate shocks for registered...
Journal Article
Employment mismatches drive expectational errors among Mozambican graduatesBiased beliefs about future labor-market earnings are commonplace. Based on a longitudinal survey of graduate work transitions in Mozambique, this study assesses the contribution of employment mismatches to a large positive gap between expected (ex...
Working Paper
Inequality and voting in fragile countriesThe political consequences of economic inequality have been debated in academic and policy circles for centuries. The nature of this relationship seems highly dependent on specific contexts, with empirical studies showing mixed evidence on how...
Working Paper
Cultivating change: the long-term impact of forced labour in MozambiqueFollowing the abolition of slavery, various forms of compulsory labour were adopted by colonial powers to develop their economies. This paper analyses the contemporary consequences of compulsory cotton production—a forced labour system that operated...
Working Paper
Sheepskin effects and heterogenous wage-setting behaviourUsing a unique panel survey of final-year undergraduates at six of the largest universities in Mozambique, we study the wage premium associated with completing an undergraduate degree. Conditional on a very rich set of controls, including pre-degree...
Journal Article
Africa’s lockdown dilemmaAs 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...
Journal Article
Educational expansion and shifting private returns to educationWe examine how returns to education have evolved in the context of post-conflict reconstruction and economic growth in Mozambique over the period 1996–2015. We show that private rates of return to education have declined at lower levels of schooling...
Working Paper
The impact of COVID-19 on urban informal workers in MaputoInformal self-employed traders in developing countries are vulnerable to shocks as they often lack access to social insurance or formal finance. This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these urban traders in the capital of...
Working Paper
Structural features of the Mozambique economy through the lens of a 2019 social accounting matrixThis study presents and discusses structural features of the Mozambique economy through the lens of a recently constructed 2019 social accounting matrix (SAM). This is an important reality check of the SAM construction process since it brings...
Journal Article
Can information correct optimistic wage expectations?Forward-looking expectations are central to job search but often inaccurate. To test whether public information can help correct beliefs, we embed an experiment in a longitudinal survey of Mozambican graduates. We quantify responses of own-earning...
Blog
Digital platforms and job search: Experimental evidence from MozambiqueDigital technologies can be deployed to improve job search, but their effectiveness in practice is disrupted. This column uses experimental data to...
Working Paper
Digital labour platforms as shock absorbersDigital labour platforms have grown five-fold over the last decade, enabling significant expansion in gig work worldwide. We interrogate the criticism that these platforms tend to amplify aggregate economic shocks for registered users (workers)...
Journal Article
Extending multidimensional poverty identificationIn the widely-used class of multidimensional poverty measures introduced by Alkire and Foster (2011), dimension-specific weights combined with a single cut-off parameter play a fundamental role in identifying who is multidimensionally poor. This...
Working Paper
What drove the profitability of colonial firms?The magnitude of returns to colonial-era investments in Africa has been addressed in an extensive literature, as have the nature and legacies of extractive colonial institutions. However, the link between these institutions and the profitability of...
Working Paper
Labour market effects of digital matching platformsCan digital labour market platforms reduce search frictions in either formal or informal labour markets? We study this question using a randomized experiment embedded in a tracer study of the work transitions of graduates from technical and...
Journal Article
The macroeconomic impact of COVID-19 in MozambiqueThis study assesses the economic costs of COVID-19 and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique. We use a social accounting matrix multiplier analysis to estimate the effects of the pandemic on the economy. Our simulations...
Journal Article
Decomposing learning inequalities in East AfricaInequalities in learning opportunities arise from both household- and school-related factors. Although these factors are unlikely to be independent, few studies have considered the extent to which sorting between schools and households might...
Blog
Dual learning disadvantages in East Africa: And how to deal with them
Children from poorer families in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda face a double disadvantage in their opportunity to access learning: not only is the...
Journal Article
Beyond access to basic services: perspectives on social health determinants of MozambiqueA wide range of evidence shows systematic differences in health status among social groups, which are associated with unequal exposure to and distribution of the social determinants of health (SDH). However, the role of these SDH has not been studied...
Working Paper
Informed participation: the effects of information treatment on panel non-responseThis paper builds on a longitudinal school-to-work transition phone survey experiment to quantify the effects on attrition of communicating with participants. Specifically, we study the impact of sending topically relevant information on job market...
Displaying 32 of 124 results