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Professor Tarp has four decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research and teaching. His field experience covers more than two decades of in-country work in 35 countries across Africa and the developing world more...
This project acts as an instrument for UNU-WIDER to conduct small-scale projects or studies on topics of immediate policy importance that deserve a swift and critical response; to experiment with the application of new analytical techniques to development issues, and to build new research ideas that may then constitute the basis of larger projects in the main programme. Small projects may include empirical evaluation of development insights; trade reform and employment; development economics and public policy; poverty measurement and inequality.
173 articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Journal Article
Labor-use efficiency in Tunisian manufacturing industriesThis paper investigates the process of adjustment in employment. A dynamic model is applied to a panel of six Tunisian manufacturing industries observed over a period of 25 years, from 1971 to 1996. Industries are assumed to adjust their labor inputs...
Journal Article
Estimating labour supply elasticities based on cross-country micro dataThe Nordic model relies on high tax rates to finance an extensive welfare state. If labour supply elasticities are large, the burden of financing the model can be large even if, arguably, the practice of providing subsidised goods that support labour...
Journal Article
How should commodities be taxed?The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This article examines the validity of this claim in an optimal...
Journal Article
The Welfare Effects of Health-based Food Tax PolicyThis paper examines the effects of health-oriented food tax reforms on the distribution of tax payments, food demand and health outcomes. We offer an illustration of how one can take into account the uncertainty related to both demand estimation and...
Journal Article
Can Cities or Towns Drive African Development?Rapid urbanization is an important characteristic of African development and yet the structural transformation debate focuses on agriculture’s relative merits without also considering the benefits from urban agglomeration. As a result, African...
Journal Article
Technology Adoption and Food Security in Subsistence AgricultureThis paper evaluates the impact of an intervention to improve farming techniques and food security in the Gaza area of rural Mozambique. We examine the impact of a group-based approach to technology adoption in subsistence agriculture, using panel...
Journal Article
Optimum Reserve Size, Fishing Induced Change in Carrying Capacity, and Phenotypic DiversityFish stocks around the world are heavily overexploited in spite of fishing policies in several parts of the world designed to limit overfishing. Recent studies have found that the complexity of ecological systems and the diversity of species, as well...
Journal Article
Public Provision, Commodity Demand, and Hours of WorkThe theoretical analysis of optimal commodity taxation is advanced, but there is only limited empirical evidence to guide commodity tax policies. With this paper, we contribute to this body of literature by empirically examining, using Finnish...
Working Paper
The Idea of Economic DevelopmentAlthough development generally refers to a broad concept, the quest for development in Sub-Saharan Africa has been biased by ideological considerations which made abstraction of local conditions and people’s aspirations. The prevalent development...
Working Paper
Regulatory Reform for Closing Africa’s Competitiveness GapOver the past decade, Africa has been experiencing an economic resurgence. Yet, the continent is facing several difficult challenges and many economies of the region continue to be among the least competitive in the world. Africa’s competitiveness is...
Working Paper
Social Transfers and GrowthThe effects of social transfers on growth are still unclear. The limitations of aggregated data at sub-national levels have confined the analysis to the use of simulation models and household surveys. As an alternative, this paper contributes to the...
Blog
Africa’s Low Hanging Fruits23 April 2014 Justin Yifu Lin and Yan Wang At the onset of its miraculous rise in 1979, China had been trapped in poverty for centuries and was poorer...
Working Paper
The Economics of Marriage in North AfricaMarriage is the single most important economic transaction and social transition in the lives of young people. Yet little is known about the economics of marriage in much of the developing world. This paper examines the economics of marriage in North...
Working Paper
Innovation Capabilities for Sustainable Development in AfricaA sustainable pathway for Africa in the twenty-first century is laid out in the setting of the development of innovation capabilities and the capture of latecomer advantages. Africa has missed out on these possibilities in the twentieth century while...
Working Paper
The Theory and Practice of Agriculture, Growth, and Development in AfricaAfrica’s improved growth performance over the last 15 years provides an opportunity for the continent to transit from recovery to structural transformation. This paper reviews the evolution of development theory and practice, the role of agriculture...
Working Paper
The Economics of Happiness and Anger in North AfricaEconomics has rediscovered happiness even though the discipline has always been about human wellbeing. A growing evidence suggests that happier people can be more productive and innovative, which leads to profitability and economic growth. Thus...
Working Paper
Capacity Development for the Transformation of AfricaCountries need capacity for a variety of reasons, including sustaining economic growth, generating jobs, reducing poverty, effectively managing development programmes, and transforming societies and economies. A lot of effort has been expended to...
Working Paper
The Impact of Democracy on Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1982-2012Does democracy promote economic growth? There is still an ongoing debate over the economic implications of democracy, and this question has gained critical importance particularly in the African context, where a wave of democratization in the early...
Working Paper
Gendered Perspectives on Economic Growth and Development in Sub-Saharan AfricaResearchers have linked sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) poor growth performance in recent decades to several factors, including geography, institutions, and low returns to investment. This literature has not yet integrated the research that identifies...
Working Paper
Trade Unions in an Emerging EconomyThis paper provides a historical overview of the South African trade union movement, followed by a brief discussion of the labour market legislation and institutions formed since 1994. Thereafter, a detailed evaluation of the impact of trade unions...
Working Paper
Capitalism and African Business CulturesScholars and practitioners once commonly linked ‘African culture’ to a distinctive ‘African capitalism’, at odds with genuine capitalism and the demands of modern business. Yet contemporary African business cultures reveal that a capitalist ethos has...
Working Paper
The Prospects for an Imminent Demographic Dividend in AfricaThis paper looks at the prospects of a demographic dividend in Africa in the near future. While acknowledging that the fertility declines which change population age structures and thus dependency ratios have been slow to begin and often seem to have...
Journal Article
Ethnic Divisions and Public Goods Provision, RevisitedA considerable amount of recent work in political science and economics builds from the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity leads to poor provision of public goods, a key component of poor governance. Much of this work cites Alesina, Baqir and...
Working Paper
Informality, Growth, and Development in AfricaThe informal sector makes up an overwhelming share of both gross domestic product and total employment in Africa. In this paper, we lay out some of the basic characteristics of the informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa, relevant institutions, and...
Working Paper
Changes in Land Tenure and Agricultural Intensification in Sub-Saharan AfricaDue to increasing population pressure on limited cultivable land in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), farm size has been shrinking, fallow periods have been shortened, and soil fertility has been declining. In accordance with the Boserupian...
Working Paper
Dimensions of African InequalityThis paper discusses dimensions of inequality in sub-Saharan Africa and their causes. It starts with a review of the empirical evidence about inequality during the colonial period as well as the post-independence era. Then it discusses the forces...
Working Paper
Can the Context Mediate Macro-Policy Outcomes?Local institutional and structural (meso) factors can play a role in mediating the returns to a macro-social policy. I focus on the Brazilian cash-transfer-programme Bolsa Familia and check how contextual features influence the returns to transfers...
Working Paper
The Economics of Malaria in AfricaMalaria still claims a heavy human and economic toll, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa. Even though the causality between malaria and poverty is presumably bi-directional, malaria plays a role in the economic difficulties of the region. This...
Working Paper
China-Africa Co-operation in Structural TransformationThis paper examines China and Africa co-operation from the angle of structural transformation as a major driver of growth and job creation. Being a bit ahead in the structural transformation process, China can provide ideas, tacit knowledge...
Working Paper
Gender Difference in Support for Democracy in Sub-Saharan AfricaLittle investigation has been made to explain why women are less likely than are men to support democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. This gender difference in politics has been found in numerous studies and may hinder the much needed legitimation of...
Working Paper
Development as DiffusionWe consider economic development of sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of slow convergence of productivity, both across sectors and firms within sectors. Why have ‘productivity enclaves’, islands of high productivity in a sea of smaller low...
Working Paper
Regional Integration in AfricaPolitical motives, geography, and the uneven distribution of gains trumped the traditional efficiency gains across Africa’s Regional Economic Communities (RECs). The small, sparsely populated, fragmented, and often isolated economies across Africa...
Working Paper
Distributional Impacts of the 2008 Global Food Price Spike in VietnamAgriculture and food cultivation production remains a key sector in the Vietnamese economy in terms of productive activities, income generation, and national export earnings. Higher world market prices should therefore in principle have a beneficial...
Working Paper
Evaluation of Non-Governmental Development OrganizationsRandomized controlled trials (RCTs) are now widely used in development economics. However, their use is often resisted by non-governmental development organizations. The objections they raise differ between the three types of activities of such non...
Working Paper
Employment, Unemployment, and Underemployment in AfricaThis paper documents and analyses the predominance of informal employment in Africa and shows that lack of demand for labour rather than worker characteristics is the main reason for pervasive underemployment. Integration into the global economy and...
Working Paper
Minimum Wage and Informality in EcuadorThis paper investigates if changes in the minimum wage have influenced changes on the formality and informality rates, and the level of wages in Ecuador. A 12-year panel was built. It allows to overcome the short time span of household data and so to...
Working Paper
Global Interpersonal InequalityThis paper discusses different approaches to the measurement of global interpersonal in equality. Trends in global interpersonal inequality during 1975-2005 are measured using data from UNU-WIDER’s World Income Inequality Database. In order to better...
Working Paper
Health Shocks and Coping StrategiesThe objectives of the study are three-fold: to investigate who are vulnerable to welfare loss from health shocks, what are the household responses to cope with the economic burden of health shocks and if policy responses like state health insurance...
Working Paper
Aid to AfricaTo continue its economic growth and create new and better livelihoods, Africa must transform the productive side of its economy. Ongoing globalization—in trade, finance, and technology—opens up new possibilities for structural transformation, but...
Journal Article
Ethnic Politics in Ranked and Unranked SystemsThis article explores how ethnic politics may operate differently in societies with “ranked” versus “unranked” ethnic systems, where ethnicity and class correlate closely versus very little. It focuses on two hypotheses suggested, but not tested, in...
Working Paper
Is Kazakhstan Vulnerable to Natural Resource Curse?This study utilizes panel data from 14 provinces of Kazakhstan and investigates the link between the point-source resources (oil and gas) and economic growth via institutional quality. Labour force migration from manufacturing to non-traded sector...
Working Paper
Ordinal Multidimensional InequalityThis paper proposes a concept of inequality comparisons with ordinal multidimensional categorical data. In our model, one population is more unequal than another when they have common arithmetic median outcomes and the first can be obtained from the...
Working Paper
Children’s Endowment, Schooling, and Work in EthiopiaI investigate the relationship between children’s endowment and parental investment using a rich dataset on a cohort of children from Ethiopia, who were surveyed at ages eight, twelve and fifteen. Children’s endowment is measured by scores on tests...
Journal Article
Growth of African EconomiesRecent evidence from an exhaustive political-economy study of growth of African economies—the Growth Project of the African Economic Research Consortium—suggests that ‘policy syndromes’ have substantially contributed to the generally poor growth in...
Working Paper
The Impacts of the Food, fuel and Financial Crises on Households in NigeriaThis paper examines the impacts of the financial, food and fuel crises on the livelihoods of low-income households Nigeria. It uses primary household level data from Nigeria to analyse the impacts of induced price variability on household welfare...
Book Chapter
Access to LandBy applying a unified framework, this book examines the impact of land tenure reforms on poverty reduction and natural resource management in countries in Africa and Asia with highly diverse historical contexts. These land tenure reforms include Land...
Blog
What Does it Mean to be in the Middle?: Mobility and Vulnerability in Latin America and the Caribbean
Luis-Felipe Lopez-Calva [1] The concept of social class and specifically middle class, has been widely discussed in sociology and other social...
Working Paper
Growth of African EconomiesRecent evidence from an exhaustive political economy study of growth of African economies—the growth project of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) suggests that ‘policy syndromes’ have substantially contributed to the generally poor...
Journal Article
Poverty Reduction and Economic StructureWhile economic growth generally reduces income poverty, there are pronounced differences in the strength of this relationship across countries. Typical explanations for this variation include measurement errors in growth–poverty accounting and...
Journal Article
Agriculture and Small Towns in AfricaAfrica is urbanizing rapidly. Yet most dual economy models focus on the sectoral rather than spatial dimensions of development. This article adopts a “dual–dual” approach to measuring rural/urban and farm/nonfarm linkages. We develop an economy-wide...
Working Paper
Aid Distribution and Co-operation in Unequal CommunitiesWe study the influence of economic inequality on co-operation and aid distribution in community-based development schemes. For this, we organized a field experiment in which community members contributed to a collective effort to attract aid. We find...
Working Paper
Do People in Income Poverty Use Their Income Efficiently?A subjective well-being approach is followed to assess the magnitude of inefficiency in the use of income. The information comes from a Mexican survey and an X-inefficiency technique is used. The paper shows that there exists substantial inefficiency...
Working Paper
Predicting Violence within GenocidesCan we predict when and where violence will break out within cases of genocide? Given often weak political will to respond, knowing where to strategically prioritize limited resources is valuable information for international decision makers...
Working Paper
International Organizations in Development and Global InequalityInitial models of development debates on how to achieve economic growth have been added to by a focus on social issues such as education and political participation. These debates and discourses about development are shaped by international...
Working Paper
How Close Does the Apple Fall to the Tree?Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005, we examine intergenerational occupational mobility in India, an issue on which very few systematic and rigorous studies exist. We group individuals into classes and document patterns of...
Journal Article
Opposition Parties and the Urban Poor in African DemocraciesAfrica’s urban poor increasingly represent a key constituency for electoral mobilization. Opposition parties, which are pivotal for democratic consolidation, have nevertheless exhibited disparate success at obtaining votes from this constituency. To...
Working Paper
Stability and Vulnerability of the Latin American Middle ClassUsing panel datasets from Mexico and Chile for the 2000s, we examine the determinants of middle-class intra-generational mobility. We define the middle class by means of a latent index of economic wellbeing that is less sensitive to short-term...
Blog
Microcredit and Poverty Alleviation: Can Microcredit Close the Deal?
M.G. Quibria In the wake of the worst famine of Bangladesh of the post-World War era Professor Muhammad Yunus launched a microcredit experiment in...
Working Paper
The (Declining) Role of Households in Sustaining China's EconomyCurrent explanations for private consumption’s diminished role in China focus on the expansion of exports and investments. Using structural path analysis, we find additional contributing factors. First, growth patterns during 1997-2007 favoured...
Working Paper
Microcredit and Poverty AlleviationThis paper explores the relationship between microcredit and poverty reduction. To investigate this question, we posit a bare-bone, household model that outlines the economic environment within which various types of family microenterprises operate...
Working Paper
Does Financial Liberalisation Improve Access to Investment Finance in Developing Countries?This paper considers the effect of financial liberalisation on access to investment finance using firm level data covering 57 developing and transition countries. An index is presented which measures financial market liberalisation along the...
Working Paper
On a Distance Function-Based Inequality Measure in the Spirit of the Bonferroni and Gini IndicesA natural way of viewing an inequality or a poverty measure is in terms of the vector distance between an actual (empirical) distribution of incomes and some appropriately normative distribution (reflecting a perfectly equal distribution of incomes...
Working Paper
On the ‘Inclusiveness’ of India’s Consumption Expenditure GrowthThis paper reviews the evidence on the ‘inclusiveness’ of the growth in consumption expenditure that has occurred in India over the last four decades or so. The notion of dynamic inclusiveness is framed in terms of imagined normative allocations of...
Journal Article
Explaining the Evolution of PovertyWe provide a comprehensive approach for analyzing the evolution of poverty using Mozambique as a case study. Bringing together data from disparate sources, we develop a novel 'back-casting' framework that links a dynamic computable general...
Working Paper
Variable Populations and the Measurement of Poverty and InequalityThe present paper is a selective overview, very considerably based on work in which the author himself has been involved, of the difficulties which can arise in the measurement of poverty and inequality when one compares populations of differing size...
Working Paper
Can Cities or Towns Drive African Development? Economy-wide Analysis for Ethiopia and UgandaRapid urbanization is an important characteristic of African development and yet the structural transformation debate focuses on agriculture’s relative merits without also considering the benefits from urban agglomeration. As a result, African...
Working Paper
Trans-border Land AcquisitionsThe rush for land acquisition—primarily driven by food shortages, food price volatility, and the run for agrofuel—has drawn considerable attention, as documented by reports published in late 2009, 2010, and 2011. Terminological differences aside, it...
Working Paper
The Effects of Rural Land Right Security on Labour Structural Transformation and UrbanizationThis paper attempts to contribute to the understanding of the impacts of secure rural agricultural land rights on labour structural transformation from agriculture to non-agriculture as well as on urbanization, with a specific focus on Thailand...
Journal Article
Globalization Crises, Trade and Development in VietnamVietnam has been among the most successful East Asian economies, especially in weathering the external shocks of recent globalization crises. Examination of economic performance and policy responses shows rising dependence on foreign finance around...
Book Chapter
The Political Economy of Fragile StatesFragile states have very mixed characteristics. Some are experiencing violent conflict, some are ‘post-conflict’, some have avoided large-scale violence–so far. Many are resource poor, but some are resource rich. Many are landlocked, but certainly...
Blog
Poverty Reduction and Economic Structure: Mozambique and Vietnam ComparedChanning Arndt, Andres Garcia, Finn Tarp, and James Thurlow Economic growth typically reduces poverty, but global averages conceal wide variation at...
Journal Article
The (evolving) role of agriculture in poverty reduction—An empirical perspectiveThe role of agriculture in development remains much debated. This paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty, as opposed to growth alone. The contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth...
Working Paper
Security of Property Rights for Whom?Recent research regarding property rights and economic development often treats property rights security in a country as homogeneous, although protecting the private entitlements of some can entail preventing others from claiming and controlling...
Working Paper
The Long-Run Behaviour of the Terms of Trade between Primary Commodities and ManufacturesThis study examines the Prebisch and Singer hypothesis using a panel of 24 commodity prices from 1900 to 2010. The modelling approach stems from the need to meet two key concerns: (1) the presence of cross-sectional dependence among commodity prices...
Journal Article
The Impact of the Global Commodity and Financial Crises on Poverty in VietnamEconomic growth in Vietnam was resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. Impacts on employment and poverty are also disputed. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose growth and...
Working Paper
The Political Participation of Africa’s YouthThe youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Today, as the region faces a growing ‘youth bulge’ that is disproportionately burdened by un- and underemployment, capturing the votes of this demographic...
Working Paper
The Efficiency of States and CitiesIn this study an attempt has been made to assess the potential of land as a municipal financing tool in four Indian cities, to enable better public service delivery and attainment of the MDGs. The institutional arrangements for land use are...
Working Paper
Institutional Reforms Debate and FDI Flows to MENA RegionThe paper revisits the policy debate on institutional reform approaches to property rights protection and empirically examines it in the context of FDI flows to the Middle East and Northern Africa region (MENA). Using panel data on 11 MENA countries...
Working Paper
Terms of Trade and Growth of Resource EconomiesThe current paper demonstrates a dichotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade, employing as case studies the two African countries, Botswana and Nigeria. Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of...
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Theme: Past, 2010-11