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Publications (154)
Journal Article
This 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 toward a desired level. A labor requirement...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A bridge between micro and macro estimates?
The 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 supply is likely to mitigate these effects. We...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A counter-argument to the recommendation in the Mirrlees Review
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 income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...
This 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 health estimates and to produce confidence...
– Economywide Analysis for Ethiopia and Uganda
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 governments are often provided conflicting...
– Evidence from a Group-Based Aid Project in Mozambique
This 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 data collected by our research team on over 200...
Fish 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 as negative impact of fishing activities on...
– An Empirical Analysis
The 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 consumption data, the relation between working hours...
Working Paper
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– Views from Africa
Although 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 models have used increased national income as a...
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Over 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 adversely affected by: (i) poor regional...
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– The Missing Evidence from Luminosity Data
The 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 empirical literature by assessing the effects of...
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Marriage 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 Africa, where asymmetric rights in marriage...
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A 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 seeing the East Asian countries advance. There...
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Africa’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 therein, and the pace of structural transformation...
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Economics 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, there are concerted efforts to measure happiness and...
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Countries 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 develop capacity in Africa with mixed results. This...
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Does 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 1990s coincided with the start of a new era of...
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Researchers 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 linkages between gender, economic development, and...
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– The Case of South Africa
This 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, legislation, and institutions on labour market...
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Scholars 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 taken hold within both state and society. The...
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– The Case for Cautious Optimism
This 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 stalled once they have begun, we nevertheless...
A 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 Easterly (1999) as providing empirical proof. This...
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The 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 development issues. Proposed policy approaches...
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Due 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 evolutionary theory and the Hayami-Ruttan induced...
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This 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 that determine inequality change, focusing on factor...
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– Contextual Differences in the Returns to Bolsa Familia in Brazil
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. Building on Amartya Sen’s work, I assess the...
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Malaria 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 article provides an analysis of the economic...
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– Ideas, Opportunities, and Finances
This 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, opportunities as well as development finances in Africa’s...
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– Do social institutions matter?
Little 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 democracy in this region. This paper addresses the...
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– Manufacturing Productivity and Sub-Saharan Africa’s Missing Middle
We 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-productivity firms, not diffused more rapidly? We...
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– Challenges and Prospects
Political 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 make a compelling case for these economies to...
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Agriculture 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 impact on rural farmers. This is based however on...
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Randomized 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-governmental organizations (NGOs): capacity...
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This 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 exports of labour-intensive products are vital to...
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This 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 characterize changes over time. Results suggest...
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– Trends and Measurement
This 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 understand the trends, global interpersonal...
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– State Health Insurance Scheme of Andhra Pradesh, India
The 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 schemes are effective in reducing the economic...
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– the Changing Context
To 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 also new risks as Africa’s integration with the...
– an Exploratory Analysis
This 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 Donald Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Their...
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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 occurs as a result of wage increase in the...
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This 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 second by correlation-increasing switches and/or...
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I 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 of cognitive skills/ability. A child’s enrollment...
– Productivity, Policy Syndromes, and the Importance of Institutions
Recent 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 Sub-Saharan Africa during post-independence. The...
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– a Retrospective Approach for Research Enquiry
This 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. Our results indicate that aggregate shocks have...
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– Productivity, Policy Syndromes, and the Importance of Institutions
Recent 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 growth in sub-Saharan Africa during post-independence...
– Comparative Path Analysis for Mozambique and Vietnam
While 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 different compositions of economic growth. We explore...
Africa 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 model of Ethiopia that distinguishes between...
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We 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 that devolving aid distribution to community...
Displaying 48 of 154 results