Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (125)
Working Paper
pdf
– Easy Come, Easy Go?
Contrary to the popular notion that money that is easily earned, is also easily spent, economic theory holds that income is fungible. Drawing on the concept of mental accounting, this study theoretically explores when such a link between spending behaviour and the effort dispensed in obtaining...
Working Paper
pdf
– Whither Africa
The global economic crisis beginning in 2008 has come at a very inopportune time for Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) appeared to be on a march toward real economic and human progress, following the dismal performance of the 1980s and early 1990s. Economic growth had resurged since the mid-1990s...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Tunisia
This paper studies the determinants of the inefficient functioning of the Tunisian labour market. The study takes advantage of recent developments in the stochastic frontier techniques and estimates the matching function for Tunisia using disaggregated data. We include control variables as...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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 countries’ different compositions of economic growth. We...
Working Paper
pdf
– Country Role Models of Development Success?
The paper discusses views on China and India as country role models. In so doing the article recounts the economic and political reforms pursued by the two countries. The paper also outlines the outstanding reforms and the bottlenecks that could jeopardize economic performance and development going...
Working Paper
pdf
– Some Reflections on Variable Population Poverty Measurement
Debates about poverty relief and foreign aid often hinge on claims about how many poor people there are in the world and what constitutes poverty. Good measures of poverty are essential for addressing the world poverty problem. Measures of poverty require a basis for determining who is poor and a...
Working Paper
pdf
– Getting Public Sector Elite Officials to Support Government Reform in Brazil
This paper shows how an elite cadre of public sector officials played a key role in the success of administrative reforms in Brazil’s state tax administration bureaus in the 1990s. The success of the reforms strengthened public sector bureaucracies and institutions at all government levels...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Role of the Customs Elite on the Reform Process in Cameroon
An ethnographic approach is applied to Cameroon customs in order to explore the role and the capacity of the bureaucratic elites to reform their institution. Fighting against corruption has led to the extraction and circulation of legal ‘collective money’ that fuels internal funds. This collective...
Working Paper
pdf
There has been a growing recognition among scholars that politics matters in the distribution of resources in society. However, attempts to use a political economy ‘lens’ with which to explore causes of poverty and strategies for poverty alleviation have largely ignored elites. By failing to embrace...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Riddle is Still There but We May be a Little Bit Wiser
The Nordic countries are often bundled together, as representatives of a ‘model’ which combines high living standards and an open market economy with social insurance and ambitious public services. Yet, the economic and political development of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden towards this model...
Working Paper
pdf
The paper documents the economic development strategies pursued by the Dominican Republic. The study argues that the country’s success results from the implementation of a three-pronged economic development strategy. The first prong relates to diversifying production and the second to developing...
Working Paper
pdf
Drawing on insights from Latin America, this paper examines the factors that contributed to the use of populist strategies by political parties during recent presidential elections in Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia. Specifically, the paper argues that the nature of party competition in Africa...
Working Paper
pdf
– Knowledge, Entrepreneurial and Political
International migration analysis often focuses on mass migration rather than on the international mobility of elites, which is the focus of this paper. The paper offers a three-fold classification of elites: (a) knowledge elites, (b) entrepreneurial elites and (c) political elites. We explore the...
Working Paper
pdf
The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would become an extremely unequal society. Comparative analysis reveals that certain endowments exist in societies that experience a ‘persistence of inequality’. This paper shows that the emphasis on endowments may be...
Working Paper
pdf
– A CGE Analysis for Mozambique
We use a gendered computable general equilibrium model to assess the implications of biofuels expansion in Mozambique. We compare scenarios with different gender employment intensities in producing jatropha for biodiesel. Under all scenarios, biofuels accelerate GDP growth and reduce poverty...
Working Paper
pdf
– An Analytical Framework with Evidence from Mozambique and Tanzania
Many low income countries in Africa are optimistic that producing biofuels domestically will not only reduce their dependence on imported fossil fuels, but also stimulate economic development, particularly in poorer rural areas. Skeptics, on the other hand, view biofuels as a threat to food security...
Working Paper
pdf
An elite derives its status from its relationship to property, whether physical or human capital. While stable property rights are necessary for everyday business, unstable property rights that result in major institutional changes (such as land reform) may have a positive impact on economic...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper analyses political elites, economic elites, hybrid elite households and non-elite households in rural China using household data for 1995 and 2002. We seek to understand the determinants of belonging to each of the three elite categories. We find that education and military experience...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper calls for a fresh look at industrial policies in the light of recent trends and developments in the global economy. In particular, five new challenges and their implications for industrial policies are discussed. These have been neglected in the debate on industrial policy and include (i)...
Working Paper
pdf
– Old and New Issues
The debate on industrial policy (IP) has been characterized by a number of contractions over the concept of industrial policy, its merits, contents and application. The purpose of this exploratory paper is to review the debate on IP. Outlining the concept and instruments of industrial policy, the...
Working Paper
pdf
What makes elites developmental instead of predatory? We argue that Mozambique’s elite was developmental at independence 35 years ago. With pressure and encouragement from international forces, it became predatory. It has now partly returned to its developmental roots and is trying to use the state...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper discusses the issue of taxation and redistribution in economies dominated by Elites with limited state capacity. Within a simple aggregate framework, we discuss the political economy incentives of Elites to tax, redistribute and increase state capacity. In particular, the analysis...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper discusses data from a survey and in-depth interviews on elite perceptions of poverty in Brazil. De Swaan tried to identify the circumstances under which elites are willing to mobilize resources in order to promote poverty reduction. This paper questions if de Swaan’s analysis applies to...
Working Paper
pdf
Malaysian economic development has been shaped by public policy in response to changing national and external conditions. Public investments peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s, until the policy reversals driven by sovereign debt concerns and new policy ideology fads. Foreign investments continued...
Working Paper
pdf
– An Integrated Biophysical and Economic Assessment for Mozambique
Mozambique, like many African countries, is already highly susceptible to climate variability and extreme weather events. Climate change threatens to heighten this vulnerability. In order to evaluate potential impacts and adaptation options for Mozambique, we develop an integrated modelling...
Working Paper
pdf
Whether policy support should be designed differently for women entrepreneurs is a particularly relevant question. To answer this, and to inform the design of policies to provide appropriate support for women entrepreneurs, the paper compares male and female perceptions of typical entrepreneurship...
Working Paper
pdf
Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track consumption correlates as opposed to consumption itself have been...
Working Paper
pdf
Economic growth in Vietnam has been fairly resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. In addition, the impact of the crises on employment and poverty is in dispute. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose impacts and estimate...
Working Paper
pdf
Land efficiency in urban China is examined, using Tianjin as a case study, from the perspective of agricultural land conservation; reduction in energy use, conventional pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions; and human time savings. Issues addressed include increased scatter on the periphery, over...
Working Paper
pdf
– Have We Come Full Circle?
The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro and meso-levels, recent literature doubts the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses the aid-growth literature and, taking inspiration from the program...
Working Paper
pdf
– Lessons from Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic
This paper provides a synthesis of the four papers on the Latin American and Caribbean economies: Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. It focuses on the following themes: macroeconomic stabilization and fiscal challenges, poverty and inequality, and the use of natural resources to...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper uses two unique panel data sets to study the causal effect that armed conflict has over entrepreneurial activity in Colombia. Using a fixed effect estimation methodology at the plant level and controlling for the possible endogeneity of armed conflict through the use of instrumental...
Working Paper
pdf
– Comparative Global Evidence
Analysing a large sample of 1980–2004 unbalanced panel data, the current study presents comparative global evidence on the role of (income) inequality in poverty reduction. The evidence involves both an indirect channel via the tendency of high inequality to decrease the rate at which income is...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Rural and Urban African Economies
The present study examines the degree to which income distribution affects the ability of economic growth to reduce poverty, based on 1990s data for a sample of rural and urban sectors of African economies. Using the basic needs approach, an analysis-of-covariance model is derived and estimated...
Working Paper
pdf
– Assessing Progress in Countries and Sectors
This study gauges the status of transition in the formerly centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, using a broad approach that compares countries with respect to their business environment, competition, and managerial practices; and assesses transition progress at the level...
Working Paper
pdf
– Firm Level Evidence from Sierra Leone
This paper positions itself among the very rare microeconomic analyses on the consequences of civil war. Up to now, most analyses on this topic are based upon household surveys. The originality of the present study is that it investigates for the first time the likely predominant route by which...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper provides a synthesis of the three papers on the non-Nordic developed economies, Ireland, Japan and Switzerland along the following themes: role of the state, openness, education and human capital, and macroeconomic stability. It then draws lessons for developing countries of today.
Working Paper
pdf
The main characteristics of 'the Swedish model' are arguably related to the country's knowledge-intensive industry and its advanced welfare state. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the historical development of these two features of the Swedish economy. The first part looks at industrial...
Working Paper
pdf
– Resident Koreans in Japan
This paper discusses the development of Korean communities in Japan from their origins in the late nineteenth century through their stabilization following the Second World War. Approaching the developing communities from a spatial perspective, the chapter compares Tokyo and Osaka and shows the...
Working Paper
pdf
The Impact of Multiple Imputation of Coarsened Data on Estimates on the Working Poor in South Africa
South African household surveys typically contain coarsened earnings data, which consist of a mixture of missing earnings values, point responses and interval-censored responses. This paper uses sequential regression multivariate imputation to impute missing and interval-censored values in the 2000...
Working Paper
pdf
Particular sets of institutions, once they become established in a society, have a strong tendency to persist. In this paper I argue that understanding how elites form and reproduce is key to understanding the persistence of institutions over time. I illustrate this idea with a simple political...
Working Paper
pdf
Rapid economic development in China in the post-1978 era has been considered 'intriguing' and 'puzzling' since it occurred under the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party – the fusion of politics and economics is supposed to be a powerful impediment to market growth. Scholars have proposed...
Working Paper
pdf
This study provides evidence that culture understood as values and beliefs moves very slowly. Despite massive institutional change, values and beliefs in transition countries have not changed much over the last 20 years. Evidence suggests that culture is affected by the long run historical past, in...
Working Paper
pdf
Community-based development has been criticized for its inadequate understanding of power relationships at the local level, which thus leaves room for elite capture. This paper compares and contrasts two case studies, both of which take power seriously in their institutional designs. The solar home...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper describes the very different role played by female elites in contemporary developing countries, as compared to the 'early' industrializing countries of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It shows that women are far more important in business and politics in today's developing...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Bangalore (India)
This paper aims at economic analysis of economic globalization and urban growth of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, as they are related to ICT sector. Overall analyses offer new insights and evidences for ICT sector as a major contributor for degree of economic globalization and urban...
Working Paper
pdf
– International Migration and the Global City
Cities are the focal point for the mobility of talents, located between the nations and firms, states and educational institutions. Shanghai, being regarded as the 'ultimate poster-child for the effects of globalization on cities and regions' by the BBC (2007), the city is argued as the best...
Working Paper
pdf
The paper investigates the determinants of productivity growth in China. It also analyses the sustainability of the country's industrial growth by estimating sectoral productivity, accounting for energy usage and emission since the start of the market-oriented reforms in the late 1970s. The growth...
Working Paper
pdf
Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Income over Time, Aspirations and Reference Groups
How a person assesses the wellbeing derived from income is often determined as much by its contrast with a reference point as by the level of income itself. In this paper, I use a household survey from Mexico to examine how subjective poverty assessments not only depend on the absolute level of...
Working Paper
pdf
– Lessons from Transition
The paper explores a phenomenon often observed in transition economies, when newly established institutions are misused, i.e., applied or resorted to for reasons which have little in common with their intended or anticipated purpose. In such incidences institutions become sources of private gains...
Working Paper
pdf
We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. Our aim is to capture the importance of persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a corresponding individual intertemporal poverty measure. Our first axiom requires that intertemporal poverty is identical to...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper demonstrates the implications of adopting an approach to measuring poverty that takes into account the lifetime experience of individuals rather than simply taking a static or cross-sectional perspective. Our approach follows the theoretical innovations in Hoy and Zheng (2008) which...
Working Paper
pdf
The analysis of poverty dynamics yields important insights about the expected effectiveness of alternative social policies on poverty reduction. This paper analyses the effect of spell recurrence on poverty dynamics taking into account multiple poverty and non-poverty spells. Using longitudinal data...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper demonstrates that the property of 'replication invariance', generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible variable- and fixed-population axioms.
Working Paper
pdf
This paper overviews the debate on the relationship between the measures of globalization, economic growth and pace of urbanization, and speculates on its impact on the quality of life and poverty in the context of Asian countries. After experiencing moderate to high urban growth for three to four...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Case of Liberia
How do production firms adapt to civil war? The answer to this question will inform the potential for economic development during and after conflict. Many businesses survive violent conflict, and in some cases even thrive. Understanding these successes will help policymakers to support the 'coping...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Capability Approach
We provide a formal model of entrepreneurship in human development. The framework is provided by the capabilities approach (CA). Hence we extend not only the conceptualisation of entrepreneurship in development, but the reach of the CA into entrepreneurship. From a CA view, entrepreneurship is not...
Working Paper
pdf
The East Asian countries are currently experiencing declining fertility rates and aging of their populations. The demographic transition is beginning to affect various societal functions, and increasing international migrants are becoming one of the responses to the transition, despite the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Effects of Household Perceptions, Illness, and Environmental Pollution on Clean Water Investment
Recent efforts to reinvigorate the connections between urban planning and health have usefully brought the field back to one of its original roles. Current research, however, has focused on industrialized cities, overlooking some of the important urbanization processes in poor countries. This paper...
Working Paper
pdf
– Governing Finance in Central and Eastern Europe
Twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain—which for decades had separated East from West—most countries of Central and Eastern Europe are now members of the European Union; some have even adopted the euro. Nonetheless, these countries have also remained exceptionally vulnerable to upset...
Working Paper
pdf
– How Can Colombo Prevent the Emerging Chaos?
This paper examines urbanization trends, the growth of Colombo and its present state of development. It looks at the approaches to the planned interventions in the city and demonstrates how a uni-directional urban development has had a detrimental impact upon healthy growth and quality of life in a...
Working Paper
pdf
– Central Europe, Russia and China Compared
In the former socialist redistributive economies, the transition to market economy and the conversion to private ownership followed different trajectories. The paper offers an overview on how a new class of grand bourgeoisie was formed in three different regions of the transition: Central Europe...
Working Paper
pdf
– An Analysis Using Panel Household Survey Data, 1990-2005
This paper, using for the first time household survey data from 26 post-communist countries, covering the period 1990-2005, examines correlates of unprecedented increases in inequality registered by most of these economies. We find that, after controlling for country-fixed effects and type of survey...
Working Paper
pdf
– How Targeting Has Left out the Poor in Peripheral Cities in the Philippines
Constrained by resource limitations and challenged by the increasing incidence of poverty in the country, the Philippine government embarked on an anti-poverty programme that sought to identify where the poorest people were, what were their specific needs, and how government and other stakeholders...
Working Paper
pdf
– East Germany’s Economic Transition since 1989
The former German Democratic Republic underwent a unique post-communist transition because it was absorbed into the wealthy Federal Republic of Germany and has received massive subsidies. Nonetheless, serious difficulties have persisted, including higher unemployment, rapid deindustrialization, and...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Case of Russia
Only recently, 20 years after transition to a market system, has Russia regained a similar production level it had achieved on the eve of transition in 1991. This may sound surprising, given its low productivity under central planning which dropped even lower during the last decades, and the rather...
Working Paper
pdf
Indonesia went through a process of fiscal decentralization in 2001 involving the devolution of several policymaking and service delivery functions to the subnational tiers of government (provinces and districts). This process is likely to have affected regional patterns of urbanization, because the...
Working Paper
pdf
Building on a Lewis-type model of structural change and entrepreneurship we show how a global economic crisis consisting of a financial and a trade shock can undermine structural change in developing countries via the start-up and innovation activities of entrepreneurs. The model analytics...
Working Paper
pdf
– Negotiating Closed Doors and Windows of Opportunity
This paper examines land tenure in informal urban settlements in India from a gender perspective through field research conducted in Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA). The author describes the formal and informal tenure arrangements that were in place in...
Working Paper
pdf
– Assessing Spatial Variations in Anti-Chinese Rioting within Jakarta during the May 1998 Riots
The concept of scapegoating is frequently used to explain how opportunistic elites attempt to deflect blame onto vulnerable ethnic minorities, particularly during times of social turmoil. However, the notion of scapegoating is undertheorized in the conflict literature and the question of why elite...
Working Paper
pdf
– What is Missing in Turkey?
Although very dynamic and flexible, Turkish SMEs are less innovative than their European counterparts. The analysis undertaken in this paper allows to assess whether this low level of innovative activities is related to a lack of entrepreneurial behaviour and/or to the weaknesses of the Turkish...
Working Paper
pdf
After becoming independent in 1991, the five Central Asian countries pursued differing transition paths from the defunct central planning. This paper analyses the connection between economic policies and performance during the 1990s and 2000s. Performance over the two decades has been determined by...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Case of Latin American Countries
Foreign bank presence has substantially increased in Latin America during the second half of the 1990s, which has prompted an intense debate on its banking and macroeconomic consequences. In this paper, we apply ARCH techniques to jointly estimate the impact of foreign bank presence on the level and...
Working Paper
pdf
Cities—especially those with substantial poor populations—will face increasingly severe challenges in tackling the impacts of global environmental change (GEC). As economic dynamos and increasingly important population concentrations, cities both contribute substantially, and often are very...
Working Paper
pdf
– Urban Governance and the Politics of Popular Livelihoods in Nigeria
This paper examines how decentralization and informalization are reshaping urban governance in contemporary Africa. By exploring the interface between urban institutional failures and popular organizational solutions, the paper considers how informal governance processes feed into wider structural...
Working Paper
pdf
– Building and Belonging in African Cities
Accepting that successful ‘development’ is premised on a population’s participation in a collective undertaking, we must understand urban residents’ interactions and ambitions. In African cities being transformed by geographic and social mobility, it is unclear what forms of inclusion, solidarity or...
Working Paper
pdf
In an introductory section, this paper considers briefly the achievements and problems of urban governance in post-apartheid South Africa through an assessment of three categories: administrative reform, developmental issues and conflicts over service delivery issues. It then goes on to assess...
Working Paper
pdf
Growth that reduces poverty is often considered pro-poor regardless of whether the poor benefit from it more than the non-poor. Such growth could simply be termed poverty-reducing growth. This paper argues that for growth to be pro-poor it should disproportionally benefit the poor. The paper...
Working Paper
pdf
Entrepreneurship is generally regarded as a force of change, innovation, and development in modern economies. Entrepreneurs bring new and better products to markets, restore allocative efficiency through arbitrage and reinvest their profits. However, it has been argued that the same energy and...
Working Paper
pdf
Urbanization is one of the critical global trends shaping the future of humanity. At the same time, it has been argued that full development requires an urbanized environment. This paper attempts to examine and characterize the major phases of urbanization in Uganda and what this means for urban...
Working Paper
pdf
– Portfolio Choice and Violence in Civil War in Rural Burundi
This paper challenges the idea that farmers revert to subsistence farming when confronted with violence from civil war. Macro-economic evidence on economic legacies of civil war suggests that civil wars, while obviously disastrous in the short run, do not need to have persistent effects on long term...
Working Paper
pdf
– Implications for Urban Development in Nigeria
The paper investigates the impact of infrastructural development on poverty reduction in Nigeria. Specifically, the relative effects of physical and social infrastructure on living standards or poverty indicators are examined, with a view to providing empirical evidence on the implications of...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper explores one possible argument for how to respond to the epistemic troubles in the production of knowledge about urban Africa. The problem I have in mind is the preponderance of policy-oriented research on the development challenges and absences of African cities, as opposed to a more...
Working Paper
pdf
– Understanding Economic Development and Institutional Change
The paper analyses the 20-year experience with transition in the SEE countries in a comparative framework, illustrating how these countries encountered difficulties in its implementation, despite having some of the best starting conditions in 1989 to implement a swift transition to a market economy...
Working Paper
pdf
– Could It Have Been Better? Will It Be Better?
Over 1.8 billion people, from Central Europe to East Asia, have been involved in the great systemic transformation to market economy, civic society and democracy. The process has brought mixed fruits. The diversification of the current situation is a result of both the legacy from the past and the...
Working Paper
pdf
– a Case Study
China's urban geography has been dramatically altered over the past three decades. The co-presence of splinters in urban fabric—contrasting and continuously changing in terms of condition, use, and socio-cultural consistency—is symptomatic for the country's contemporary transition, suspending...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Great Transition
This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society development under communism and the political, economic and institutional change and transformation after 1989. We collected a unique dataset on nature and intensity of dissident activities in 27 former communist countries...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Case Study of India
South Asia has the highest rate of child malnutrition in the world, despite rapid economic growth compared to other regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. Known as the ‘South Asian enigma’ this feature is partly attributed to the low status of women in South Asian societies. This paper examines this...
Working Paper
pdf
The 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 performance, its indirect impact on growth in other...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Rural Western China
Using 2000-04 panel data this study analyses the pathways rural households followed out of poverty in two lagging provinces of China, Inner Mongolia and Gansu. Rising labour productivity in agriculture has been key, and still holds much promise. Labour mobility has also been important in Gansu. So...
Working Paper
pdf
The current research on entrepreneurship as an economic phenomenon often assumes its desirability as a driver of economic development and growth. However, entrepreneurial talent can be allocated among productive, unproductive, and destructive activities. This process is theorized as driven by...
Working Paper
pdf
– Interaction between Systems and Technical Progress
Literature on post-socialist transformation usually deals with the political, economic and social sides of it, although there have also been important changes in the field of technical advance in the last 20 years. One of capitalism’s main virtues is the strong incentive it gives to dynamism...
Working Paper
pdf
– Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union over 2000-2007
During the socialist era the communist regime attempted to reduce development differentials among states and social classes. In contrast, during the last 20 years, the economies in transition experienced considerable divergence in the economic, social, demographic and political areas. As a result...
Working Paper
pdf
What explains the divergent political paths that the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have followed since the fall of the Berlin Wall? While some appear today to be consolidated democracies, others have all the features of consolidated autocracy. This study...
Working Paper
pdf
– Explaining the Prevalence of Slums in Developing Countries
One of the most visible and enduring manifestations of urban poverty in developing countries is the formation and proliferation of slums. While attention has focused on the rapid pace of urbanization as the sole or major factor explaining the proliferation of slums and squatter settlements in...
Working Paper
pdf
– Towards a New Measure of Urban Concentration
A common challenge in analyzing urbanization is the data. The United Nations (UN) compiles information on urbanization (urban population and its share of total national population) that is reported by various countries but there is no standardized definition of ‘urban’, resulting in inconsistencies...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper describes the gaps and limitations in the data available on urban populations for many low- and middle-income nations and how this limits the accuracy of international comparisons – for instance of levels of urbanization and of the size of city populations. It also discusses how the lack...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Multi-generational Panel Study in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas, 1968–2008
This paper describes the methodology of a longitudinal multi-generational study in the favelas (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro from 1968 to 2008. Major political transformations took place in Brazil during this interval: from dictatorship to ‘opening’ to democracy; major economic transformations...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper reviews the literature on the forces driving urbanization in developing countries. It presents a model outlining how globalization can lead to the evolution of an urban structure which may approximate Zipf’s law. Policy implications are outlined.
Working Paper
pdf
The paper presents a theoretical model that seeks to answer the question of why former squatter settlements tend to upgrade/redevelop at a slower pace than otherwise similar settlements originating in the formal sector. We argue that squatter settlers’ initial strategy to access urban land creates a...
Working Paper
pdf
Population density gradients for South Africa's cities are quite small in absolute value, indicating a relatively flat population distribution across the cities. In contrast employment is less flatly distributed than the population. The relationship between employment densities and distance across...
Working Paper
pdf
– Challenges and Opportunities
Many cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America face serious problems managing their wastes. Two of the major problems are the insufficient collection and inappropriate final disposal of wastes. Despite spending increasing resources, many cities – particularly in Africa and Asia – collect less than...
Working Paper
pdf
Do local improvements in infrastructure provision improve city competitiveness? What public finance mechanisms stimulate local infrastructure supply? And how do local efforts compare with national decisions of placing inter-regional trunk infrastructure? In this paper, we examine how the combination...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Comparative Approach for Innovative Urban Projects
Since the 1980s, the promotion of heritage values has gradually become a relevant issue for urban planning. Together with the emergence of new peripheries, inner-city areas and particularly old historic centres, affected by deterioration due to the recession of the last decades, have been the object...
Working Paper
pdf
– Towards a Political Economy of Conflict in Cities
As the world moves towards its so-called urban ‘tipping point’, urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The association between cities, violence, and disorder is not...
Working Paper
pdf
– Tracing the Role of Creolized Urban Ethnicity in Nation-State Formation
Dar es Salaam is exceptional in East Africa for having a record of relatively little ethnic tension, and remaining tranquil and true to its name, the ‘harbour of peace’. This paper explores the interface between ethnic and national identities in Tanzania’s capital city, focusing on its ethnic...
Working Paper
pdf
– Reconstructing the Story of Sectarian Violence in Beirut
This paper aims at understanding the dynamics of sectarian violence in the city of Beirut, by looking at the early phase of violence in the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), and the process of dividing Beirut into various sectarian enclaves controlled by the warring militias. The paper aims to show the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Longitudinal Results from Guayaquil, Ecuador
This paper examines the gendered nature of asset accumulation between 1978 and 2004 in Indio Guayas, a low-income community on the periphery of the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. In so doing, it emphasizes both the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative intra-household data, as well as...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper uses a unique panel dataset on firm-level corruption. It contains quantitative information on bribe payments by a sample of formal and informal Vietnamese firms. We show that bribe incidence is highly associated with firm-level differences in (i) visibility, (ii) sunk costs, (iii) ability...
Working Paper
pdf
– Causes, Consequences, and Questions
The formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have experienced a remarkable demographic transformation in the past twenty years. On many dimensions of fertility and family formation, much of the region now looks like Western Europe—below-replacement fertility rates...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper aims towards better understanding the role of entrepreneurship in fragile states, which despite the practical interest and relevance has been somewhat disregarded in academic research. Given the necessity to support policy formulation with appropriate and relevant measurement of...
Displaying 112 of 125 results