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Publications (121)
Working Paper
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African cities are increasingly seen as key to unlocking national structural transformation and inclusive growth, as they tend to host the majority of the non-productive and informal labour force; attract the lion’s share of domestic investment in non-productive sectors; and host different political...
Report
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This report documents ETMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ethiopia. The Ethiopian national team currently includes Adnan A. Shahir, Abas Mohammed Ali (Ministry of Planning and Development, Ethiopia), and Francesco Figari (University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy), who are responsible for the 2023...
Working Paper
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– A comparative perspective
We examine the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated tax-benefit measures in seven sub-Saharan African countries, focusing on the onset of the crisis.We evaluate impacts on disposable incomes, considering variations across income groups; assess the effectiveness of tax...
Working Paper
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This study evaluates which type of benefit—a universal benefit, a proxy mean-tested benefit, or a categorical benefit— better cushions the poverty effects of income shocks in a developing economy. We compare the effectiveness of the three benefit schemes on poverty first conceptually and then by...
Many displaced people around the world are in limbo—unable to return home or go anywhere else. Our surveys show that displaced people have lived in their current location for 6.9 years on average, significantly longer than the five-year threshold for what is typically considered a ‘protracted’...
Report
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This report documents ETMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ethiopia. The Ethiopian national team currently includes Adnan A. Shahir, Abas Mohammed Ali, and Francesco Figari, who are responsible for the 2022 model update and this report. The results presented here are derived using ETMOD version 3...
Working Paper
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– Insights from the Ethiopian and Somali civil wars
What distinguishes post-war governments that succeed in establishing a stable political order and prevent recurring conflict from those that do not? This comparative study considers the specific threats that typically lead to the collapse of the post-conflict political order to offer new hypotheses...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia
The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries has made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting household consumption data, which is rarely done by phone...
Report
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View the latest ETMOD country report here. This report documents ETMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ethiopia. Since 2020 the Ethiopian national team is based at the University of Insubria (Italy). It includes Adnan A. Shahir and Francesco Figari, responsible for the 2022 update of the model and...
Technical Note
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Agricultural subsidies may have significant productive and distributional consequences, and policy-makers need to be able to assess these impacts as a part of the overall tax and benefit policy. Microsimulation models offer a tool for such analysis also in developing countries, but their coverage...
Working Paper
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– A case study of the Eastern Industry Park
Despite the Ethiopian government’s commitment to attracting foreign direct investment to its emerging manufacturing sector and its shared interests with Chinese private businesses in building profitable investments, relations between Chinese private businesses and the Ethiopian government are not...
Working Paper
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– A gendered life-course perspective
We investigate the causes of the gender disparity in labour market participation in Ethiopia using iterative quantitative and qualitative longitudinal analysis through the whole childhood of the individual into early adulthood, from age 8 up to age 25. Multilevel survival analysis shows that girls...
Working Paper
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This paper analyses the impact of trade liberalization on local labour markets in Ethiopia, with a focus on the gender dimension of employment. By exploiting rich micro-level data on Ethiopian workers, we evaluate the effect of the Ethiopian trade reforms on the changes and composition of employment...
Working Paper
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Manufacturing industry expansion is a central part of Ethiopia’s growth and transformation agenda due to its potential for accelerated economic development and large-scale job creation, in particular for women. However, the industry is experiencing extremely high labour turnover rates, which is...
Working Paper
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We look at how improving roads can affect jobs and structural transformation. We use a novel geocoded dataset covering the universe of Ethiopian roads and match this information with individual data to identify the effects of improvements in road infrastructure on the creation, quality, and sectoral...
From the book:
Industries without Smokestacks
Working Paper
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– A micro perspective from Tigray, Ethiopia
While the volume of remittances to developing countries has been growing significantly over the years, the impact of remittances on food security has not received much attention. To bridge the gap this paper has examined the impact of remittances on farm household’s food security status, using a...
View the latest ETMOD country report here. This report documents ETMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ethiopia. This work was carried out by the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI) in collaboration with the University of Essex and the Department of Economics at KU Leuven, with support...
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.
– measuring and improving quality
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring quality of care
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.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring quality of care
Working Paper
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Methods: In 2010–2014, we used a situational analysis tool to collect data at district and regional hospitals in Bangladesh (n = 14), the Plurinational State of Bolivia (n = 18), Ethiopia (n = 19), Guatemala (n = 20), the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (n = 12), Liberia (n = 12) and Rwanda (n = 25...
Working Paper
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– Measuring and improving quality
Problem: Maternal and neonatal mortality remains high in low- and middle-income countries, with poor quality of intrapartum care as a barrier to further progress. Approach: We developed and tested a method of measuring the quality of maternal and neonatal care that could be embedded in a larger...
Working Paper
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– A tale of two periods
This paper provides an informative picture of the extent of regional inequality of economic outcomes and opportunities in the pre-and post-reform Ethiopia. We start by presenting evidence that regional inequality in educational attainment, formal employment, and access to safe water and sanitation...
Working Paper
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This paper investigates the impact of migration of male household heads on the autonomy of their spouses. Using panel household survey data from Ethiopia, the methodology mainly relies on an instrumental variables approach that addresses the endogeneity inherent in the relationship using past...
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.
– The case of Ethiopian manufacturing
Part of Journal Special Issue
Learning to Compete
Working Paper
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– Implications for Ethiopia’s industrialization
Although the manufacturing sector is known to have a unique role in structural transformation, the industries without smokestacks that include tradable services (e.g., IT, tourism, transport), horticulture, and agro-industry can provide new opportunities for export development in low-income...
Working Paper
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– The political drivers of Ethiopia’s PSNP
Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme is among the largest social protection programmes in Africa and has been promoted as a model for the continent. This paper analyses the political drivers of the programme, arguing that elite commitment can be understood in the context of shifts within...
Working Paper
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– Evidence on redistribution and poverty reduction in Ethiopia
The reduction of poverty, and more recently inequality, are pressing concerns in many low- and middle-income countries, not in the least as a result of the Sustainable Development Goals committing countries to significant improvements by 2030. Redistribution is important for reaching these goals...
Working Paper
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– Comparative evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam
We investigate whether there are racial and ethnic disparities in children’s education in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. We find that in all the four countries, and especially in Vietnam, children from small ethnic groups have lower education attainment and cognitive ability. The gap in...
Book Chapter
– Welfare Improvements in a Changing Economic Landscape
From the book:
Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Working Paper
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Prior to the introduction of mother tongue-based education in 1994, the language of instruction for most subjects in Ethiopia’s primary schools was the official language (Amharic)—the mother tongue of only one third of the population. This paper uses the variation in individual’s exposure to the...
Working Paper
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Ethiopia has experienced rapid economic growth since 2005. Real gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average rate of 10.5 per cent per annum for the period between 2004–05 and 2013–14. Public investment in key infrastructure and interventions in the agriculture sector have made important...
Working Paper
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We adapt the standardized Poverty Line Estimation Analytical Software (PLEASe) computer code stream based on Arndt and Simler’s (2010) utility-consistent approach to analyse poverty in Ethiopia in 2000, 2005, and 2011. Several data-related issues create challenges to estimating the spatial and...
Working Paper
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– Measuring real inequality using survey data from developing countries
This paper investigates how two effects drive wedges between nominal and real inequality estimates. The effects are caused by (i) differences in the composition of consumption over the income distribution coupled with differential inflation of consumption items; and (ii) quantity discounting effects...
Working Paper
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– A feasibility study
The purpose of this study is to assess the feasibility of building a microsimulation model of the Ethiopian tax and benefits system. We first provide a detailed description of the tax and benefits system of the country. This includes qualifying criteria, tax brackets, and exemptions. We then...
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.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Economics of climate change impacts on developing countries
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.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Economics of climate change impacts on developing countries
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.
– The self-limiting nature of technocratic aid
Part of Journal Special Issue
Aid to Support Fragile States
Blog
Why does a mother from a poor African village not send her daughter to school, but instead marries her off to an old man as a second or third wife? This way poverty is inherited from parent to child. Or why does a boy from a remote village in a developed country, such as a Finland, drop out from...
Working Paper
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We present a unified structural equation modelling framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with a simple ordinary least squares regression. The structural equation modelling framework forms the basis for a...
– Bad Luck or Bad Policy?
16 December 2014 John Page On 20 November 2014 the United Nations celebrated the 25th Africa Industrialization Day. But perhaps ‘celebrate’ is not exactly the right word. Africa’s experience with industrialization over the past quarter century has actually been disappointing. In 2010, sub-Saharan...
Working Paper
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– Floriculture and the Metal and Engineering Industries in Ethiopia
Ethiopia represents an excellent case study of recent industrial policy experimentation in Africa. The country is well known for its successful promotion of the cut-flower industry through business-government co-ordination. What is less known is that at nearly the same time it was also using co...
– 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...
Working Paper
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Land tenure arrangements in Africa are generally skewed in favour of males. Compared to males, female plot owners face complex sets of constraints and systemic high tenure insecurity which culminate in low yields. In order to obtain better returns, some females rent their plots to males, but risk...
Working Paper
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– Welfare Improvements in a Changing Economic Landscape
We use Arndt and Simler’s utility-consistent approach to calculating poverty lines to analyse poverty in Ethiopia in 2000, 2005, and 2011. Poverty reduction was steady but uneven, with gains greatest in urban areas in the first half of the decade, and in rural areas in the latter half. Other...
Working Paper
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– The Case of Ethiopian Manufacturing
In this study, we investigate the relationship between exporting and firm performance using a longer panel dataset of Ethiopian manufacturing firms for the period 1996−2009. We test two hypotheses regarding exporting: selection into exporting versus learning by exporting. According to the selection...
Blog
23 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 than most sub-Saharan African countries. Thanks to the right strategies for transformation, China achieved an average annual growth rate of 9.8 per...
Book Chapter
From the book:
Food Price Policy in an Era of Market Instability
Working Paper
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– A Study of Climate Variability and Household Adaptation Strategies in Southern Ethiopian Rangelands
This paper examines the determinants and implied economic impacts of climate change adaptation strategies in the context of traditional pastoralism. It is based on a household level survey in southern Ethiopian rangelands. Pastoralists’ perception of climate change in the region is found to be very...
Working Paper
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– Evolution and Present Experimentation
There has recently been a resurgence of interest in industrial policy. This paper examines the choices, implementation processes, and outcomes of the Ethiopian present industrial policy. The country represents an excellent case study of recent industrial policy experimentation in Africa as it is one...
Blog
24 September 2013 Tony Addison As Helsinki moves into a crisp sunny autumn, Angle brings you news of two big UNU-WIDER events. ‘Egalitarian Principles: The Foundation for Sustainable Peace’ was the topic of the 17th WIDER annual lecture, given by former President of Finland and Nobel Peace Prize...
Working Paper
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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...
Working Paper
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– a Comparative Analysis of Donor Practice
Forty billion dollars of official development assistance during 1991-2012 reduced Ethiopian absolute poverty while underwriting more efficient but exclusionary public institutions. This aid-institutions paradox reflects a strong interest-alignment between major donors pursuing geostrategic...
Working Paper
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– an Experimental Study from Ethiopia
An experimental design using treatments of a voluntary contribution mechanism is used to test household efficiency. Efficiency is decisively rejected in all treatments contrary to the assumption of most household models. Information on initial endowments of spouses improves efficiency only in some...
Working Paper
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– the Case of Ethiopia
Food prices increased significantly in 2007–08 in Ethiopia due to several supply- and demand-side factors. The Ethiopian government released emergency food grain reserves, imported and distributed wheat at subsidized price, banned the export of staple cereals, and removed value added and turnover...
Blog
Tony Addison This year has rushed by at speed. For UNU-WIDER it’s been a year of big successes. We will have published some 110 working papers by the end of December, up from 96 in 2011 (go here for the latest list). Recent working papers cover the topics of intergenerational mobility in India, food...
Working Paper
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Aid providers frequently link supporting small firms to job creation. Small firms create about half of new jobs in Africa, but they also have higher failure rates. Ignoring firm exit exaggerates net employment growth. Using panel data for Ethiopia, we find that small and large enterprises create...
Blog
Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September attracted over 150 researchers and policy makers from across the world. Videos of this can be found online, as well as the papers, at www.wider.unu.edu...
Working Paper
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– Firm-Level Evidence from Ethiopia
We use census panel data on Ethiopian manufacturing firms to analyze the connections between enterprise agglomeration, firm-level output prices and physical productivity. We find a negative and statistically significant relationship between the agglomeration of firms that produce a given product in...
Journal Article
Part of Journal Special Issue
Climate Change and Economic Development
Journal Article
– Meeting Ethiopia's Energy Needs Under a Changing Climate
Part of Journal Special Issue
Climate Change and Economic Development
The roots of development economics lie in the study of large-scale phenomena such as economic transformation. Climate change, as a global phenomenon, is drawing the attention of the profession back towards studies of transformational processes, including new considerations of adaptation and low...
Blog
Tony Addison With this issue, Angle returns refreshed from its Nordic summer break. The sun continues to shine on the Baltic, although it is getting noticeably chillier as we now head into the autumn. To keep our spirits up we have a very active programme of events for the rest of the year. This...
Working Paper
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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...
Book Chapter
– A General Equilibrium Analysis
Book chapter in: P. Dorosh and S. Rashid (eds) Food and Agriculture in Ethiopia: Progress and Policy Challenges.Ethiopia’s economy has experienced rapid growth in recent years. Although growth in agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) from 1998 to 2007 was less rapid than in other parts of the...
Blog
Tony Addison, Tseday Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott, Finn Tarp, Tuuli Ylinen To meet development objectives, aid recipients and their donor partners need to effectively manage the macroeconomic effects of aid. Aid can improve the economy's supply-side and raise growth. But if the macroeconomic...
Working Paper
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– Meeting Ethiopia’s Energy Needs Under a Changing Climate
Ethiopia is powering ahead with an ambitious energy development strategy, highly reliant on abundant hydropower potential. A changing climate, including uncertain water supply, however, may pose a salient challenge to meeting expected targets. Bridging the modeling gaps between climate, energy, and...
Working Paper
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This study links a multi-sectoral regionalized dynamic computable general equilibrium model of Ethiopia with a system of country-specific hydrology, crop, road and hydropower engineering models to simulate the economic impacts of climate change towards 2050. In the absence of externally funded...
Journal Article
– Evidence from Ethiopia
Much has been written on the determinants of technology adoption in agriculture, with issues such as input availability, knowledge and education, risk preferences, profitability, and credit constraints receiving much attention. This paper focuses on a factor that has been less well documented: the...
Working Paper
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Technological latecomer countries face a dilemma, they need to pursue pro-active industrial policies to compensate for manifold disadvantages vis-à-vis established competitors, but at the same time, due to neopatrimonial politics and capacity constraints, their institutions are rarely in a position...
Entrepreneurship and innovation are two of the most pervasive concepts of our times, yet there are still gaps in our understanding of the interactions between entrepreneurship and innovation, particularly in developing countries. This book is an attempt to fill this gap. It focuses on the...
Blog
Wim Naudé and Adam Szirmai Nobody can be left in any doubt as to the importance of innovation for prosperity on reading[i] that ‘People living in the first decade of the twentieth century did not know modern dental and medical equipment, penicillin, bypass operations, safe births, control of...
Blog
– Examples from Ethiopia and Chile
Mulu Gebreeyesus and Michiko Iizuka Industrial policy can be defined as the policies that stimulate specific economic activities and promote structural changes. It is not about industry per se but also includes non-traditional agriculture or service (Rodrik 2007). Pack and Saggi (2006) similarly...
Blog
Luc Christiaensen and Lionel Demery Escalating food prices in 2007-2008, climate change and land grabbing have woken the world up to the extraordinary challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050. Indeed, following several world summits, policymakers are now convinced of the need for a significant...
Book Chapter
– Poverty, Risk, and Vulnerability in Rural Ethiopia
Journal Article
Part of Journal Special Issue
Entrepreneurship, Developing Countries and Development Economics
Working Paper
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This paper addresses two prominent issues on the development of small enterprises in Africa. Which factors inhibit or foster innovation activities in small enterprises? Do innovators create more jobs? We use a large set of microenterprises survey data from Ethiopia that comprise 1000 observations...
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.
– Policy Lessons from Recent Experience
Part of Journal Special Issue
Development Aid
Blog
Wim Naudé and James C. MacGee Globally, wealth is very unequally distributed, both within countries and between countries. The UNU-WIDER project on Personal Assets from a Global Perspective has found for instance that the richest 10 percent of adults in the world own 85 percent of global household...
Working Paper
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This paper uses inequality decomposition techniques in order to analyse the consequences of entrepreneurial activities to household income inequality in southern Ethiopia. A uniform increase in entrepreneurial income reduces per capita household income inequality. This implies that encouraging rural...
Working Paper
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– Policy Lessons from Recent Experience
This paper investigates the macroeconomic challenges created by a surge in aid inflows. It develops an analytical framework for examining possible policy responses to increased aid, in terms of absorption and spending of aid—where the central bank controls absorption through monetary policy and the...
Book Chapter
– A Household Level Analysis
Book Chapter
– Evidence from Rural Ethiopia
From the book:
Personal Wealth from a Global Perspective
Working Paper
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– Poverty, Risk, and Vulnerability in Rural Ethiopia
Increased openness is seen by some as a panacea for development while for others it is a recipe for disaster for the poor. Using the example of Ethiopia, this paper discusses some of the key challenges faced by some of the poorest African countries in beneficially engaging in the world economy...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Rural Ethiopia
This paper considers asset holdings in rural Ethiopia. It shows that households own mostly non-financial assets and that the composition of asset portfolios varies significantly with the household’s overall wealth and its exposure to uncertainty. As regards the distribution of assets, inequality is...
Working Paper
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Since 1992 Ethiopia has been engaged in liberalizing its financial sector. The hallmark of the strategy is gradualism. The approach is not without problems especially from Bretton Woods Institutions that saw the reform as a sluggish process. This study examines this liberalization program by...
Working Paper
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– A Household Level Analysis
In this paper, using the rich household panel data of urban and rural Ethiopia that covers the period from 1994 to 2000, we attempted to establish the link between finance and poverty in Ethiopia. Our results show that access to finance is an important factor in consumption smoothing and hence...
Working Paper
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The ability of low-income countries to productively absorb large amounts of external assistance is a central issue for efforts to scale-up aid. This paper examines absorptive capacity in the context of MDG-based development programmes in low-income countries. It first defines absorptive capacity...
Book Chapter
From the book:
Understanding Human Well-being
Displaying 96 of 121 results