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Book Chapter
– A global look at the first year of the pandemic
From the book:
How States Respond to Crisis
Book Chapter
– The undermining role of vertical health policies in health systems
From the book:
How States Respond to Crisis
Book Chapter
– The undermining role of vertical health policies in health systems
From the book:
How States Respond to Crisis
Book Chapter
From the book:
How States Respond to Crisis
– Pandemic Governance Across the Global South
BOOK IN PRODUCTION | SCHEDULED FOR PUBLICATION FEBRUARY 2025We expect the state to matter in times of crisis to better provide for and protect their populations. But how is it, precisely, that the quality of the state matters? This book speaks to this question through comparative study of how...
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.
This paper uses survey and tax administrative data to analyse the effects of a sizeable employer-borne payroll tax credit for young, low-wage workers in South Africa. We find fairly limited impacts of the wage subsidy on the employment of young, low-wage workers relative to two comparison groups...
Journal Article
The collection of value added tax (VAT) is essential for achieving domestic revenue objectives, yet VAT gap estimation is rarely performed in developing countries. This study utilizes innovative tax declaration and audit data to estimate VAT misreporting in Tanzania, applying a machine learning...
Inequality in Mozambique increased substantially between 1996 and 2023, with a large and rapid increase between 2010–2020 of nearly 10 points on the Gini Index. A change of even 2 or 3 Gini points often represents major distributional changes in outcomes across the ranked groups of a population. A...
An increasing number of Global South countries are now diverting growth and development spending to pay off insurmountable levels of external debts that ballooned as a result of a ‘polycrisis’ of external shocks from COVID-19, climate change, wars, and interest rate hikes. Upwards of USD 3 trillion...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Resources Matter
Blog
The 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Seville, Spain, will convene in 2025, providing a global stage for countries to assess and strengthen strategies for financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As part of the preparatory efforts, the co-facilitators of...
Blog
At the last meeting of the Community of Practice on Gender and Tax (CoPGT), held on 10th September 2024, the conversation focused on microsimulation models and their role in helping us understand the gendered effects of tax policies in the context of the wider fiscal system. As a community, we’re...
– What is on the agenda in 2025?
The forthcoming UN Conference on Financing for Development, set for mid-2025, continues a great sequence started in Monterrey in 2002, followed up in Doha in 2008 and in Addis Ababa in 2015. The preparatory process is in full swing, with a broad agenda captured by the conference’s Elements Paper...
COP29, which just concluded, gathered country delegations, observers, businesses, and NGOs for several rounds of heated negotiations and discussions. Since the groundbreaking adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, COPs have largely revolved around painstaking efforts to implement its articles...
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.
Microsimulation approaches to studying shocks and social protection in selected developing economies
In this paper, I calculate automatic stabilization in Ghana, South Africa, and Ecuador to explain how they cushion income amid income and demand shocks. Additionally, I stress-test fiscal policies within these countries to gauge welfare alternatives and insurance. Adopting a discretionary action...
Book Chapter
From the book:
How States Respond to Crisis
Book Chapter
From the book:
How States Respond to Crisis
– Ending Poverty while Protecting Nature
Almost everything that is essential to modern society—transport and power systems, buildings, machinery, and medical devices—depends upon metals, minerals, and stone as well as oil and natural gas which provide the energy for households and businesses and transport as well as widely-used materials...
Working Paper
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– A review of approaches and development implications
Nowadays, all policy makers must engage with direct and indirect carbon pricing issues. However, the implications of different types of tools and methods to price carbon and support decarbonization deserve further attention in view of their development implications. Two aspects—revenue recycling and...
Working Paper
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Using panels of labour force surveys from Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and India and a recent work status classification, we provide an in-depth analysis of labour mobility up or down the job ladder. This classification allows us to observe job transition possibilities across six work...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from refugees in Jordan during the COVID-19 pandemic
This paper studies the social protection of refugees during a pandemic. A pandemic adds to the many existing challenges refugees face, creating a dangerous polycrisis. Drawing on detailed household-level data collected by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees just before and during the...
Working Paper
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This study examines the sectoral impacts of electricity supply shortages in South Africa, using the cost share information available from the 2015 social accounting matrix. A simulation conducted under each of two technological assumptions, Cobb-Douglas and Leontief, reveals that a productivity...
Working Paper
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– Case of Russian–Ukraine conflict
The world has faced an increasing number of global shocks that have resulted in large and unpredictable changes in global prices, particularly of food. These increases, coupled with the negative impacts of shocks to economic growth, have had damaging effects on welfare, hunger, and diets. Future...
Working Paper
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We find that women sorting into lower wage firms explains nearly half of the gender wage gap in South Africa, using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal sector workers. Sorting varies considerably over the life cycle: the firm-wage gender gap is negligible for the...
Working Paper
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This systematic review examines the effectiveness of social assistance programmes in protecting households in Africa—a region highly vulnerable to climate change, conflict, and other shocks—during periods of crisis. Despite the significant increase in the number of these programmes over the past two...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a large-scale public works programme in Ethiopia
We assess how one of the largest public works programmes in the world—Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP)—affected violent conflict and civil unrest. Using difference-in-differences methods and linking administrative and geocoded conflict event data, we find that the PSNP did not...
Working Paper
pdf
– Sharing prosperity globally and domestically
A major of focus of global development policy is the aim to achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40% (B40) of the population at a rate higher than the national average. We propose an alternative approach to assessing shared prosperity using ‘inequality lines’. Analogous to poverty lines...
Working Paper
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– A 15-year appraisal of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme
We assess the impact of a large-scale social protection intervention, Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), over a 15-year period. We find that the PSNP had a positive impact on food security but inconsistent impacts on assets. There were positive impacts on fertilizer use, investments...
Working Paper
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Climate change and violent conflict are defining challenges of our time. However, it is not yet understood how they interact in shaping human welfare and food security, how their interaction shapes gendered outcomes, or how social protection systems can mitigate their impact. To address these...
Working Paper
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This paper draws on quantitative and qualitative analyses to examine the patterns of structural transformation, the drivers and constraints of structural transformation, and how the configuration of power within the city and its interactions with national and city political settlements affects...
Working Paper
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The economic literature has shown that exogenous transitory shocks affect education by changing the opportunity cost of children. We argue that this is only part of the explanation. When permanent, shocks may change contracts and the organization of labour by eroding the productive structure and...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from South Africa
This study examines the impact of tax incentives on charitable donations within South Africa, with a focus on donations declared on individuals’ tax returns. Leveraging the universe of South African tax administrative data spanning over a decade (2011–21), we apply the bunching approach to assess...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Zambia's formal sector
Low-income countries face the combined challenges of climate shocks and limited domestic revenue mobilization, yet these issues are rarely studied together. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of climate shocks on firm performance and tax revenue in a low-income country context, using...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Uganda
Aggressive profit shifting by multinational enterprises (MNEs) is a growing concern for domestic resource mobilization in developing economies. This paper evaluates the revenue and welfare consequences of a flagship tax avoidance rule that has been implemented in more than 45 countries to prevent...
Technical Note
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Esta nota técnica diz respeito ao conjunto de ferramentas sobre as disparidades fiscais, que inclui código (o do-file do Stata) e um arquivo README (como executar o código). A nota técnica descreve a literatura e a metodologia subjacentes ao desenvolvimento do conjunto de ferramentas. O conjunto de...
Technical Note
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La presente nota se refiere al toolkit para la estimación de brechas tributarias, que incluye el código (archivos DO de Stata) y el archivo README (instrucciones para ejecutar el código). Esta nota describe la bibliografía y la metodología que fundamentaron el desarrollo del toolkit. El toolkit se...
Technical Note
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Cette note technique concerne le guide pratique sur les écarts fiscaux, qui comprend un code (fichier Stata) et un fichier README (comment exécuter le code). La note décrit la littérature et la méthodologie derrière le développement du guide. Ce guide pratique des écarts fiscaux est lié à l...
Technical Note
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This technical note relates to the tax gap toolkit, which includes code (Stata do files) and a README file (how to run the code). The note describes the literature and methodology behind the development of the toolkit. The tax gap toolkit is related to the estimation of value-added tax (VAT)...
Journal Article
In this article, we reassess the relationship between inequality and human development, focusing on the differential role of concentration of income at different parts of the distribution. To do so, we rely on a large global panel of countries over the last decades including information on economic...
Launched on 1 September 2024, South Africa's two-pot retirement system is designed to offer greater flexibility in managing retirement savings. This system allows individuals to access a portion of their retirement funds before retirement through a ‘savings pot’, while a ‘retirement pot’ remains...
– Five consequences of overlooking other conflicts
The years since 2020 have been one of the most violent periods since the end of the second world war. The war in Ukraine and the escalating violence in the Middle East have dominated global headlines and captured the attention of policymakers and donors. But while the humanitarian toll in both...
– Economic policies that could make a difference
Turmoil following presidential and parliamentary elections in Mozambique has been severe. Preliminary official results from the 2024 elections indicated a landslide win by the ruling party, Frelimo. These results are widely contested, with various reports of irregularities.Post-election squabbles...
In post-conflict settings, the ability to collect taxes is essential for building a strong government and supporting long-term development. In Colombia, a country shaped by decades of internal conflict, several factors—such as historic land disputes, political violence, and the presence of illicit...
Apesar dos esforços desenvolvidos a nível mundial para formalizar as empresas, a maioria continua a operar informalmente. Dados recentes de 2022 indicam que 8 em cada 10 empresas a nível mundial continuam a ser informais. Os defensores das políticas de formalização na Organização Internacional do...
Despite global efforts to formalize enterprises, the majority still operate informally. Recent data from 2022 indicates that 8 out of 10 enterprises globally remain informal. Advocates for formalization policies at the ILO and OECD argue that it benefits firms, workers, and governments.In Mozambique...
Growing income inequality poses a major global challenge, even as the inequality between countries has shrunk due to rapid economic growth in nations like China and India. Both Indonesia and India experienced decades of gradually increasing national income inequality, beginning in the 1980s. The...
– Report from the 2024 Jobs and Development Conference
With over 1.2 billion people expected to reach working age in the next decade, there is a dire need for the economy to support global employment growth. From 8–9 October in Cairo, Egypt, the 2024 Jobs and Development Conference brought together global experts to tackle one of the most pressing...
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 extent of redistribution in low-income developing countries, including in Africa, is very limited, which raises the question whether the tax rates of high-income individuals should be raised. A crucial parameter when considering a potential increase in progressivity is the response of taxable...
Working Paper
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This study examines the relationship between urbanization and structural transformation in Lagos. Specifically, the study focuses on spatial distribution of economic activities, and the patterns and drivers of, as well as constraints to, structural transformation in the city of Lagos from a...
Working Paper
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– The role of monetary and fiscal policy coordination
This study examines how different policy mix regimes affect the impact of recent US contractionary monetary policy on South Africa’s inflation and business cycles. The study uses a small open economy New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model with an integrated fiscal block to...
Working Paper
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This paper analyses the impact of armed groups and their taxation practices on the municipal fishing sector of the Zamboanga Peninsula in Mindanao, Philippines. Leveraging novel qualitative and quantitative data, we find clear evidence of armed group presence, social implantation, and taxation in...
Working Paper
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– A study of small, medium, and micro enterprises
This study measures the VAT compliance gap for small and medium-sized entities in Tanzania. Specifically, the study measures the under-reporting component of the VAT compliance gap. This study uses VAT declaration and audit data to conduct a bottom-up estimation to measure the extent of VAT...
Working Paper
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– The Progressive Vertical Index
Recent evidence from developing countries shows that the bottom of the income distribution pays more taxes relative to their income than the top 1%, highlighting a lack of tax progressivity in these societies. Current measures of tax progressivity fail to indicate which part of the income...
Working Paper
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Drawing from two labour market experiments in rural India, we offer insights on the influence of survey design on the measurement of employment. The first experiment contrasts self-reported estimates of employment with proxy-reported estimates from spouses. We find that employment estimates based on...
Technical Note
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This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) presumptive tax returns data covering financial years from 2015/16 to 2022/23. The data contains 21 variables, including information on taxpayers’ characteristics, turnover, and payable taxes. It covers the population of small...
Seventy years ago, Simon Kuznets was immortalised by his finding that inequality rises first and then falls later—the hypothesis widely known as the Kuznets Curve. In a new UNU-WIDER project, we look at what one of the most influential papers in the field means for inequality and development today...
‘The Number of Countries with High Inequality’ is the World Bank’s newest inequality indicator, one which it says will guide work on its agenda to ‘end poverty on a livable planet’. The indicator uses a country’s most recent Gini score, classifying it as a high inequality country if Gini is 40 or...
Drought is a leading cause of persistent poverty and humanitarian crises among pastoralists in East Africa. In a new book in the UNU-WIDER and Cambridge University Press Elements in Development Economics series, we examine the evolution, evaluations, and growth of the Index Based Livestock Insurance...
Rising public debt in Africa, exacerbated by multiple shocks and limited fiscal space, poses a significant challenge to the region’s development. Half of the low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are in debt distress or at high risk of it, as calls for international action, such as...
Effective social protection programmes that meet local needs can significantly enhance wellbeing and break the cycle of structural poverty among the poor and vulnerable. Measuring their effectiveness and understanding their impact is crucial for policymakers involved in their design. The Vulnerable...
South Africa's unemployment rate stands at a staggering 32.1%—one of the highest in the world. Coupled with an alarming poverty rate, where nearly half of the population lives below the poverty line, the socioeconomic landscape is dire. Amidst these challenges, the special COVID-19 Social Relief of...
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.
– Micro evidence from Colombia
A growing literature has documented widespread variation in the extent to which insurgents provide public goods, collect taxes, and regulate civilian conduct. This paper offers what is, to our knowledge, the first study of the long-term economic legacies of rebel governance. This effect is...
Working Paper
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In this paper, I show that the trend in spatial inequality in Mozambique almost entirely explains the outstanding surge in inequality in the country over the past decade, as well as its decline immediately after the pandemic, in contrast to its secondary role in the earliest years. For this analysis...
Working Paper
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Tax revenues are fundamental to state-building and development, particularly in the aftermath of conflict. Through the lens of the recent post-conflict experience of Colombia, this paper explores the challenges of increasing tax revenues amid violence and illicit economic activities. We study four...
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.
COVID-19 pandemic, household welfare and diversification strategies of smallholder farmers in Uganda
Agricultural activities in many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are subject to various risk factors that the COVID-19 compounds. Earlier studies on the effect of COVID-19 on smallholders neglect the issue of comparison with non-farm households. The study uses micro-level household datasets to...
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.
After decades of war, Mozambique experienced sustained economic growth and poverty reduction from the mid-1990s. However, these positive dynamics started to revert from 2015. Meanwhile, inequality stagnated in the period 1996/97–2008/09, before markedly increasing afterwards. In this study, we...
On 25 May 2023, three-year-old Neyamiah James died after extended electricity outages in Johannesburg caused her home oxygen machine to run out of backup power. On 4 March 2023, Yengiwe Mthimunye died after being turned away from Waterval Clinic in Mpumalanga because of a power outage. Bhekisisa...
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.
We investigate the behavioural responses of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates applying empirical bunching methodology to tax administrative data from Zambia over the period from 2014 to 2021. We find evidence for excess bunching at the first kink in the tax...
Mozambique ranks in the bottom 20 of the human development index, with nearly two-thirds of its population (18.9 million people) living below the USD 0.70-a-day national poverty line. Simultaneously, the country struggles to finance public spending and consistently runs state budget deficits...
Yemi Kale is the Group Chief Economist of the African Export-Import Bank. In this editorial, he reflects on the prospects for Africa’s future following the Afreximbank 2024 Annual Meetings, held in Nassau, Bahamas, on the theme of ‘Owning our Destiny: Economic Prosperity on a Platform of Global...
Blog
Critically examining the Global South’s proposals for international financial architecture reformsThis report offers a critical examination of the Global South’s proposals for international financial architecture (IFA) reform through a systematic survey and analysis of official statements delivered...
Blog
In recent years, governments worldwide witnessed a surge in debt levels. According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt reached a staggering USD 315 trillion in early 2024, with sizable increases in emerging market countries. This increase in borrowing, at least by governments, was...
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.
Technical assistance and increased use of ICT in tax administrations hold promise for greater revenue collection. Yet, the evidence on how these activities work in the real-world circumstances of developing countries is scant. The paper attempts to fill this gap by evaluating an intervention...
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.
This study presents an empirical framework that explores the relationship between poverty reduction and changes in the production structure of developing countries. We use the new GGDC-UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database to measure productivity growth within sectors and structural change –...
Journal Article
The shale gas revolution in the United States induced an unprecedented commodity boom across northwestern India. Leveraging population-based discontinuities in the contemporaneous roll-out of India’s national rural electrification scheme, we show that access to electricity increased total employment...
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.
This study examines the trajectory of global income inequality since 1981. Commonly used (relative) definitions indicate a decline in global inequality since the late 1980s. Looking ahead, it has been intuited that the influence of China's economic development — and that of other rapidly growing...
Working Paper
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This study provides an introduction to major discussions and core findings on inequalities in Viet Nam, drawing on a review of recent research, consideration of how inequality is discussed in legal documents, and an analysis of inequality using household survey data from Viet Nam. Inequality is...
Working Paper
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The impact of conflict on taxation and development has long been debated. Most studies suggest that conflict will have a depressive effect on state tax collection, negatively impacting economic growth and development. After reviewing the existing literature, we argue for an approach that recognizes...
Working Paper
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The public-debt-to-GDP ratio in South Africa increased from 26 per cent in the 2008/09 fiscal year to 73.9 per cent in 2023/24, raising fears that fiscal policy is not sustainable. This raises the question: did the government take steps to arrest the increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio and regain...
Working Paper
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Refunds are an essential feature of well-functioning VAT systems and take up a sizeable portion of government spending. In South Africa, refunds amount to 50 percent of gross VAT collection, representing a substantial transfer from the government to taxpayers that has to occur at relatively high...
Working Paper
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Violent conflicts act as disincentives for sustainable socioeconomic development in conflict-prone societies, especially in the Global South. Existing studies focus largely on economic, political, and social triggers of violent conflicts; cultural factors, while important, are often not considered...
Working Paper
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– The equity implications of taxing more to expand the South African social security system
In this paper, we use a static fiscal incidence analysis model to evaluate the poverty and inequality impacts of using fiscal policy to finance expanded social spending in South Africa. We assess three methods to enhance the social protection system’s equity objectives: increasing the size and/or...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from individual-level administrative tax data
We use individual-level tax administrative data to estimate personal income inequality among the tax-compliant population in South Africa over the period 2011–21. Our results indicate that inequality of this population rose slightly over the period, with the Gini coefficient increasing from 0.64 to...
Working Paper
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Legal identity is an important aspect of securing access to public services, such as education, healthcare, and social protection services, including child support grants. In the South African context, in the post-apartheid period, many poor South Africans benefited from well-organized civil...
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.
This paper examines how economic sanctions affect the allocation of workers across formal and informal employment. We analyse the case of the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Iran in 2012 and focus on the manufacturing sector. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, we compare the...
– Confronting a new economic reality
The 2023 Annual Lecture was delivered by Pinelopi (Penny) Goldberg. She spoke about her research on the topic of globalization.As the title of the lecture implies, this study is about globalization in crisis. Readers are no doubt aware that recent years have seen significant shifts in global...
Displaying 96 of 8819 results