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Publications (8871)
Book Chapter
– The Playing out of Aid Nurtured Ideals in Rwanda and Cambodia
Book Chapter
– Lessons from Afghanistan
Book Chapter
– Rethinking Country Ownership
Book Chapter
– Insights from the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy
Book Chapter
– Evidence from across the Globe
– The Global Agenda
ESTIMATED FOR ONLINE PUBLICATION ON 10 March 2025 | The reform of the international financial and tax systems has been at the center of global debates in recent years—in the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD and the G20. The fourth United Nations Conference on...
– Development Cooperation in Weak States and Conflict Contexts
ESTIMATED FOR OPEN ACCESS ONLINE PUBLICATION ON 3 APRIL 2025 | An important question for the future of aid concerns its role in weak states and conflict contexts. While considerable research points to a mixed record of effectiveness in these contexts, the imperative of external support for...
With just days to go before the rescheduled 2025 Budget Speech, South Africa faces a ZAR 60 billion revenue shortfall amid slowing economic growth and diminishing international aid. The initial proposal to increase VAT from 15% to 17% met sharp opposition, prompting an unprecedented postponement...
The 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action set ambitious goals for equality, development, and peace for women worldwide. Endorsed by 189 countries, it reaffirmed that women’s rights are human rights and called for their full recognition and protection at every stage of life. Nearly 30...
Working Paper
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– Mexico and United States compared
Building upon a multisectoral framework in light of the Kuznetsian paradigm, this paper analyses the relationship between structural transformation and income inequality. Empirical evidence is drawn using a large census dataset consisting of more than 22 million individuals from Mexico and the...
Working Paper
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– History, structure, and potential effectiveness
This study assesses the effectiveness of Mozambique's flagship social pension programme, the elderly component of the Programa de Subsídio Social Básico (PSSB). Focusing on three key criteria—programme targeting, reliability, and materiality—we combine administrative data on the universe of...
Working Paper
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– Experimental evidence on preferences for redistribution in Mozambique and Viet Nam
Knowledge of the factors driving people’s views on redistribution in the Global South remains limited. While these societies occupy top positions in inequality rankings, redistribution levels tend to be lower. We combine survey and experimental data from Mozambique and Viet Nam to test whether...
Working Paper
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The effects of minimum wages on workers and firms depend on enforcement and compliance. While most research examines local determinants, this paper explores whether international market enforcement influences minimum wage impacts. In South Africa farmers exporting to the EU must comply with private...
South Africa’s energy sector is undergoing a transformation. The suspension of load shedding—planned, rolling power outages to prevent grid collapse — for over 300 days signals progress in stabilizing electricity supply. However, rising electricity prices and deep-rooted structural issues overshadow...
Wage inequality in India has declined over the past two decades. This article examines the role of rising minimum wages in driving this trend. Exploiting state-level variations in legislative minimum wage changes, it finds that minimum wage increases account for 26% of the decline in wage inequality...
– O ‘elevador social’ está avariado?
Um estudo recente fornece novas perspectivas sobre a mobilidade social intergeracional em Moçambique, com foco na educação e ocupação, bem como no bem-estar multidimensional e subjectivo. Esta análise acrescenta uma perspectiva importante às avaliações nacionais existentes sobre pobreza e bem-estar...
– Is the social elevator broken?
A recent study provides new insights into intergenerational social mobility in Mozambique, focusing on education and occupation, as well as multidimensional and subjective well-being. This adds an important perspective to existing national poverty and well-being assessments. While progress is found...
– Tendências, Desafios e Oportunidades
Este relatório analisa as tendências, desafios e oportunidades no sector agrícola de Moçambique entre 2002 e 2020, com especial enfoque na agricultura familiar. Baseia-se num conjunto de dados inovador, produzido no âmbito do programa Crescimento Inclusivo em Moçambique (IGM), que compila 11...
– Trends, challenges, and opportunities
This report examines the trends, challenges, and opportunities in Mozambique’s agricultural sector from 2002 to 2020, with a particular emphasis on smallholder farming. It is based on a novel dataset produced under the Inclusive growth in Mozambique (IGM) programme compiling 11 agricultural surveys...
Agriculture has long been the backbone of Mozambique’s economy. Over 70% of the population relies on this sector for their livelihoods, contributing 23% to the nation's GDP. Despite its critical role, Mozambique faces significant challenges in boosting agricultural productivity to propel the economy...
– Informações do Inquérito sobre as Vidas Vulneráveis de 2024
Este relatório resulta de uma análise da mobilidade social intergeracional em Moçambique utilizando dados recolhidos em seis postos administrativos de quatro províncias (Maputo, Zambézia, Sofala e Nampula) no âmbito do Inquérito às Vidas Vulneráveis (VLS).Este inquérito foi realizado no âmbito do...
– Insights from the Vulnerable Lives Survey 2024
This report is the result of an analysis of intergenerational social mobility in Mozambique using data collected from six administrative posts across four provinces (Maputo, Zambézia, Sofala, and Nampula) under the Vulnerable Lives Survey (VLS).This survey was implemented within the Inclusive Growth...
In recent years, UNU-WIDER has partnered with sub-Saharan African governments to establish secure data labs that provide researchers with access to anonymized administrative tax data for economic research. Two notable examples are the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) research lab in Uganda and South...
Blog
Last week, we attended the 2025 UNDP Dialogue on Public Finance and SDGs, where we explored the most pressing topics regarding public financing for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Global South countries. The Zero Draft of the 4th Financing for Development Conference (FFD4)...
In 2025, UNU-WIDER completes four decades of work. Starting as a small think-tank in relatively remote Helsinki, it has grown into a global institute, with a network of scholars and practitioners that spans the globe. The original vision behind UNU-WIDER was to develop an institute with ‘a research...
Book Chapter
– A Global Look at the First Year of the Pandemic
From the book:
How States Respond to Crisis
Book Chapter
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
– Ghana's Struggle against Health System Constraints in the COVID-19 Response
From the book:
How States Respond to Crisis
– Pandemic Governance Across the Global South
SCHEDULED FOR PUBLICATION IN APRIL 2025 | We 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 diverse states in the...
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.
– Experimental evidence from Mozambique
This study examines the impact of digital labor-market platforms on jobs outcomes using a randomized encouragement design embedded in a longitudinal survey of Mozambican technical-vocational college graduates. We differentiate between platforms targeting formal jobs, where jobseekers direct their...
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.
– Evidence from the Sena Sugar Estates, 1920–74
Forced wage labour (FWL) in colonial-era Portuguese Africa came to encompass a majority of working age men and persisted until the early 1960s. On the basis of reconstructed financial records from the Sena Sugar Estates in today's Mozambique, we estimate the long-run profitability of the firm. With...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Ethiopia
This paper examines the role of social protection in mitigating the adverse effects of conflict on household welfare. We assess the impact of a graduation intervention linked to Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme, focusing on Amhara, a region severely affected by the Tigray conflict. Using...
Working Paper
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– Insights for financial stability and monetary transmission
Aggregate consumption typically exceeds 60 per cent of GDP and should be pivotal in central bank policy models. Most use semi-structural macro-models, yet consumption is usually inadequately specified. We use a systems approach to estimate new equations for South African consumption, house prices...
Working Paper
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Measurement errors in macroeconomic aggregates such as GDP have been widely lamented, particularly in low-income contexts. This study investigates the reliability of one component of national accounts, agricultural sector output. Focusing first on the case of Mozambique, we use a series of 12...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from post-war Zimbabwe
Literature on rebel governance has examined various ways in which rebels engage with civilians, build informal governing institutions, and exert social control during civil war. When rebels win, how does rebel governance affect post-war politics? This paper explores how varieties of insecurity that...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from macro and microdata, 1950–present
Since 1950, agricultural productivity has been increasing even as labourers leave agriculture. However, while average productivity of the sector has been converging, within-sector inequality has been increasing. Agricultural income inequality is still less than overall income inequality, but it...
Working Paper
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This working paper examines Tanzania’s social protection system amidst growing humanitarian crises driven by climate change, health epidemics, and regional conflicts. It explores the social protection needs experienced in humanitarian settings, the challenges in implementation and expansion of...
Working Paper
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– Distributional impacts of climatic shocks on household consumption in Mozambique
Mozambique is highly vulnerable to climate change. It faces frequent cyclones, floods, and droughts while having limited revenue collection capacity and social protection programmes. This paper assesses the distributional effects of climate shocks on household consumption and explores adaptation...
Working Paper
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– The political economy of the Kuznets curse in Brazil
This paper proposes a novel assessment of the Kuznets curve for an underdeveloped country engaging in rapid late development. We mobilize new long-run data for Brazil, combining surveys, administrative records, and national accounts statistics, to compute macro-consistent income shares and other...
Working Paper
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This paper examines the state and evolution of the rule of law in Mozambique, focusing on key dimensions such as voice and political participation, judicial independence and accessibility, corruption, access to basic services, personal security, and property rights. Drawing on Afrobarometer surveys...
After a temporary increase in 2020 due to COVID-19, global extreme income poverty is reportedly falling again, according to World Bank estimates. However, undernourishment is rising, and the number of people in need of humanitarian aid has nearly quadrupled since 2015. How is this seemingly...
Blog
As the development community rethinks how to improve the lives of people in low- and middle-income countries, so too must researchers and research funders. Unequal academic partnerships and weak data protection are undermining the quality of research and harming the welfare of communities and...
Displaying 48 of 8871 results