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From the Editor's Desk (March 2012)Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Danielle Resnick During the last month, three democracies in Africa witnessed incumbent presidents exit office in very different ways. The most...
To halt the deterioration of their national economy most African governments embarked on IMF and World Bank supported Structural Adjustment Programmes. These programmes have been criticised as neglecting social costs and promoting export-led growth...
The proposals in this paper derive from studies undertaken at WIDER on questions relating to sustainable development in developing countries. The paper attempts to quantify the resource transfer implications of supporting feasible environment...
The recent rise in inequality in the distribution of disposable income in many, although not all, countries has led to a search for explanations, particularly since for much of the postwar period falling inequality has been the norm. In OECD...
Part of Journal Special Issue Clientelist Politics and Development
Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics in delivery of programme benefits by local governments, or gram panchayats (GPs), and manipulation of GP programme budgets by legislators and elected officials at upper tiers in West...
At independence in 1975, the Frelimo government took over public administration from the colonial system and started to transform it. The public financial management (PFM) system was adapted to the central planning and management of the economy in...
Despite impressive economic growth rates over the last decade, foreign aid still plays a significant role in Africa's political economies.This book asks when, why, and how foreign aid has facilitated, or hindered, democratization in sub-Saharan...
Part of Book Democratic Trajectories in Africa
Budget reliability is the first pillar of Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA). In this study, we construct an expansion of the PEFA government response accuracy indicator and test its decomposition, with an application to the...
Are recent donor approaches compatible with a political understanding of policy processes in partner or recipient countries? This question is given increased urgency with the recent calls for and commitment to increasing financial flows, scaling-up...
The paper discusses implications for practice and theory of the recently completed Joint Evaluation of General Budget Support 2004-06 based on case studies in Burkina Faso, Malawi, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Uganda and Vietnam. The paper first...
This study examines the effect of the hardening of the budget constraint on the investment behaviour of Italian state owned enterprises (SOEs). It carries out a natural experiment that exploits the 1987 shift of budget regimes due to the pressure of...