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91% of sub-Saharan African workers don’t save for old age: Why that’s a problem and how to fix it
Less than 10% of the workers in sub-Saharan Africa save for old age, the lowest rate for any region in the world. That implies most of the...
Blog
Partnerships with Global South governments improve development policy and support achieving the Global Goals
In Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa, Uganda, and elsewhere, UNU-WIDER is on the ground to support national development plans, collect and create...
Working Paper
Affirmative action around the world: insights from a new datasetAffirmative action, or positive discrimination favouring the members of marginalized populations, is a key policy approach for addressing group-based inequalities along ethnic, religious, and racial lines (e.g. horizontal inequalities). It is adopted...
Blog
Working together on the puzzle of peace: The role of partnerships
When the theme for the first WIDER Development Conference of 2022—peace, security, and conflict—was chosen some years ago, no one could have predicted...
Blog
The Great Gatsby Curve and the Global South: Time for a more ambitious redistribution and reparations agendaThe famous 1920s book The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the classic analogy for the American dream of meritocracy —that any person can...
Journal Article
The gendered crisisTHIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This article studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. First, the study finds that men’s employment...
Blog
Partnering for development
At UNU-WIDER, all our work is implemented through partnerships, collaboration, and co-creation. Through those connections, we make a meaningful...
Blog
The richer your neighbours, the more you borrow – the case of South Africa
Research on how income inequality affects borrowing behaviour reignited after the 2008 global recession. One prevailing theory is that rising income...
Policy Brief
Climbing the job ladderMost workers in developing countries work in the informal labour market Lower-tier informal work leads to a dead end in the countries in this study, with little opportunity to move up the job ladder While those in upper-tier informal work are the...
Working Paper
Welfare losses, preferences for redistribution, and political participationThis paper studies the effect of austerity on forms of political participation—including voting, appealing for reform, and peaceful protesting—and the role of preferences for redistribution in shaping the relationship between individual exposure to...
Working Paper
Armed group opportunism in the face of recent crisesTerrorist and other types of armed groups often exploit natural and human-made disasters and emergencies to advance their causes. This paper studies how some armed groups have responded to two recent global emergencies—climate change and the COVID-19...
Blog
Four global problems that will be aggravated by the UK’s recent cuts to international aidUK economic forecasts have improved markedly since the September 2022 mini-budget. The economic recession may now be more shallow and public borrowing...
Blog
The developing world is facing a new debt crisis: What can we do about it?The recently concluded COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh had one important outcome for developing countries: the announcement of a loss and damage fund. This...
Working Paper
Sanction-busting through tax havensFinancial sanctions, which aim to economically hurt a target by restricting its access to financial assets and markets, require the ability to identify who owns an asset. Although experts have long claimed that offshore financial centres that offer...
Working Paper
Fiscal dependence on extractive revenuesThe aims of this paper are twofold. It firstly identifies and discusses the extent to which public revenues from natural resources are adequately captured in existing cross-country revenue databases, before exploring the extent to which such data can...
Journal Article
Educational expansion and shifting private returns to educationTHIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | We examine how returns to education have evolved in the context of post-conflict reconstruction and economic growth in Mozambique over the period 1996–2015. We show that private rates of return to education have...
Working Paper
The institutions and policies of aid-recipient countries and aid effectivenessThe aid effectiveness principles have limits if the recipient is fragile. The problem of relevance exists if the recipient has an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. In situations of weak statehood and fragility, a large portion of aid would likely...
Blog
Is there a silver lining to COVID-19? The effects of government responses on financial inclusion
The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic is still being assessed. Meanwhile, new variants continue to threaten as the reservoir of infected people remains...
Journal Article
Improving parenting practices for early child developmentTHIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study investigates the short- and medium-term impact of a randomized group-based early child development program targeting parents of children aged 6–24 months in a poor, rural district of Rwanda. This low...