Blog
UNU-WIDER’s new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) advances progress on SDG 8: Decent WorkUNU-WIDER’s 6-week online course on delivering Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8) brings together recent research on the linkages between economic...
Journal Article
Acting like a stateThis article examines the complex local dynamics of armed violence in post-war Abkhazia. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the Abkhaz participants and non-participants in this violence and a range of secondary materials, it adapts the conceptual...
Blog
Stuck at the bottom of the job ladder in Africa: The stumbling block to resilient growth and prosperity
When the question of creating good jobs and decent work in Africa arises, policymakers and development partners often focus on formalization. For...
Policy Brief
How to support the emergence of effective tax systemsCross-national or longitudinal evidence on which factors contribute to the development of effective tax systems in the Global South is lacking Global South countries still collect less than half the tax revenue of higher-income countries, when...
Working Paper
Youth, violence, and sustaining peaceViolent conflicts affect the lives and livelihoods of almost one quarter of the world’s population. But the effects of violent conflict are not uniform. This study assesses the differential effects of violent conflict on young people’s education, job...
Working Paper
The legacy of Mexico’s Drug War on youth political attitudesWe investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country’s most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an...
Blog
Why the Aid Effectiveness Principles are important for developmentDemonstrating empirically the Aid Effectiveness Principles' global impact on development is a challenge. But according to Rachel M. Gisselquist...
Blog
Will a revenue boom support development in resource-rich economies?The post-COVID-19 economic recovery and Russia’s war with Ukraine have caused some natural resource prices to reach new highs. Although forecasting...
Blog
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...
Working Paper
Social protection, the COVID-19 crisis, and the informal economyThis paper considers the implications of COVID-19 relief measures for the building and extension of comprehensive and universal social protection systems. It highlights three key areas emerging from the crisis, which are likely to affect the shape of...
Working Paper
What drives parental investments in early childhood?This paper investigates the causal impact of a randomized video intervention designed to study the determinants of parental time investments in early childhood among low-income parents. We designed and screened a video that provided information and...
Working Paper
Transforming rural economies through tertiary educationThis paper analyses the role of tertiary education on rural development. Using census data on villages in India for 2011, we find that skilled workers have had an important impact on rural prosperity. A 1 percentage point rise in the share of the...
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...
Working Paper
Temperature, climate change, and household financial behaviourWe examine the impact of temperature shocks and climate change on household financial behaviour in Viet Nam. To do so, we first estimate the effect of temperature on household borrowing and savings using Vietnamese longitudinal data that matches...
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...
Research Brief
Perceptions of inequality among young adults in MozambiqueJournal 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...