Working Paper
Innovation activity in South Africa
Improvements in productivity are necessary to effectively increase economic growth in the long term. The literature emphasizes a positive correlation between firm-level innovation and productivity gains. It is unsurprising, then, that policy makers...
Working Paper
The Road to the Market in North Korea
North Korea's economic reform began in the mid-1980s. It was motivated by the increasing seriousness of the problems typical of centrally planned socialist economies.In general, the country's reforms have so far been limited both in scope and depth...
Journal Article
Financial Liberalization and Banking Sector Efficiency in India
The Indian financial sector has undergone a significant structural transformation since the initiation of financial liberalization during 1990’s. It brought significant changes in the financial sector in general and banking in particular. While there...
Working Paper
Income Distribution during the Transition in China
This paper's goal is to increase the understanding of the inequality trends during the transitional period in China. From 1978 to 1995, China has been undergoing 18 years far-reaching economic system reform and opening to the outside world nationwide...
Journal Article
Consumption risk, technology adoption and poverty traps
Much has been written on the determinants of technology adoption in agriculture, with issues such as input availability, knowledge and education, risk preferences, profitability, and credit constraints receiving much attention. This paper focuses on...
Journal Article
Gender Bias and the Intrahousehold Distribution of Resources: Evidence from African Nuclear Households in South Africa
This paper applies recent developments in collective model estimation to elicit the allocation of resources in African families in South Africa. We use the 2010/11 South African Income and Expenditure Survey as it contains exclusive goods, i.e...
Journal Article
Backseat Drivers
A book review Book review on 'Protection for exporters: power and discrimination in transatlantic trade relations, 1930-2010' by Andreas Duer Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Journal Article
Agglomeration, Growth and Regional Equity
Traditional development models focus on the sector rather than location of growth. Advocates of agriculture-led strategies emphasise agriculture's strong growth linkages and potential to raise rural incomes. The new economic geography literature...
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship and human development
We provide a formal model of entrepreneurship in human development. The framework is provided by the capabilities approach (CA). Hence we extend not only the conceptualisation of entrepreneurship in development, but the reach of the CA into...
Journal Article
Macro–micro feedback links of water management in South Africa
The pressure on an already stressed water situation in South Africa is predicted to increase significantly under climate change, plans for large industrial expansion, ongoing rapid urbanization, and government programs to provide access to water to...
Journal Article
The Forgotten Property Rights
Studies of land property rights usually focus on tenure security and transfer rights. Rights to determine how to use the land are regularly ignored. However, user rights are often limited. Relying on a unique Vietnamese panel data set at both...
Working Paper
Gender Aspects of Urban Economic Growth and Development
The urbanization process is frequently shaped by prevailing constructions of gender. The recognition of this phenomenon is vital both in diagnosis and policy terms. This paper aims at illustrating the importance of gender in three major related...
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship is Not a Binding Constraint on Growth and Development in the Poorest Countries
Many economists claim that entrepreneurship is an important determinant of economic growth and development. In the sub-discipline of development economics however, entrepreneurship is largely absent from explanations of growth and development. This...
Journal Article
The economic costs of extreme weather events
Extreme weather events such as droughts and floods have potentially damaging implications for developing countries. Previous studies have estimated economic losses during hypothetical or single historical events, and have relied on historical...
Working Paper
Viet Nam
In analyzing Viet Nam's recent economic adjustments, this paper attempts to distinguish events and policies that are properly assigned to the transition effort (defined as the process of increasing the market determination of economic outcomes) and...
Journal Article
A note on modelling economic growth determinants in the Dominican Republic
The article models economic growth determinants in the Dominican Republic. The exercise considers a panel of 25 candidate explanatory variables observed during the last three decades of the twentieth century. The time series are selected on the basis...
Journal Article
Does Gender Influence the Provision of Fringe Benefits? Evidence From Vietnamese SMEs
This contribution studies the provision of fringe benefits using a unique survey of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. Analysis of the survey reveals that women who own SMEs are more likely than men who own similar firms to provide...
Journal Article
Latin American Urban Development into the Twenty-first Century
This article argues for a more systemic engagement with Latin American cities, contending that it is necessary to reconsider their unity in order to nuance the ‘fractured cities’ perspective that has widely come to epitomize the contemporary urban...
Book Chapter
Multidimensional nutritional welfare of children in Southern Africa
This chapter is part of a book titled Hidden Hunger: Strategies to Improve Nutrition Quality Hidden hunger has long been an overlooked problem. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies have to be remedied and the availability of calories needs to be...
Journal Article
In the shadow of the city
Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest urbanising region of the world. This demographic transformation has occurred in concert with two other trends in the region, nascent democratisation and stalled decentralisation. Using the case of Lusaka, Zambia...
Working Paper
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan is typically seen as one of the slowest reformers among the countries in transition from central planning to a market-oriented economy. This paper evaluates the welfare impact of gradual transition in Uzbekistan, asking whether it has...
Book
Beating the Odds
How poor countries can ignite economic growth without waiting for global action or the creation of ideal local conditions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, countries that ignite a process of rapid economic growth almost always do so while lacking...
Book Chapter
Conclusion
Part of Book
Beating the Odds
Working Paper
User Fees, Expenditure Restructuring and Voucher Systems in Education
The analysis of the optimal funding of education is complicated by the numerous and serious market failures which are likely to characterize a free market for education. Prominent amongst these are the likely external benefits of education, stressed...
Working Paper
Sustainable and Excessive Current Account Deficits
The abundance of private capital flows confronts many emerging-market authorities with a transfer problem. They must decide whether to accept or resist the net capital inflow, or how much to accept and how much to resist. This paper aims at assisting...
Working Paper
Causes and Lessons of the Mexican Peso Crisis
This paper analyses in depth the causes of the Mexican peso crisis, so as to learn relevant lessons for similar crisis occurring in other developing or transitional economies. The study follows a relatively chronological order, examining first the...
Journal Article
From Bilateral Trade to Multilateral Pressure
This paper investigates the economic consequences of a scenario in which the European Union (EU) imposes economic sanctions on Sudan. The idea of the paper is motivated by the deteriorating relations between Sudan and the EU arising from the...
Journal Article
Consequences of Avian Flu for Growth and Poverty
Like many African countries, Kenya is vulnerable to avian flu given its position along migratory bird routes and proximity to other high risk countries. This raises concern about the effect of an outbreak on rural livelihoods. We use a dynamic...
Working Paper
The Political Economy of Complex Humanitarian Emergencies
This paper develops and tests five hypotheses regarding the economic causes of complex humanitarian emergencies (CHEs). We argue that: (1) such emergencies, involving large-scale deaths and population displacements, are most likely to occur when...
Journal Article
Agricultural growth, poverty, and nutrition in Tanzania
Rapid economic growth does not appear to have significantly improved poverty and nutrition outcomes in Tanzania. We link recent production trends to household incomes using a regionalized, recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium and...
Working Paper
Identifying monetary policy rules in South Africa with inflation expectations and unemployment
This paper investigates whether a Taylor rule accurately describes the South African Reserve Bank’s reaction function in setting interest rates using quarterly data, covering the period since inflation targeting was formally adopted in 2000. The...
Working Paper
A meta-analysis of aid effectiveness
As research on the empirical link between aid and growth continues to grow, it is time to revisit the accumulated evidence on aid effectiveness. This paper does this by building on the meta-analysis in our previous work. The availability of more data...
Working Paper
Economic and non-economic returns to Communist Party membership in Vietnam
Single-party political systems exist in a number of countries, such as China and Vietnam. In these countries, party membership is potentially an important source of economic and social status. This paper investigates these effects and the mechanisms...
Working Paper
Incentives to labour migration and agricultural productivity
Understanding how internal labour migration affects the agricultural sector is important for all developing countries whose markets do not work well or are non-existent. In fact, even if the movement out of the agricultural sector can be viewed as a...
Journal Article
The impact of transport costs on new venture internationalisation
This paper investigates the importance of transport costs in new venture internationalisation, i.e. of firms that start exporting before they are 3 years of age. It does so by merging two large international datasets, on the firm level (covering 49...
Working Paper
Decentralization and the Provision and Financing of Social Services
This paper is the fruit of an attempt to distinguish the elements, present in a fiscal decentralization process, that are likely to contribute to efficiency enhancement in the provision of social services in developing countries. From the...
Journal Article
Cognitive ability and games of school choice
We take school admission mechanisms to the lab to test whether the widely-used manipulable Immediate Acceptance mechanism disadvantages students of lower cognitive ability and whether this leads to ability segregation across schools. Results show...
Working Paper
The Investment Decline in Transition Economies
All centrally planned economies suffered from over-investment. Due to low capital productivity, reasonable growth rates in output could be maintained only with high investment/GDP ratios. Nevertheless, the sharp reduction in investment during...