Working Paper
Inequality, institutions, and cooperation
We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation, and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab...
Working Paper
Ethnic diversity and informal work in Ghana
We present the first study that examines the effects of ethnic diversity on informal work. Using two waves of data from the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey, we find that ethnic diversity is associated with a higher probability of engaging in...
Working Paper
Political connections and firm's formalization
The literature shows that political connections have different effects on firms’ activities. However, the question of how political connections affect firms’ formalization has not been explored. Using data from three waves of the Vietnam Small and...
Working Paper
Finance, gender, and entrepreneurship
How does informal economic activity respond to increased financial inclusion? Does it become more entrepreneurial? Does access to new financing options change the gender configuration of informal economic activity and, if so, in what ways and what...
Working Paper
Formalization and productivity
Using a firm-level panel dataset on private small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Viet Nam’s manufacturing sector, this paper examines productivity dynamics of formal and informal firms. We decompose productivity changes into changes within...
Working Paper
Progress and stagnation in the livelihood of informal workers in an emerging economy
We use long-spanning individual longitudinal data to examine the long-term labour market outcomes of low-tier informal workers. We investigate their characteristics, calculate the extent of switching, and identify the characteristics of those who...
Blog
Populism in Brazil: how liberalisation and austerity led to the rise of Lula and Bolsonaro
While the rise of populist politicians in the Europe and the US gets a lot of attention from the media and researchers alike, the drivers of the...
Blog
Nobel Peace Prize acknowledges link between preventing hunger and promoting peace
Professor Patricia Justino is a leading expert on the links between political violence and economic development. Her work has greatly expanded...
Blog
South Asia: how to ensure progress on reducing poverty isn't reversed by coronavirus
South Asia accounted for nearly two-fifths of the world’s poor, nearly half of the world’s malnourished children and was home to the largest number of...
Journal Article
Effects of peers and rank on cognition, preferences, and personality
We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a...
Working Paper
Informality and firm performance in Myanmar
Using a novel panel survey of enterprises in Myanmar, we compare the performance of manufacturing firms by three different informality definitions. The first is binary, based on whether firms pay taxes. The second captures five categories of...
Working Paper
Exporters and global value chain participation
Using the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury firm-level panel data for 2009–17, this paper investigates how global value chain-related trade affects the export performance of manufacturing firms in South Africa. In particular, the...
Working Paper
Informal–formal workers' transition in Nigeria
This study evaluates the effects of the informal sector on Nigerian workers’ livelihoods and analyses workers’ transitions within the informal sector and between informal and formal employment. A binary logit model is applied to General Household...
Working Paper
Economic complexity and structural transformation: the case of Mozambique
Mozambique is among the world’s least complex economies. By systematically accounting for both supply- and demand-side factors, we identify new products and sectors that can help to diversify and upgrade its economy. In a supply-side analysis, we use...
Blog
Data for better tax policy analysis: Introducing the latest version of the Government Revenue Dataset
by
Kyle McNabb
February 2021
Thanks to the updated version of the Government Revenue Dataset (GRD) we are now able to gain a clear picture of tax and other revenue trends in over...
Working Paper
Capturing economic and social value from hydrocarbon gas flaring and venting: evaluation of the issues
Atmospheric emissions urgently need to reduce for natural gas to fulfill its potential role in the energy transition to achieve the Paris Agreement on climate change. This paper establishes the magnitude and trends of flaring and venting in oil and...
Journal Article
COVID-19 and global poverty
The study paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on global poverty in the light of IMF’s growth forecasts. It shows that the pandemic will erode many of the gains recorded over the last decade in terms of poverty reduction. Our...
Working Paper
Vulnerable employment of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Tunisian youth
Youths in the Middle East and North Africa face the highest unemployment rates in the world. Those who are employed are pushed to accept informal sector jobs that are insecure, unsafe, and lack non-wage benefits. Precarious employment is pervasive...
Research Brief
Are credits or deductions better in public health spending?
The impact of medical deductions and medical credits on income inequality is a subject of discussion in South Africa, as well as in many other countries, raising critical questions about the fairness of the medical tax system and the impact on...
Research Brief
Finding optimal solutions for efficient youth labour policies
According to South Africa’s National Development Plan Vision 2030, serious action needs to be taken to reduce poverty and encourage economic growth. One of the main challenges involves reducing the unemployment rates in South Africa, particularly...
Research Brief
Wage inequality in post-apartheid South Africa
Much work has been done on inequality in South Africa, but to date the literature that assesses the dynamic response of income or wealth distribution to economic policy actions is almost non-existent. This information gap is caused by data...
Working Paper
Capturing economic and social value from hydrocarbon gas flaring and venting: solutions and actions
This second paper on hydrocarbon gas flaring and venting builds on our first, which evaluated the economic and social cost (SCAR) of wasted natural gas. These emissions must be reduced urgently for natural gas to meet its potential as an energy...
Blog
The WIID celebrates 20 years with a daring new plan
by
Carlos Gradín
October 2020
After 20 years of contributions to income inequality research, the World Income Inequality Database (the WIID) is getting a new expansion that will...
Blog
The global distribution of routine and non-routine work – and why we should we care about it
by
Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, Albert Park
October 2020
The nature of work is changing due to technological progress, globalization, and the rapidly expanding supply of college-educated workers. At a global...
Working Paper
Economics and Politics of Official Loans versus Grants
The paper examines a wide range of issues relating to the mix between loans and grants as well as the degree of concessionality of loans. A number of empirical tests are carried out based on annual panel data over 1970 to 1999 for 22 donor countries...
Blog
35 years of research for change: Bringing inequality to the fore (1998-2020)
UNU-WIDER released the world’s first estimates of the global wealth distribution in 2007 – one result of a 2004–05 project, ‘Personal Assets from a...
Working Paper
The electric vehicle revolution
The emergence of a mass market for electric vehicles (EVs) offers considerable development opportunities for resource exporters, given their intensive raw material requirements, including for cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium, and manganese...
Working Paper
Structural estimates of the South African sacrifice ratio
This paper estimates the output cost of fighting inflation—the sacrifice ratio—for the South African economy using quarterly data spanning the period 1998Q1–2019Q3. To compute the sacrifice ratio, the structural vector autoregressive model developed...
Working Paper
Wealth inequality and CO2 emissions in emerging economies
As the world battles with the triple problems of social, economic, and environmental challenges, it has become important to focus both policy and research efforts on these. Therefore, this study examines the effect of wealth inequality on CO2...
Working Paper
Youth unemployment hysteresis in South Africa
This study simulates the macro-micro economic impacts of the employment policy, focusing on hysteresis in youth unemployment in South Africa. Specifically, we apply a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to calibrate the 2015 South African...
Working Paper
Do fiscal regimes matter for fiscal sustainability in South Africa?
This paper empirically examines South Africa’s fiscal sustainability through a Markov-switching model which utilizes quarterly datasets for the period from 1960 to 2019. The results show that public debt responds positively, demonstrating a...
Working Paper
Identifying structural changes in the exchange rates of South Africa as a regime-switching process
Exchange rate volatility is said to exemplify the economic health of a country. Exchange rate break points (known as structural breaks) have a momentous impact on the macroeconomy of a country. Nonetheless, this country study makes use of both...
Working Paper
The impact on the South African economy of alternative regulatory arrangements in the petroleum sector
This paper adds quantitative analysis to the study by Crompton et al. (2020), in which various alternative regulatory arrangements regarding the petrol price in South Africa were explored. We use a multi-sector dynamic computable general equilibrium...
Working Paper
What works to mitigate and reduce relative (and absolute) inequality?
Over the past two decades, research on the impacts of a diverse range of public policies and income inequality has seen rapid growth. Despite the large number of publications to date, there remain important lacunae in our understanding of how policy...
Working Paper
Transparency in extractive industry commodities trading
The paper reviews the debate about transparency in extractive industry commodities trade. It examines the obstacles to improved transparency. A critical review of the experience with estimating losses from a lack of transparency concludes that many...
Working Paper
Pandemics and their impact on oil and metal prices
We examine the effect of pandemics on selected commodity prices—in particular, those of zinc, copper, lead, and oil. We set up a vector autoregressive model and analyse data since the mid-nineteenth century to determine how prices reacted to...
Working Paper
Monetary policy and wealth inequality in South Africa
This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and wealth inequality in South Africa. We employed a unique database of tax administrative data which allowed us to account for individual heterogeneity. These tax data span from 2011 to...
Blog
The world needs a people’s vaccine
by
Sanjay G. Reddy, Arnab Acharya
November 2020
The world needs a people’s vaccine for COVID-19 — one provided universally, and accessible to the entire world population. A patent-protected vaccine...
Working Paper
Do bigger health budgets cushion pandemics?
How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID...
Working Paper
Evolution of wage inequality in India (1983–2017)
We examine data for urban workers in the non-agricultural sector across three decades, 1983–2017, and find that earnings inequality increased during 1983–2004, was largely stable during 2004–11, and decreased during 2011–17. We explore whether...
Working Paper
Earnings inequality and the changing nature of work
With structural changes in production coupled with technological progress, there have been shifts in modes of production and patterns of employment, with important consequences on task composition of occupations. This paper has utilized different...
Working Paper
Horizontal inequality, COVID-19, and lockdown readiness
A growing body of research shows that COVID-19 both reflects and exacerbates existing inequalities. However, there are significant gaps in this research area with respect to ‘horizontal’ or group-based inequalities in Global South countries. Lack of...
Working Paper
Size matters: measuring the effects of inequality and growth shocks
Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between...
Policy Brief
Policy implications of empirically estimated fiscal multipliers for South Africa
Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes, there remains significant uncertainty regarding the impact of fiscal policy decisions on macroeconomic outcomes. This impact is quantified by calculating fiscal multipliers. A...
Policy Brief
Fiscal multipliers and debt dynamics using a DSGE approach
Much of the research on the impact of fiscal policy shocks on macroeconomic outcomes (e.g., fiscal multipliers) uses reduced-form modelling approaches such as vector auto-regressions to obtain empirical results. In a recent study1, we used this...
Policy Brief
Mining for change
For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. There is an extensive literature linking natural resource dependence to poor economic performance. One...