Journal Special Issue
Development Financing
The real value of official aid flows fell for much of the 1990s, and private capital flows to low-income countries remain mostly limited. The decline in aid flows may endanger the development process, since they finance much of the development budget...
Journal Article
Public Provision, Commodity Demand, and Hours of Work
The theoretical analysis of optimal commodity taxation is advanced, but there is only limited empirical evidence to guide commodity tax policies. With this paper, we contribute to this body of literature by empirically examining, using Finnish...
Journal Article
How should commodities be taxed?
The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This article examines the validity of this claim in an optimal...
Journal Article
Ethnic Politics in Ranked and Unranked Systems
This article explores how ethnic politics may operate differently in societies with “ranked” versus “unranked” ethnic systems, where ethnicity and class correlate closely versus very little. It focuses on two hypotheses suggested, but not tested, in...
Journal Article
Ethnic Divisions and Public Goods Provision, Revisited
A considerable amount of recent work in political science and economics builds from the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity leads to poor provision of public goods, a key component of poor governance. Much of this work cites Alesina, Baqir and...
Working Paper
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in Zambia
The hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on public goods provision is widely accepted. Notably, most work on this issue fails to distinguish adequately between national versus subnational governance. We find that subnational...
Working Paper
Why do women co-operate more in women’s groups?
We examine a public goods game in 83 communities in northern Liberia. Women contributed substantially more to a small-scale development project when playing with other women than in mixed-gender groups, where they contributed at about the same levels...
Working Paper
Provision of Public and Merit Goods
This paper is part of a larger UNUIWIDER research project which examines the problems of the provision of basic social goods, such as health care, education, maternal care and safe water, in the developing countries. These services have...
Working Paper
A Framework for Incorporating Environmental Indicators to the Measurement of Human Well-Being
This study, relying on an economic-theoretical approach to index numbers, proposes a framework for incorporating environmental indicators to the measurement of human well-being. Furthermore this study also proposes an improvement index which...
Working Paper
Intersociety Literacy Comparisons
Basu and Foster (1998) characterized a sophisticated literacy measure using five axioms. In this paper we argue that if a measure satisfies three of their five axioms, namely, anonymity, monotonicity and externality, then also it becomes suitable in...
Working Paper
Assessing Well-being Using Hierarchical Needs
Determining whether well-being has improved is an important multidisciplinary task. It is important therefore to develop a multidimensional measure of well-being that reflects a wide spectrum of human needs. A new approach is presented in this paper...
Working Paper
Voluntary Contributions to Informal Activities Producing Public Goods: Can These be Induced by Government and Other Formal Sector Agents?
This study attempts to determine the extent to which human potential may be unlocked by government or other formal sector actions that induce voluntary contributions by individuals to the activities of Indonesia’s posyandus or village health posts...
Journal Article
Optimal taxation and public provision for poverty reduction
The existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in...