Journal Article
Poverty Mapping Based on First-Order Dominance with an Example from Mozambique
We explore a novel first-order dominance (FOD) approach to poverty mapping and compare its properties to small-area estimation. The FOD approach uses census data directly, is straightforward to implement, is multidimensional allowing for a broad...
Journal Special Issue
Aid to Africa
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) give aid to Africa a new emphasis. Yet aid flows to Africa have trended downward over the last decade, and as a consequence more Africans now live in poverty. This is especially true of Sub-Saharan Africa. Any...
Working Paper
The impact of aid on total government expenditures
Aid is said to be fungible at the aggregate level if it raises government expenditures by less than the total amount. This happens when the recipient government decreases domestic revenue, decreases net borrowing, or when aid bypasses the budget...
Policy Brief
Fiscal Policy for Poverty Reduction, Reconstruction, and Growth
Growth, poverty reduction, and social peace are all undermined when public expenditure management and taxation are weak and when the fiscal deficit and public debt are not managed successfully. And large-scale aid and debt relief cannot work without...
Working Paper
Innovative Ways of Making Aid Effective in Ghana
There has been significant amount of aid inflows to developing countries including Ghana, but these have been very volatile. Aid flows have been associated with low domestic resource mobilization and have reduced Ghana to a country heavily dependent...
Working Paper
Aid and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper is a contribution to the literature on aid and growth. Despite an extensive empirical literature in this area, existing studies have not addressed directly the mechanisms via which aid should affect growth. We identify investment as the...
Working Paper
The Fiscal Effects of Aid in Ghana
An important feature of aid to developing countries is that it is given to the government. As a result, aid should be expected to affect fiscal behaviour, although theory and existing evidence is ambiguous regarding the nature of these effects. This...
Working Paper
A Global Environmental Compact for Sustainable Development
The proposals in this paper derive from studies undertaken at WIDER on questions relating to sustainable development in developing countries. The paper attempts to quantify the resource transfer implications of supporting feasible environment...
Working Paper
Measuring the Quality of Life Across Countries
This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of interrelationships among the determinants of the quality of life (QOL). We show that various measures of well-being are highly sensitive to domains of QOL that are considered in the...
Working Paper
Income Distribution and Tax, and Government Social Spending Policies in Developing Countries
This paper reviews income distribution in developing (and transition) countries in recent decades. On average, before-tax income distribution is less unequal in developing countries than it is in industrial countries. However, unlike industrial...
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
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...
Working Paper
The impacts of public expenditure innovations on real exchange rate volatility in South Africa
This study investigates the impacts of public expenditure innovations on exchange rate volatility in South Africa using quarterly data for the period 1970–2019. To achieve this objective, a version of the vector autoregressive impulse response model...
Working Paper
Social Spending and Aggregate Welfare in Developing and Transition Economies
Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is...
Working Paper
Impact of Sectoral Allocation of Foreign Aid on Gender equity and Human Development
While developing countries have made some progress in achieving human development since the turn of the century, many are still lagging behind in important human development goals such as education, health, nutrition and access to clean drinking...
Working Paper
A Timeseries Analysis of the Impact of Foreign Aid on Central Government’s Fiscal Budget in Uganda
A dynamic relationship between foreign aid and domestic fiscal variables in Uganda is analysed using a cointegrated vector autoregressive model over the period 1972-2008. Results show that aid is a significant element of long-run fiscal equilibrium...
Working Paper
Financing Sustainable Agriculture Under Climate Change with a Specific Focus on Foreign Aid
Agricultural development is facing great challenges in meeting global food security and is expected to face even greater difficulties under climate change. The overall goal of this paper is to examine how foreign aid in particular can be used to...
Working Paper
Making Aid Work for Education in Developing Countries
This paper examines the effect of education aid on primary enrollment and education quality. Using the most recent data on aid disbursements and econometric specifications inspired by the general aid effectiveness literature, we find some evidence...
Working Paper
Decomposing budget credibility
Budget reliability is the first pillar of Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA). In this study, we construct an expansion of the PEFA government response accuracy indicator and test its decomposition, with an application to the...
Working Paper
Does Aid Improve Public Service Delivery?
The expected increase in aid to Africa will put a big challenge for public service delivery. Using a simultaneous equation model, this paper provides an analysis of the effects of the volume and volatility of aid on education, health, water and...
Journal Article
What determines public education expenditures in Russia?
Recent studies suggest that the allocation of expenditures in education is important for growth. The state of public education spending in many transition economies highlights the need for an assessment of the nature of education expenditures in...
Working Paper
The political economy of ‘linked’ progressive taxation in Africa and Latin America
One key element in the reduction of poverty and (in Latin America) inequality has been the achievement of greater fiscal equity; we analyse one key part of this process, which is the earmarking of portions of tax revenue to be spent on progressive...
Book
Social Provision in Low-Income Countries
During recent years, provision of key social services in low-income countries has been affected by adverse macroeconomic conditions and by radical changes in economic thinking. For example, the welfarist approach, which gives prominence to the state...
Working Paper
Transforming Conflict with an Economic Dividend
Peace can generate an economic dividend, which can be further increased by appropriate economic reform. This dividend can in turn be used to raise popular support for conflict resolution measures along the road to achieving a final political...
Working Paper
Conflicts, Poverty and Human Development in Northern Uganda
The long-running conflict in northern Uganda has led to major violations of human rights against civilians, destruction of infrastructure, reduced access to social services, and paralysed economic activity. Creating peace and fostering reconciliation...
Working Paper
Distributional Conflict, the State, and Peacebuilding in Burundi
This paper examines the causes of conflict in Burundi and discusses strategies for building peace. The analysis of the complex relationships between distribution and group dynamics reveals that these relationships are reciprocal, implying that...
Working Paper
The Political Economy of Postwar Reconstruction in Lebanon
This paper studies the postwar economic and political reconstruction in Lebanon. The paper shows that the ‘reconstruction boom’ was short-lived. The economy experienced a growth trap early in the reconstruction period, and entered a cyclical crisis...
Working Paper
Aid and Dutch Disease in the South Pacific
The impact of aid inflows on relative prices and output is ambiguous. Aid inflows that increase domestic expenditure are likely to cause real exchange rate appreciation, ceteris paribus. However, if this expenditure raises the capital stock in the...
Working Paper
Public Sector Efficiency and Small Island Developing States
This paper examines the efficiency of public sector expenditures at achieving social sector outcomes in small island developing states (SIDS). Public sector efficiency is estimated using a stochastic production function (SPF) approach and panel data...