
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (March 2012)
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Part of Book External Finance for Private Sector Development
Luc Christiaensen and Lionel Demery Escalating food prices in 2007-2008, climate change and land grabbing have woken the world up to the extraordinary...
Part of Journal Special Issue Economics of climate change impacts on developing countries
The goal of this paper is to evaluate the results of regional economic growth model estimations at multiple spatial scales using spatial panel data models. The spatial scales examined are minimum comparable areas, microregions, mesoregions and states...
Book review on: T. Besley and T. Persson (2011). Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters.Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson embark on a new research agenda in their book ‘Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics...
The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of the inefficient functioning of the Tunisian labour market. The study takes advantage of the recent development in the stochastic frontier techniques and estimates, the matching function for...
Commodity price fluctuations have been troublesome in their destabilising effects on the foreign exchange earnings of developing countries. Recently, however, attention has been drawn to their role in transmitting inflation and in inducing...
Nutritional status at a young age is positively associated with an individual’s total human capital accumulated. Higher levels of human capital are in turn strongly correlated with an individual’s economic and social well-being. Health is one such...
In the 1980s most of Sub-Saharan African countries (SSA) especially the HIPCs faced an unprecedented indebtedness. Different mechanisms of debt relief as well as economic reforms have been put in place with the objective of enabling these countries...
What explains the divergent political paths that the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have followed since the fall of the Berlin Wall? While some appear today to be consolidated democracies, others have all the...
One of the most visible and enduring manifestations of urban poverty in developing countries is the formation and proliferation of slums. While attention has focused on the rapid pace of urbanization as the sole or major factor explaining the...
This paper studies the determinants of the inefficient functioning of the Tunisian labour market. The study takes advantage of recent developments in the stochastic frontier techniques and estimates the matching function for Tunisia using...
Part of Book Poverty and Undernutrition
Development aid aimed at increasing productivity in the fisheries sector has at times had a negative effect by encouraging or facilitating overfishing. A percentage increase in capacity enhancing or bad subsidies in sub-Sahara Africa, all else being...
In a recent UNU-WIDER working paper 'Fiscal composition and aid effectiveness: A political-economy model' Paul Mosley examines the claim that aid would have, in the long term, a negative impact on productivity and stability of expenditure in...
The question of whether aid is effective in promoting economic growth is a complex and controversial one. While there is a general consensus around the idea that aid can have positive effects at the micro and meso levels, recent studies, such as...
The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro- and meso-levels, recent literature doubts the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses the aid-growth literature...
The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro and meso-levels, recent literature doubts the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses the aid-growth literature...
Part of Book From Conflict to Recovery in Africa
This paper introduces a concept of inequality comparisons with ordinal bivariate categorical data. In our model, one population is more unequal than another when they have common arithmetic median outcomes and the first can be obtained from the...
The fisheries sector in sub-Saharan Africa has benefited from high and increasing amounts of foreign aid for over four decades. In the 1990s when evidence emerged that most stocks were overcapitalized and overfished, the effectiveness of fisheries...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid, Social Policy and Development
One of the dual objectives of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol is to promote sustainable development in the host countries. With different CDM indicators for 58 CDM host countries over 2005-10, this paper empirically...
This paper confronts three conundrums. First, does the relationship between aid and growth fade over time when aid is successful? Second, why are aid inflows neglected in the literature on growth acceleration (or episodes). Third, why is country...
In accounting for the rather gloomy trend of the aid effectiveness literature over the last few years, one explanatory strand has been fiscal, suggesting in particular that aid flows in weak states have tended to erode the tax base and the structure...
This paper examines to what extent the central bank for the West African Economic and Monetary Union (BCEAO) has used interest rate policy in response to domestic economic developments. We show that while in the long run the BCEAO matches changes in...
China’s recent accession to the WTO is expected to accelerate its integration into the world economy, which aggravates concerns over the impact of globalization on the already rising inter-region income inequality in China. This paper discusses China...
The present study examines the degree to which income distribution affects the ability of economic growth to reduce poverty, based on 1990s data for a sample of rural and urban sectors of African economies. Using the basic needs approach, an analysis...
This paper models the inter‐temporal allocation of foreign development aid to Papua New Guinea (PNG). A formal theoretical model of aid allocation is developed, in which aid to any one country is determined jointly with aid to all other recipient...