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From the Editor's Desk (January 2012)
Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The...
127 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Journal Article
Poverty Mapping Based on First-Order Dominance with an Example from MozambiqueWe 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 AfricaThe 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 expendituresAid 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 GrowthGrowth, 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 GhanaThere 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 AfricaThis 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
User Fees, Expenditure Restructuring and Voucher Systems in EducationThe 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 ServicesThis 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 Fiscal Effects of Aid in GhanaAn 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...
Blog
Four things to consider to improve public revenues in the Global South: New findings from the Government Revenue DatasetAcross the Global South, governments continue efforts to increase domestic revenues and capacity for public spending. As concerns over debt distress...
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...
Working Paper
Public Finance and Economic GrowthThe study is an empirical test of the effects of different categories of government expenditure, revenue and deficits on economic growth in developing countries. It is based on panel data of annual series over the last three decades for 103 countries...
Working Paper
Fiscal Policy in a Growth FrameworkThis paper assesses recent theorising and empirical evidence on the impact of fiscal policy—taxes, public expenditures and budget deficits—on long-run growth. It considers the relevance of recent advances in growth theory for low-income countries and...
Working Paper
The Mozambican Civil ServiceThe post-independence Mozambican civil service, what was left of it following the exodus of Portuguese settlers in the mid-1970s, was poorly educated, with low incentives. In subsequent years, the combination of a war-ravaged economy, poor human...
Working Paper
Fiscal Effects of AidIt is clear from the implications of growth theory that the impact of aid depends on how it affects savings, investment and government behaviour. In respect of low-income countries, which are the principal aid recipients and the economies for which...
Working Paper
Fiscal Policy, Conflict, and Reconstruction in Burundi and RwandaThe ethnic conflicts in Burundi and Rwanda have severely weakened the economies and worsened the structural fiscal imbalances of these countries. Government revenue has declined due to the erosion of the tax base and tax administration capacity. At...
Working Paper
Public Spending and Poverty in MozambiqueLittle is known about the extent to which public spending is targeted towards the poor in Mozambique. The objective of the present paper is to assess whether public expenditures on education and health, in particular, are successful at reaching the...
Working Paper
Macroeconomics of Fiscal Policy in Developing CountriesThis paper considers some aspects of the effects of fiscal policy on macroeconomic adjustment in developing countries. First, the paper reviews the notion of the fiscal deficit in the particular context of developing countries. It then spells out the...
Research Brief
How to Spend It?A donor dilemma: aid effectiveness in fragile states. Donors are often faced with the dilemma that those countries most in need of aid are often those least likely to spend it effectively. This dilemma can be characterized as an instance of the...
Research Brief
What is the Effect of Aid on Primary Enrolment and Quality of Education?An increase of education aid by one per cent increases the rate of primary education enrolment by 0.06 percentage points. The most robust effect on primary enrolment is obtained by aid to the category ‘education facilities and training’. High levels...
Research Brief
How Can Aid Help Agriculture Become More Resilient to Climate Change?Review shows that global agricultural production must be increased by about 70 per cent by 2050 in order to provide sufficient nourishment for the world’s growing population. Focusing on tropical climates to 2050, climate change is likely to reduce...
Research Brief
Impact of Aid for Health and Education on Gender Equity and Human DevelopmentInitial high human development index scores and per capita income have a strongmimpact on the outcomes of aid to the health and education sectors. An increase in the share of the government budget allocated to education and health improves overall...
Working Paper
Social Spending and Aggregate Welfare in Developing and Transition EconomiesNotwithstanding 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...
Blog
Beyond the Crisis of the African University - Why Institutions Matter
I recently returned from a week at the University of Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa, speaking at a conference honouring Nobel laureate Desmond...
Book
Fiscal Policy for DevelopmentFiscal policy is critical to the development of poor countries. Public spending on pro-poor services and public goods must be increased, tax revenues must be mobilized, and macro-economic stabilization must be achieved without inhibiting growth...
Book Chapter
The Fiscal Dimensions of Conflict and ReconstructionPart of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Book Chapter
The Impact of Adjustment-Related Social Funds on Income Distribution and PovertyPart of Book Inequality, Growth and Poverty in an Era of Liberalization and Globalization
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (April 2013)
30 April 2013 Tony Addison As April closes, our thoughts turn to UNU-WIDER’s spring/summer programme. And it’s a busy one. June sees us back in...
Working Paper
Lessons from the Transition EconomiesWhy many transition economies succeeded by pursuing policies that are so different from the radical economic liberalization (shock therapy) that is normally credited for the economic success of central European countries? First, optimal policies are...
Working Paper
A Timeseries Analysis of the Impact of Foreign Aid on Central Government’s Fiscal Budget in UgandaA 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...
Displaying 32 of 127 results