Working Paper
Employment and development in Asia
How have economic development, employment, and labour markets in Asian countries interacted since the publication of Myrdal’s Asian Drama? Myrdal rejected, the western approach to and definition of employment and emphasized the role of ‘informal’...
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship and human development
We provide a formal model of entrepreneurship in human development. The framework is provided by the capabilities approach (CA). Hence we extend not only the conceptualisation of entrepreneurship in development, but the reach of the CA into...
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
Does Educational Achievement Help to Explain Income Inequality?
In this paper we propose to measure the inequality of educational achievements by constructing a Gini index on educational attainments. We then use the proposed measure to analyse the relationship between inequality in incomes and educational...
Working Paper
Private beats public
This paper estimates a private school learning premium in Tanzania by implementing a flexible value-added model with unique administrative data on exam scores. The dataset covers 635,000 secondary school students with information on both their...
Working Paper
Information Technology and Economic Growth
This paper explores the impacts of information technology investment on economic growth in a cross-section of 39 countries in the period 1980-95 by applying an explicit model of economic growth, the augmented version of the neoclassical (Solow)...
Book Chapter
Capacity Development for Transformation
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
Dimensions of African Inequality
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Working Paper
Investment in Education and Income Inequality
Income inequality has risen in many parts of the world during the past decades. Rising inequality is no longer a problem of only Latin American and Sub-Saharan African countries. Some OECD countries, and recently also East Asian countries, have...
Working Paper
Selecting Priorities for Poverty Reduction and Human Development
Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. At least 45 per cent of the population cannot meet their minimum basic needs. Human development indicators are amongst Africa's worst, including a very high level of illiteracy. The country was...
Working Paper
Economics Theories of the Household
The aim of this paper is to review the principal assumptions and aspects of the unitary household model and collective models of household behaviour. Empirical studies are presented to assess whether the theories can offer adequate descriptions of...
Working Paper
The interaction of institutional quality and human capital in shaping the dynamics of capital structure in Vietnam
The aim of this paper is to find which of two theories of capital structure—trade-off theory or pecking order theory—best explains the capital structure decision of non-state firms during the post-transition process in Vietnam. We also investigate...
Working Paper
The Role of Knowledge and Capital in Economic Growth
This paper discusses new ideas in growth theory focusing on how to make sustained growth feasible. It first reviews models that broadened the notion of capital to include human capital and the state of technology. The paper next surveys models which...
Working Paper
Selective Policies for Export Promotion
This paper considers the rationale for and limitations to selective export promotion policies in developing countries, with a focus on manufactured exports. It draws upon the experience of the most successful exporters in the developing world - the...
Blog
What Does it Mean to be in the Middle?: Mobility and Vulnerability in Latin America and the Caribbean
by
Luis Felipe López-Calva
January 2013
Luis-Felipe Lopez-Calva [1] The concept of social class and specifically middle class, has been widely discussed in sociology and other social...
Blog
Measuring Poverty Over Time
by
Luc Christiaensen, Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen
August 2012
Luc Christiaensen and Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen If a person suddenly becomes poor, for example, due to an unexpected death or illness in the family...
Book Chapter
Mexico’s Oportunidades and the Raise of Social Protection in Latin America
Flera länder i Latin- och Sydamerika har under det senaste decenniet infört sociala trygghetssystem för att minska den utbredda fattigdomen. Miguel NiñoZarazúa går här igenom bakgrunden till dessa reformer och vilka effekter de har fått. Fokus ligger...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (February 2012)
Tony Addison It’s now February, and Helsinki remains deep in snow. We had an extended blizzard last weekend, with temperatures hovering around minus...
Blog
The Big Picture: Aid, Growth, and Macroeconomic Management
Lucy Scott and Annett Victorero The ReCom—Research and Communication on Foreign Aid programme held its first results meeting on the topic of ‘Aid...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (December 2011)
Tony Addison With the end of the year fast approaching, we bring you the last Angle of 2011. Here in Helsinki, the shortest day of the year is nearly...
Policy Brief
Mobilizing Talent for Global Development
Talent (combining creativity, education, skills, and knowledge) is associated with human capital and provides a very valuable economic resource. In the past, the emigration of human capital from developing countries raised fears because of the...
Journal Special Issue
Spatial Issues in Africa
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Journal Special Issue
Spatial Inequality and Development
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Working Paper
Public and Private Expenditures on Human Capital Accumulation in India
We study a model of human capital driven growth, where the parent’s human capital serves as a productive input in the child’s human capital production only when that of the former exceeds a minimum level required to intellectually contribute to the...
Working Paper
The long(er)-term impacts of Chile Solidario on human capital and labour income
This paper examines Chile Solidario, a social protection programme that provides poor households in Chile with preferential access to a conditional cash transfer programme designed to facilitate investments in children’s health and education. We...
Working Paper
The Success of Learnerships?
Vocational training programmes, like South Africa’s learnership programme, which combine classroom learning and on-the-job training seem like the type of intervention which can create skills, get young people into jobs quicker, and reduce youth...
Working Paper
Education, Skill, and Earnings
This paper provides evidence on the nature of returns to education in Ghana and confirms the emerging empirical literature on the convexity of returns to education in Ghana. Using a basic Mincerian, model we find that returns to education more than...
Working Paper
Capacity Development for the Transformation of Africa
Countries need capacity for a variety of reasons, including sustaining economic growth, generating jobs, reducing poverty, effectively managing development programmes, and transforming societies and economies. A lot of effort has been expended to...
Working Paper
Health shocks and the intergenerational transmission of inequality
This paper explores the intergenerational effects of parental health shocks using longitudinal data from the Young Lives project conducted in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is found that health shocks to poorer parents reduce investments in children...
Working Paper
The Practice of Industrial Policy – Lessons for Africa
African countries are facing great opportunities but also formidable challenges in accelerating economic growth and sustaining a high level of economic performance. The experiences of East Asian countries may offer valuable insights for African...
Working Paper
Skills-Biased Labour Demand and the Pursuit of Inclusive Growth in South Africa
This paper examines the changing nature of occupational labour-market trends in South Africa and the resulting impact on wages. We observe high levels of demand for skilled labour that have intensified a trend already established before 1994. Over...
Working Paper
Dimensions of African Inequality
This paper discusses dimensions of inequality in sub-Saharan Africa and their causes. It starts with a review of the empirical evidence about inequality during the colonial period as well as the post-independence era. Then it discusses the forces...
Working Paper
Globalization, Development, and Mobility of Technical Talent
The objective here is to understand how the mobility of technical talent might be changing the structural relationship between rich and poor countries. This paper examines the under-researched relationship between India and Japan in the context of...
Working Paper
What Kind of Education Does China Need?
This paper analyses the impact of different levels of educational attainment on local growth and economic disparities in China. By applying decomposition analysis and quantile regression techniques to a set of sub-provincial level regional data...
Working Paper
Human Capital and Wage Determination in Different Ownerships, 1989-97
This article evaluates the Chinese labour market by examining the role of human capital in wage determination. Using data from China’s Household Nutrition Survey, we estimate the returns to education in state-owned, collective-owned and private...
Working Paper
Return International Migration and Geographical Inequality
This paper explores entrepreneurship amongst return migrants, how their business locations and characteristics differ from other businesses, and the implications for rural-urban inequality. First, we examine, amongst returnees, the determinants of...
Research Brief
Three key insights for research on social mobility in developing countries
The volume, Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods, and Determinants, brings together leading scholars from a range of social science disciplines working on a variety of issues related to social mobility. Three motivations guide...
Working Paper
What drives parental investments in early childhood?
This paper investigates the causal impact of a randomized video intervention designed to study the determinants of parental time investments in early childhood among low-income parents. We designed and screened a video that provided information and...
Working Paper
Role of the Household and Community in Determining Child Health
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...
Working Paper
Globalization and the Human Development Trap
The feeble results of liberalization policies in Latin America are explained in terms of a multiple steady state model including a dynamic human development trap, endogenous technological change, technology transfer and trade. Divergent and...
Working Paper
Export Productivity and Specialization in China, Brazil, India and South Africa
This paper analyses the patterns of export productivity and trade specialization profiles in the China, Brazil, India and South Africa, and in other regional groupings. In doing so, the investigation calculates a time varying export productivity...
Working Paper
Inter-Country Variations in Digital Technology in Africa
While much attention has been focused on the so-called ‘digital divide’ between Africa and the industrialized world, very scant attention has been devoted to the wide variations in the levels of digitalization of African countries. Whereas countries...
Working Paper
Intergenerational mobility in occupational choices
Historically, the issue of intergenerational evolution of income, wealth, and socioeconomic status has been the subject of considerable research in the analysis of inequality. Such intergenerational linkages are anticipated to come from two sources...
Blog
Changing the lives of very young children: Evidence from Rwanda
by
Patricia Justino, Marinella Leone, Pierfrancesco Rolla, Monique Abimpaye, Caroline Dusabe, Diane Uwamahoro, Richard Germond
November 2020
Globally, around 250 million children under the age of five do not meet key development milestones, which reduces their ability to reach their full...
Working Paper
The legacy of conflict: aggregate evidence from Sierra Leone
This paper studies the general equilibrium impact of civil war in Sierra Leone. I first use an instrumental variable (IV) strategy and geographic conflict variation to estimate reduced-form effects. I show that civil war leads to affected areas...
Working Paper
Inequality Trends and their Determinants
The paper reviews the steady and widespread decline in income inequality which has taken place in most of Latin America over 2002-10 and which––if continued for another 2-3 years––would reduce the average regional income inequality to pre...
Working Paper
Gender bias in education during conflict
Using a large-scale novel panel dataset (2005–14) on schools from the Indian state of Assam, we test for the impact of violent conflict on female students’ enrollment rates. We find that a doubling of average killings in a district-year leads to a 13...
Working Paper
Investing in Health for Economic Development
Health is an asset with an intrinsic value as well as an instrumental value. Good health is a source of wellbeing and highly valued throughout the world. Health is not only the absence of illness, but capacity to develop a person’s potential. Health...
Working Paper
Decomposing Growth: Do Low-Income and HIPCs Differ from High-Income Countries?
This paper studies the distribution of output per worker between the years 1980 and 2000 in different country groups. The study uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) to decompose the changes in the distribution of labour productivity into changes in...
Policy Brief
Six sets of policy actions to promote social mobility
Promoting social mobility is an essential task of development, and a multi-faceted one. Precarious livelihoods are widespread. Containing downward mobility is an important precondition for sustaining upward mobility. Policies of human capital...
Blog
Wasted talent – How COVID-19’s effect on the poor could make all of society poorer
by
Ruby Richardson
September 2021
The opening keynote of the recent WIDER Development Conference, COVID-19 and development – effects and new realities for the Global South, was given...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Policies for Growth in Small Pacific Island Economies
This paper examines macroeconomic performance and policies in small Pacific island economies (SPIEs). These economies are highly prone to various supply shocks and face severe obstacles to development arising from their geography and demography...
Working Paper
Long-term Effects of Land Reform on Human Capital Accumulation
We use data on inter-generational gains in educational attainment by some 500,000 individuals in 200 West Bengal villages to explore gender-differentiated impacts of land reform on human capital accumulation at the individual level. While there are...
Research Brief
Are women’s labour force participation rates improving in sub-Saharan Africa?
Several sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have achieved substantial economic growth in the past 30 years. Likewise, access to education has considerably expanded, as reflected in rising enrolment rates for both men and women. Female labour force...
Research Brief
What do we need to know about social mobility in the Global South?
The volume, Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods and Determinants, brings together leading scholars from several disciplines to advance research practice on social mobility. Three sets of motivations guide this joint effort...
Working Paper
Growth and inequality convergence: the role of environmentally related impacts on human capital
We examine inequality convergence over the past three decades and ask if environmentally related impacts on health, and their effect on human capital, are responsible for the slow rate of inequality reduction in countries. Though higher initial...