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From the Editor's Desk (June-July 2012)
Tony Addison I started writing this ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ in Accra, to the sound of an African drum band, preparing for a ceremony to mark the...
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Blog
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...
Blog
From The Editor's Desk (December 2012)
Tony Addison This year has rushed by at speed. For UNU-WIDER it’s been a year of big successes. We will have published some 110 working papers by the...
Blog
After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Some Lessons on Transition
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London was the setting on 19 June 2012 for the launch of the...
Blog
Can Entrepreneurship Make Peace Work?Tony Addison and Tilman Brück There is a special role for entrepreneurship to play in making peace work. The recently published UNU-WIDER study...
Working Paper
Can the Context Mediate Macro-Policy Outcomes?Local institutional and structural (meso) factors can play a role in mediating the returns to a macro-social policy. I focus on the Brazilian cash-transfer-programme Bolsa Familia and check how contextual features influence the returns to transfers...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Industry in UgandaThe paper looks at the evolution of industry in Uganda examining drivers and constraints since the pre-colonial period in the 1940s to date. It is argued that the state played a central role in industrialization during the pre-colonial and immediate...
Journal Article
Institutions and African EconomiesThis article presents an overview of the current special issue ‘Institutions and African Economies’. The findings include: (1) greater prevalence of democratic regimes improved both agricultural productivity and the overall growth of African...
Working Paper
A Quest for Institutional Foundations Towards Inclusive Development in Sub-Saharan AfricaThe paper explores the paths towards building institutional foundations for inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewing institutional configurations as a system of multiple equilibria, the concepts of endogenous institutions and...
Working Paper
Capacity Development for the Transformation of AfricaCountries 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...
Blog
Africa’s Recovery from the Global Economic CrisisAugustin Fosu and Wim Naudé African economies have been shaken by the global economic downturn which followed the US-centered financial crisis of 2008...
Policy Brief
What Can the European Central Bank Learn from Africa?The 14-member Franc Zone in West and Central Africa represents the largest monetary union in the southern hemisphere, predating the European Monetary Union by decades. With monetary unions planned for other parts of Africa in the near future...
Working Paper
The industrial policy experience of the electronics industry in MalaysiaDespite the use of industrial policies to stimulate economic growth by several successful developers, latecomers have faced mixed experiences. Hence, this paper analyses the industrial policy experience of the electronics industry in Malaysia. A...
Blog
Reflections on Transition: Twenty Years after the Fall of The Berlin Wall
Gérard Roland The above titled book, published by Palgrave Macmillan 2012, brings together contributions from a conference that took place in Helsinki...
Blog
Lessons from Africa's Democratic Upheavals
Danielle Resnick During the last month, three democracies in Africa witnessed incumbent presidents exit office in very different ways. The most...
Blog
Youth Employment: A Key Issue
Economist Imed Drine recently left UNU-WIDER and headed with his family for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to take up a new position as a senior economist with...
Working Paper
Développement, Aide, et ConflitLe génocide rwandais est le résultat final d'une combinaison de mécanismes dont aucun ne peut revendiquer être prioritaire ou indépendant des autres. Parmi ces mécanismes figurent une extrême pauvreté et la réduction des perspectives d'avenir pour la...
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship is Not a Binding Constraint on Growth and Development in the Poorest CountriesMany economists claim that entrepreneurship is an important determinant of economic growth and development. In the sub-discipline of development economics however, entrepreneurship is largely absent from explanations of growth and development. This...
Policy Brief
Stranger than Fiction? Understanding Institutional Changes and Economic DevelopmentThe volume Institutional Change and Economic Development fills some important gaps in our understanding of the relationship between institutional changes and economic development. It does so by developing new discourses on the 'technology of...
Book Chapter
Terms of Trade and Growth of Resource EconomiesThe current paper demonstrates a dichotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade, employing as case studies the two African countries, Botswana and Nigeria. Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of...
Book Chapter
The African Economic Growth Record, and the Roles of Policy Syndromes and GovernanceThe current chapter, first, finds that although the post-independence growth of African economies has fallen substantially below that of other regions, this comparative evidence is less than uniform across time and countries. Second, it uncovers...
Book Chapter
Capacity Development for TransformationFrom the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Working Paper
Development, Aid and ConflictRwanda's genocide is the end-result of a combination of processes, none of which can easily be priorized or separated from the others. These processes are: extreme pauperization and reduction of life chances for a majority of the poor, especially...
Working Paper
Innovation Systems, Radical Transformation, Step-by-StepThe paper introduces a reform trajectory we call ‘revolutionary incrementalism’ in which partial and incremental measures add up to profound transformation. Recent advances in economic theory demonstrate that growth is not hard to start: it almost...
Working Paper
Institutional Reforms and the Role of Multilateral Aid AgenciesThis paper reviews the role of the multilateral aid agencies in the delivery of aid. The role of these institutions is as old as the debate on the role of aid in economic development. Aid is effective in a good policy environment. However, effective...
Working Paper
Building Institutions in Post-Conflict African EconomiesInstitutions are altered by conflict, depending on the scale, duration and type of war. At one extreme, formal political, social and economic institutions may be completely destroyed (e.g. Somalia), while the importance and type of informal...
Working Paper
Innovation Capacity and Economic DevelopmentBoth China and India, the emerging giants in Asia, have achieved significant economic development in recent years. China has enjoyed a high annual GDP growth rate of 10 per cent and India has achieved an annual GDP growth rate of 6 per cent since...
Working Paper
The Impact of Reform on Economic Growth in ChinaThe study decomposes the sources of Chinese growth by first making a distinction between technological progress and technical efficiency in the growth accounting framework, and then identifying a series of reform programmes, such as urbanization...
Working Paper
Political Regime, Private Investment, and Foreign Direct Investment in Developing CountriesThis paper uses annual aggregate data for 36 low or middle income countries covering the period 1995-2001 to investigate the effect of FDI on private investment. It also explores if the relationship between FDI and private investment is influenced by...
Working Paper
Building New StatesWith the Derg's overthrow in 1991, Eritrea embarked on the construction of a new state. New economic institutions were created, and considerable reform undertaken. Problems in co-ordinating reform and reconstruction were largely avoided, mainly...
Displaying 32 of 229 results