Blog
From the Editor's Desk (May 2012)Tony Addison Finland traditionally celebrates the start of summer on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday), and UNU-WIDER currently basks in warm sunshine. At...
Tony Addison Finland traditionally celebrates the start of summer on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday), and UNU-WIDER currently basks in warm sunshine. At...
Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later...
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...
16 December 2014 John Page On 20 November 2014 the United Nations celebrated the 25th Africa Industrialization Day. But perhaps ‘celebrate’ is not...
9 May 2013 Carl-Gustav Lindén The world is a complex place where risk and uncertainty are an everyday challenge. Decision makers at all levels say...
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...
After the Second World War, Mozambique went through a series of transformations, from an incipient industrializing colonial society to an independent country with a central planned economy, plus a regional and internal war, and finally from 1994...
Part of Journal Special Issue Entrepreneurship and Conflict
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...
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
Studies of land property rights usually focus on tenure security and transfer rights. Rights to determine how to use the land are regularly ignored. However, user rights are often limited. Relying on a unique Vietnamese panel data set at both...
All centrally planned economies suffered from over-investment. Due to low capital productivity, reasonable growth rates in output could be maintained only with high investment/GDP ratios. Nevertheless, the sharp reduction in investment during...
Capital markets facilitate capital growth by mobilizing savings and converting them into investments, and they are therefore a stimulant of economic growth. There is evidence that countries with high savings rates tend to grow faster. Although most...
The financial intermediation-growth nexus is a widely studied topic in the literature of development economics. Deepening financial intermediation may promote economic growth by mobilizing more investments, and lifting returns to financial resources...
The socioeconomic fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore discussions on domestic resource mobilization (hereafter DRM)...
Aid’s future, its history, and its impact were the topics of a policy workshop held by UNU-WIDER in co-operation with the Embassy of Denmark in Dar es...
Using a panel vector autoregressive model this paper investigates the dynamic and endogeneous contribution of tourism to output based on a sample of 40 African countries for the period 1990–2006. Results from the study confirm tourism to be an...
I discuss how aid can support growth in small, isolated economies. Small markets frustrate scale economies and competition. Combined with high transport costs, essential inputs become prohibitively expensive. Breaking the coordination problem...
Over many past decades countries in sub-Saharan Africa have received extensive bilateral and multilateral aid in support of the production of relevant, timely, and good quality data and statistics. But assessing aid effectiveness in the statistical...
This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power on farmers’ agricultural investment decisions. Our main result is that households significantly...
Using a panel vector autoregressive model this paper investigates the dynamic and endogeneous contribution of tourism to output based on a sample of 40 African countries for the period 1990–2006. Results from the study confirm tourism to be an...
We examine the role of institutional investors in financial markets and in corporate governance. In many countries, institutional investors have become the predominant players in financial markets and their influence worldwide is growing, chiefly due...
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...
This paper is a survey of some key variables with an international dimension and implications for growth and development policies in selected Pacific island countries. Results from a simple growth accounting exercise show that factor accumulation is...
We investigate domestic private investment behaviour in a panel of 24 low-income and middle-income countries spanning a period of 1981-2000. The paper rigorously addresses (i) the cross-country heterogeneity in private investment behaviour, and (ii)...
This paper introduces a discrete-time intertemporal investment model in which the flow of profits affects the risk premium on the cost of finance, and, as a consequence, the rate of discount of future profits. While public investments, according to a...
This paper aims to investigate the relationship between financial liberalization on the one hand and saving, investment and economic growth on the other hand, using a new dataset for measuring financial liberalization for a sample of 25 developing...
This paper investigates the simultaneous causal relationship between investments in information and communication technology (ICT) and foreign direct investment (FDI), with reference to its implications on economic growth. For the empirical analysis...
Lucy Scott Women are increasingly seen as an important part of the international development agenda. Empowering women and promoting gender equality...