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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...
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Blog
From the Editor’s Desk (September 2012)
Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later...
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...
Journal Article
Impact of Terrorism on Investment Decisions of FarmersPart of Journal Special Issue Entrepreneurship and Conflict
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...
Blog
Africa's Failure to Industrialize: Bad Luck or Bad Policy?
16 December 2014 John Page On 20 November 2014 the United Nations celebrated the 25th Africa Industrialization Day. But perhaps ‘celebrate’ is not...
Blog
Imperfect Data Increases Uncertainty
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...
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...
Journal Article
The Forgotten Property RightsStudies 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...
Working Paper
The Investment Decline in Transition EconomiesAll 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...
Working Paper
Mozambique’s IndustrializationAfter 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...
Working Paper
Digital Divide and Growth GapThis paper, using a cumulative growth model and a catch-up model, verifies the cumulative relationship between IT investment and economic growth, and then examines whether this relationship enlarges the differences in the economic growth among OECD...
Working Paper
The Corporate Digital DivideThis paper shows how organizational, technical, and environmental factors affected firm decisions to adopt Internet technologies during the early years of the commercialization of the Internet. Organizations that had made prior investments in client...
Working Paper
Multilateral Development Banks and Private Sector FinancingThe paper examines the role of the multinational development banks in private sector financing with a particular focus on the International Finance Corporation (IFC). The aim of the paper is to bring to focus, in an analytical manner, the past...
Working Paper
Foreign Direct Investment, Domestic Investment, and Economic Growth in ChinaIn this paper, we investigate the causal link between foreign direct investment (FDI), domestic investment and economic growth in China for the period 1988-2003. Towards this purpose, a multivariate VAR system with error correction model (ECM) and...
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
Firm Ownership, FOEs, and POEsWhere the theory of free competition reigns, developing countries should open their arms to investments from all types of enterprises in order to maximize jobs. Ownership, measured by votes of shareholders or boards of directors, is immaterial to...
Working Paper
Developing IrelandThis paper sets out to explain the factors behind Ireland’s exceptional period of economic growth from the early 1990s to the mid 2000s. It suggests that an unbending commitment to economic openness and an on-going effort to establish quality...
Working Paper
Capital markets in sub-Saharan AfricaCapital 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...
Working Paper
The Financial Deepening-Productivity Nexus in ChinaThe 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...
Journal Article
A Survey of Growth and Development Issues of the Pacific IslandsPart of Journal Special Issue Focus
Book Chapter
The Economic Impact of Information and Communication Technology in KoreaPart of Book Information Technology, Productivity, and Economic Growth
Research Brief
The Role of ODA in Infrastructure FinancingIt has long been recognized that the creation of an adequate infrastructure is vital for creating sustainable growth and reducing poverty in Africa. However the gap between the investment that is needed and the money currently available is too big to...
Research Brief
Female Empowerment and Extreme Poverty ReductionWomen are increasingly seen as an important part of the international development agenda. Empowering women and promoting gender equality are enshrined as global development objectives with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed in 2000...
Research Brief
Aid for Statistics in AfricaIn the WIDER Working Paper ‘Aid and Investment in Statistics for Africa’ Jeffery I. Round discusses how the effectiveness of aid aimed at improving statistical capacity in Africa can be assessed. He begins by describing the reasons behind the...
Research Brief
Aid and Structural Change in AfricaIt is commonly acknowledged that developing economies are characterized by large differences in output per worker across sectors. For such economies the shift of resources from low productivity to high productivity is the key potential driver of...
Blog
Development Finance: The Role for Aid in Africa
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...
Blog
Learning to Compete: Lessons from Vietnam – An Interview with Carol Newman
28 May 2014 In this interview Carol Newman discusses the success of the Vietnamese economic transformation and lessons which can be drawn for Africa...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (February 2013)
Tony Addison As the snow continues to lie deep across Helsinki, UNU-WIDER is putting the last touches to the ReCom results meeting on ‘aid and the...
Working Paper
Aid as a Catalyst for Pioneer InvestmentI 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...
Working Paper
Aid and Investment in Statistics for AfricaOver 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...
Book Chapter
Tourism and Economic GrowthUsing 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...
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