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From the Editor's Desk (March 2012)Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
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...
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...
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tony Addison, Lucy Scott, and Annett Victorero Aid effectiveness was a recurrent theme during the UNU-WIDER conference on ‘Foreign Aid: Research and...
Tony Addison, Tseday Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott, Finn Tarp, Tuuli Ylinen To meet development objectives, aid recipients and their donor...
In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, debt crises have plagued low-, middle-, and high-income countries at various times. Indebted countries have generally addressed balance of payments crises either by (a) obtaining International...
The recent food price crisis and the responses of the policy makers in developing countries provide an unprecedented opportunity to analyse the policy processes in these countries. Policy responses differed depending on the nature and magnitude of...
29 November 2012 Carl-Gustav Lindén In November 2012 UNU-WIDER had the pleasure of hosting a public event with Dr Kaushik Basu, the newly appointed...
The project centers on the inter-linkages between the major developing countries of Brazil, India, China and South Africa and the global economy, with a special emphasis on the implications of China's growth on smaller economies and the rest of the...
Finn Tarp This is the first in a series of articles that Angle will be running before and after the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan...
Recent evidence from an exhaustive political-economy study of growth of African economies—the Growth Project of the African Economic Research Consortium—suggests that ‘policy syndromes’ have substantially contributed to the generally poor growth in...
Brazil’s recent growth has been intensely pro-poor, and both poverty and inequality have declined significantly in the last decade. It has been suggested that Brazil’s unexpected successes are the outcome of a new model of development. The paper...
Researchers have linked sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) poor growth performance in recent decades to several factors, including geography, institutions, and low returns to investment. This literature has not yet integrated the research that identifies...
The 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...
The articles in this special issue set forth a set of technical contributions that will improve the understanding of the impacts of climate change in developing countries. They are drawn from the Development Under Climate Change (DUCC) project...
Africa is the developing region most at risk from the global economic crisis. Its recent strong growth has been interrupted. Already home to the largest number of low-income countries in the world, the region is now likely to experience higher...
This paper reviews the many areas in which economists play an important role in policy-making, including the quantification of objectives set by political processes, formulation of macroeconomic policy where economists have a dominating role, and...
Much criticism of aid rests on no evidence at all, on out-of-date studies (many of which are methodologically weak) or on a misunderstanding of causation and country context. Many critics correlate weak or negative growth with aid flows, without much...
Part of Journal Special Issue Macroeconomic Perspectives on Aid
We link a bottom-up energy sector model to a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model of South Africa in order to examine two of the country’s main energy policy considerations: (i) the introduction of a carbon tax and (ii)...
Marco V. Sánchez and Rob Vos Substantial slowdown in progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) should be expected as a consequence of...
Productivity gains are the prime engine of economic growth. This paper uses a rich amount of firms’ accounting information from the Single Information Collecting Centre in Senegal over the period 1998-2011. To investigate the two main obstacles to...
Part of Journal Special Issue Macroeconomic Perspectives on Aid
Part of Journal Special Issue Macroeconomic Perspectives on Aid
Part of Journal Special Issue Macroeconomic Perspectives on Aid
Part of Journal Special Issue Macroeconomic Perspectives on Aid
Part of Journal Special Issue Macroeconomic Perspectives on Aid
Part of Journal Special Issue Macroeconomic Perspectives on Aid
Senegal is a typical sub-Saharan economy, which conducted an import substitution policy over 1960-86, followed by a policy of support for the private sector and liberalization of the economy. It suffers from a low level of economic development...
Augustin Fosu and Wim Naudé African economies have been shaken by the global economic downturn which followed the US-centered financial crisis of 2008...
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...
Post-apartheid poverty and inequality trends have been the subject of intensive analysis, yet relatively little attention has been devoted to the impact of differential price movements on the measurement of poverty and inequality. This paper aims to...
We develop a stock-and-flow-consistent model for South Africa with four financial instruments and detailed balance sheets for the household, government, financial, non-financial, and foreign sectors and the Reserve Bank. Though micro-founded, the...
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. International financial crises...
Part of Book Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System
A sharp rise in unemployment and a sharp rise in mortality have been two recurrent aspects of the process of transition. In response to the unemployment challenge transitional economies have equipped themselves with labour market policies (LMPs)...
In a dynamic panel data model allowing for error cross-section dependence, output volatility is found to impede sustainable development. Through a financial development channel (liquidity liability ratio), output volatility exerts a significant...
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have lofty expectations regarding the impact of official development aid. Are these expectations valid? This paper surveys the literature on aid and growth. It finds that practically all aid studies since the...
There are large volumes of gas offshore Tanzania, which has raised hopes of a boom. But those hopes look set to be disappointed. A boom would depend on there being a sizeable flow of revenue to government from producing and exporting gas. This paper...
A significant natural resource discovery creates excited popular expectations of imminent wealth. But the size of a boom is usually overestimated and the delay in receiving revenues is underestimated. This paper takes stock of the sequencing, timing...
Much of the vast literature on changes in income distribution in advanced countries during the last two decades attributes these either to globalization (specifically in the form of trade liberalization with low-wage developing countries), or to...
In this paper we use data from 17 African nations in order to investigate the hypothesis that monetary union – represented in this case by the CFA Franc Zone – augments the extent of macroeconomic integration. The paper covers a number of dimensions...
The paper examines the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using an innovative econometric methodology to study the direction of causality between the two variables. We apply our methodology, based on the Toda-Yamamoto test for...
The overlapping wage contract model, known as the staggered contract model, is expanded in an open economy context to include wage indexation to add some more realism to the model. In addition the effects of alternative assumptions about availability...
The emergence of the euro as a key currency, perhaps eventually rivalling the US dollar in importance, may have important macroeconomic implications for industrial as well as developing economies in the years ahead. This paper focuses on two related...
This paper surveys issues related to globalization, and the obstacles to the successful integration of vulnerable economies. For many developing countries, the positive benefits of the increased globalization that has been taking place since around...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
In this blog, the managing editor of the WIDERAngle shares his personal view on some of the most important —and potentially overlooked— work recently...
Part of Journal Special Issue Women’s Work
Latin America has seen vast improvements in gender educational and health equality. Favourable supply-side conditions, however, have not translated into greater gender economic equality, a process that also depends on structural economic change and...
This paper analyses the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in South Africa over the 1996–2019 period. We identify personal income tax shocks using a narrative approach and incorporate these shocks in a proxySVAR model. Our...
This paper explores the macroeconomic implications of aid flows in countries with weak institutions. It argues that these countries should take into account their overall macroeconomic position, their capacity to absorb aid at the sectoral and...
by Jose Antonio Ocampo With economic activity falling by close to 1 percent in 2002, Latin America will complete a lost half-decade in terms of...
by Sailesh K. Jha Exports have been one of the key drivers of economic growth in several Asian DMCs in the 1990s. During this period the composition...
by Andrés Solimano At the turn of the twentieth century, a large number of Europeans—mainly Italians and Spaniards—left their homelands and headed to...
I’m writing this editorial from Dar es Salaam, while at the 20th anniversary workshop for Tanzania’s REPOA, one of our research partners. UNU-WIDER...
What type of business destroys proportionately more jobs during times of economic recessions and hires more in booms? This simple question motivates...
Since the end of the civil war, the Government of Sierra Leone has made substantial progress in strengthening public financial management. Improvements have been achieved across all aspects of the budget cycle and are particularly notable with regard...
Estimating the impact of HIV/AIDS epidemic on economic growth is challenging because of endogeneity concerns. In this paper, we use novel data on male circumcision and distance from the first HIV outbreak as instrumental variables for the HIV/AIDS...
May is always a hopeful month. With 18 hours of daylight we are all perky—especially the seagulls who swarm around Helsinki harbour. Here at UNU-WIDER...
In this interview, Per Pinstrup-Andersen talks about the international project which has culminated in the book Food Price Policy in an Era of Market...
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...
In the more than two decades since democratic elections signalled a new era in Mozambique, a great deal has been accomplished. Nearly all development...
Commodity price shocks are an important type of external shock and are often cited as a problem for economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper quantifies the impact of agricultural commodity price shocks using a near vector autoregressive...
The white-painted cluster of traditional style buildings might suggest that this was a farm on the South African veldt. Not so however—it was Trade...
Malawi’s farm input subsidy benefits the poor and can be part of a viable national development strategy. Agriculture is Malawi’s main economic sector...
The article explores the various co-ordination mechanisms between the state and the business community in Ghana, and the implications for economic growth in the country. We focus on three periods in the economic history of state–business relations...
UNU-WIDER had a busy September. We celebrated our 30th birthday with some 600 people at our three-day conference on ‘Mapping the Future of Development...
Donors of foreign aid increasingly claim to consider gender inequality in the recipient countries to be a serious concern. While aid specifically to promote gender equality receives only a tiny share of aid budgets, allocations to education, health...
There are a series of questions to which we need answers if we are to implement climate change policies that help avoid negative effects. Three key...
February found UNU-WIDER busy sending out Calls for Papers on topics ranging from social protection to clean energy to discrimination and affirmative...
Part of Journal Special Issue The Political Economy of Africa's Emergent Middle Class
Part of Journal Special Issue The Political Economy of Africa's Emergent Middle Class