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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...
124 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Blog
From the Editor's desk (November 2011)
Tony Addison As we come to the end of November, the snow has yet to arrive in Helsinki. We continue to enjoy clear skies and spectacular sunsets...
Blog
Diversity debit vs. diversity dividend: Challenging the conventional wisdomIt is widely accepted in recent work in economics and political science that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on the provision of public goods...
Journal Special Issue
Development FinancingThe real value of official aid flows fell for much of the 1990s, and private capital flows to low-income countries remain mostly limited. The decline in aid flows may endanger the development process, since they finance much of the development budget...
Working Paper
Why do women co-operate more in women’s groups?We examine a public goods game in 83 communities in northern Liberia. Women contributed substantially more to a small-scale development project when playing with other women than in mixed-gender groups, where they contributed at about the same levels...
Journal Article
Public Provision, Commodity Demand, and Hours of WorkThe theoretical analysis of optimal commodity taxation is advanced, but there is only limited empirical evidence to guide commodity tax policies. With this paper, we contribute to this body of literature by empirically examining, using Finnish...
Journal Article
How should commodities be taxed?The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This article examines the validity of this claim in an optimal...
Journal Article
Ethnic Politics in Ranked and Unranked SystemsThis article explores how ethnic politics may operate differently in societies with “ranked” versus “unranked” ethnic systems, where ethnicity and class correlate closely versus very little. It focuses on two hypotheses suggested, but not tested, in...
Journal Article
Ethnic Divisions and Public Goods Provision, RevisitedA considerable amount of recent work in political science and economics builds from the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity leads to poor provision of public goods, a key component of poor governance. Much of this work cites Alesina, Baqir and...
Working Paper
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in ZambiaThe hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on public goods provision is widely accepted. Notably, most work on this issue fails to distinguish adequately between national versus subnational governance. We find that subnational...
Blog
Making Finance the Servant not the Master
Tony Addison Today, there is much frustration with the financial sector. Society’s precious savings are not being put to the best of uses—investing...
Blog
Why the UN Arms Trade Treaty will be Good for Exporters
Alisa DiCaprio The global arms trade is a lucrative business. In 2010, total arms transfers were estimated at US$40 billion. Despite the global...
Blog
Bringing in Public Economics – An Interview with Jukka Pirttilä
29 March 2014 Quite a few prominent Finnish economists have been collaborating with UNU-WIDER throughout the years. One of them is Jukka Pirttilä, who...
Journal Article
Optimal taxation and public provision for poverty reductionThe existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in...
Book Chapter
Why do women co-operate more in women's groups?Part of Book Towards Gender Equity in Development
Working Paper
The Mozambican Civil ServiceThe post-independence Mozambican civil service, what was left of it following the exodus of Portuguese settlers in the mid-1970s, was poorly educated, with low incentives. In subsequent years, the combination of a war-ravaged economy, poor human...
Working Paper
A Public Goods Approach to Regulation of UtilitiesThe objective of this paper is to broaden the discussion on regulation in general and on the regulation of utilities in particular. Beyond the technical complexity involved in designing and implementing regulatory interventions, we focus our...
Working Paper
Consumer Participation and Pro-Poor Regulation in Latin AmericaIn spite of not being ‘public goods’ in the strict sense of the term, public provision has been a common way of supplying utilities services around the world. Among the major reasons underlying the dominant position of the public sector as the...
Working Paper
Public Spending and Poverty in MozambiqueLittle is known about the extent to which public spending is targeted towards the poor in Mozambique. The objective of the present paper is to assess whether public expenditures on education and health, in particular, are successful at reaching the...
Working Paper
Culture and the Fertility Transition in IndiaThe paper examines the evidence for various explanations usually offered for the differences in fertility behaviour across regions and over time in India. Female education has been found in other research to be the single most important factor...
Working Paper
Donors for tax moraleDo aid projects affect citizens’ motivation to pay taxes? We address this question by combining fine-grained data on aid projects from AidData and survey data from the Afrobarometer for 34 African countries. We first employ a subnational analysis...
Working Paper
Is economic development affected by the leaders’ education levels?Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders’ quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for...
Working Paper
Contract clientelismWhere does the money come from to buy votes? We argue that an important source of funds for vote-buying comes from ‘contract clientelism’, or the provision of public contracts to private firms in exchange for campaign donations. Using quantitative...
Working Paper
Ethnicity is not public service destinyMillions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress’s promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains...
Working Paper
Inequality, institutions, and cooperationWe examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation, and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab...
Journal Article
Measuring the Impact of Asset ComplementaritiesPart of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
Working Paper
Group inequality and regional developmentThis study explores the patterns and consequences of ethnic and regional inequalities in Pakistan. Using inter-district variation in inequality, ethnic fractionalization, and access to public goods, we extend the literature on public service...
Book Chapter
An Independent Press and Anti‐hunger StrategiesPart of Book The Political Economy of Hunger
Displaying 32 of 124 results