Working Paper
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in Zambia
The 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...
Working Paper
Supply-Side Constraints, Capital Goods Imports, and the Quality of Sub-Saharan African Countries’ Exports
In the last decade, a large portion of capital goods imports of Sub-Saharan African countries is telecommunications equipment, and China is now the main source of equipment for 30 Sub-Saharan African countries. A connection between specific types of...
Working Paper
Fast-Food Consumption and Child Body Mass Index in China
The rapid economic growth experienced within the past two decades in China highly correlates with childhood overweightness. The epidemic has become an issue of grave concern. A principal factor considered to be responsible for the epidemic in the...
Blog
Diversity debit vs. diversity dividend: Challenging the conventional wisdom
It is widely accepted in recent work in economics and political science that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on the provision of public goods...
Blog
Income generation and malaria in Uganda
by
Saurabh Singhal, Yao Pan
December 2017
Several large-scale efforts have been made to combat malaria in the last decade under the Millennium Development Goals, and while these have led to a...
Journal Article
Evaluating multiple spatial dimensions of economic growth in Brazil using spatial panel data models
The goal of this paper is to evaluate the results of regional economic growth model estimations at multiple spatial scales using spatial panel data models. The spatial scales examined are minimum comparable areas, microregions, mesoregions and states...
Working Paper
On the persistence of growth for South African firms
The growth of firms has been shown to have a meaningful impact on the health of firms and the economy in general. As the body of literature dedicated to understanding high-growth firms has expanded, an interest in the persistence of growth has become...
Working Paper
Measurement of a Multidimentional Index of Globalization and its Impact on Income Inequality
In this paper we present two composite indices of globalization. The first is based on the Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine and the second is obtained from principal component analysis. They indicate which countries have become most globalized and...
Working Paper
A Unified Structural Equation Modelling Approach for the Decomposition of Rank-Dependent Indicators of Socioeconomic Inequality of Health
We present a unified structural equation modelling framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with a simple ordinary least squares regression. The structural...
Blog
Rethinking African debt and exploitation of natural resources
In Africa, there is a distressing correlation between debt and the need to export raw materials. A new paradigm is needed in which African countries...
Working Paper
Macro-financial implications of public debt in South Africa
This paper examines the role of financial frictions in the public debt–growth nexus, documenting that a public debt shock has different macro-financial implications dependent on the state of financial markets in South Africa. A non-linear vector...
Working Paper
The effects of taxation on income inequality in sub-Saharan Africa
This paper investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use instrumental-variable two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable quantile...
Working Paper
A fiscal approach to the social contract in sub-Saharan African countries
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that many developing countries could not respond effectively to crises due to their limited capacity to diversify their social protection responses. Social protection systems depend mainly on government tax revenue...
Working Paper
Determinants of gender gaps in youth employment in urban Mozambique
In this study, we explore the correlates of the employment gender gap among urban youth in Mozambique. Young people are confronted with simultaneous decisions about education, work and family life influenced by social norms around gender roles. Using...
Working Paper
Unravelling Africa’s raw material footprints and their drivers
This paper applies an environmentally extended input–output analysis, leveraging the Eora database, to estimate the global raw material footprints of 51 African nations from 1995 to 2015. It employs least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and...
Working Paper
Migration out of poverty
Internal migration plays an important role in the economic development of individuals, their families, and their country. This study describes Mozambique’s most common migration patterns from 1992 until 2017 using data from three population censuses...
Working Paper
Explaining the Poverty Difference between Inland and Coastal China
This paper proposes a decomposition framework for quantifying contributions of the determinants of poverty to spatial differences or temporal changes in poverty. This framework is then applied to address the issue why poverty incidence is higher in...
Working Paper
Regional Income Inequality in Rural China, 1985-2002
This paper depicts the trend of regional inequality in rural China for the period 1985-2002. The total inequality is decomposed into the so-called within- and between-components when China is divided into three regional belts (east, central and west)...
Working Paper
Gender differences in formal wage employment in urban Tanzania
This paper uses the latest Tanzania labour force survey—the Integrated Labour Force Survey—and a censored bivariate probit model to analyse gender differences in labour force participation and gender bias in formal wage employment in urban Tanzania...
Working Paper
Digital technology and productivity of informal enterprises
The lingering policy dilemma facing many governments in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years is what can be done in the short to medium term to boost the output and incomes of individuals and enterprises in the informal sector, given the size and...
Working Paper
The recentered influence function and unidimensional poverty measurement
I discuss the applicability of the recentered influence function (RIF) to the analysis of poverty differentials between distributions (regression-based decomposition into composition and income structure effects). I show that the predominant approach...
Working Paper
Commercialization in agriculture in rural Vietnam, 2006-14
The vast majority of households in rural Vietnam undertake agricultural activities and for many this is their main livelihood. Moreover, this agriculture has become increasingly commercialized over time. This paper uses the five wave VARHS balanced...
Working Paper
The Porous Dialectic
This paper provides a survey of six widely used non-experimental methods for estimating the impact of programmes in the context of developing economies (instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, direct matching, propensity score matching...
Working Paper
Income and malaria
We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of an agricultural extension program in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility for the program reduced the incidence of malaria by 8.8 percentage points, with...
Working Paper
The Impact of Foreign Aid in Education Growth
This paper examines whether foreign aid in education has a significant effect on growth. We take into consideration the heterogeneous nature of aid as well as the heterogeneity of aid recipients—we disaggregate the aid data into primary, secondary...
Working Paper
Differences in Food Insecurity between Girls and Boys
Using data from a 2004 household-based survey of children, we examine differences between boys and girls in self reports of food insecurity in Zimbabwe. Previous studies have taken only the views of the household head into consideration in...
Research Brief
Firms with high-growth episodes in South Africa
The analysis of firm growth has been a topic of consistent economic interest as a growing body of literature has lent support to the possibility that the majority of growth and new employment creation is the result of a small sub-sector of high...
Working Paper
Remittances and Financial Inclusion in Development
In this paper we focus on the relationship between remittance inflows and financial inclusion in developing countries. We present single equation estimates on remittances and financial inclusion, and system estimates in which economic growth is...
Working Paper
The External Debt-Servicing Constraint and Public Expenditure Composition
The paper explores the impact of a binding external debt-servicing constraint on the sectoral composition of government expenditures in the economies of Africa, where this constraint has traditionally been most prevalent. Applying seemingly unrelated...