
180 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Inclusive Growth in Africa
24 September 2013 Roger Williamson Another big weekend for UNU-WIDER. The stage was well set on Thursday 19 September for a consideration of...
Working Paper
Financial disincentives to formal workThe aim of this paper is to quantify the financial cost that informal workers would incur in the event of entering formality, accounting for potential earnings gains upon entry. To do so, we use representative microdata from Ecuador and Colombia...
Report
Myanmar Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises 2018 Qualitative StudyThe purpose of this report is to give a nuanced picture of the SME business environment in Myanmar as a complement to the 2017 MSME quantitative survey conducted within the project ‘Towards Inclusive Development in Myanmar’. This project is a...
Working Paper
The Poverty Macroeconomic Policy NexusThe present paper utilises a short-run theoretical macroeconomic model of a small open economy to look at the impact of macroeconomic policies and financial deepening upon poverty through sectoral changes. This is because an expansion in certain...
Working Paper
From Local to Global and Informal to FormalThis is a brief sketch of the Self Employed Women’s Association’s (SEWA) three-decade-long journey from the local to global and informal to formal sector in search of finding work and income for now 720,000 women workers. Though SEWA remains a local...
Working Paper
A Macro Policy for Poverty Eradication through Structural ChangeThis paper argues that poverty originates in the structural injustices of a social order which incapacitates the poor from participating in the growth generating sectors of the economy and leaves them captives in the so called informal sector...
Working Paper
Decent Work and the Informal EconomyThe ILO was founded for social justice, a mandate expressed today in terms of decent work as a global goal, for all who work, whether in formal or informal contexts. In June 2002, the delegates to the International Labour Conference from governments...
Working Paper
Socio-Spatial Implications of Street Market Regulation PolicyUnlike in most Latin American cities, street vendors organized in farmers’ markets popularly known as ferias libres in Santiago de Chile, gained legal recognition early in the twentieth century. Since then, comunas, or local municipalities, have...
Working Paper
Consumption Smoothing Across SpacePanel data from villages in rural south India have been used for leading econometric studies on risk-sharing in village economies. The work has influenced debate on safety net design world-wide and has driven scholarly agendas on household economics...
Working Paper
Risk-Sharing and Endogenous Network FormationIn economic literature insurance networks are often treated as exogenous institutions. Frequently, the assumption is made that some clearly identifiable group (e.g. ‘the whole village’ or ‘the extended family’) constitutes an insurance network. Still...
Working Paper
Household Wealth in Latin AmericaThis paper provides a descriptive analysis of wealth ownership and wealth inequality in Latin American countries, using diverse published sources and primary data analysis for 16 nations. We produce estimates of the distribution of home ownership...
Working Paper
Manufacturing, Services and Premature Deindustrialization in Developing CountriesThis paper uses a Kaldorian framework to examine the evidence of deindustrialization in developing countries at low levels of income, the jobless growth in these economies and the fast expansion of the informal sector. The questions are specifically...
Working Paper
The Informal Sector in Developing CountriesThis study documents four key facts about informal economic activities: (1) the size of the informal sector varies greatly across nations; (2) this size is strongly correlated with economic development, the tax burden, and the rule of law; (3) the...
Working Paper
Minimum Wage and Informality in EcuadorThis paper investigates if changes in the minimum wage have influenced changes on the formality and informality rates, and the level of wages in Ecuador. A 12-year panel was built. It allows to overcome the short time span of household data and so to...
Journal Article
Firm-Level Corruption in VietnamThis article uses panel data from a survey of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam to uncover which firms pay bribes and which do not. We also study how bribe paying evolved between 2005 and 2007 and test how the determinants of bribes...
Working Paper
Measuring the Labour Income Share of Developing CountriesThis paper is the first to address the challenges of measuring the labour income share of developing countries. The poor availability and reliability of national accounts data, and the fact that self-employed people, whose labour income is hard to...