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Annual Report 2022 Cover

UNU-WIDER 2022 Annual Report is released

2022 was a key year in the UNU-WIDER 2019–2023 work programme, with great achievements made possible through our partnerships and collaborations Read more in the 2022 Annual Report.
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Josue Figueroa / Unsplash

The Job Ladder: Transforming informal work and livelihoods in developing countries

NEW BOOK - Available now on Open Access. Providing a nuanced view of informality across a range of developing economies using a common conceptual framework.
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UNU-WIDER's LDC5 Conference Exhibition

Visit the virtual booth featuring materials shared at the 5th United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in Doha, Qatar. Check out photos, videos, and infographics on our research results from LDCs.
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Check out our new series of short videos on ‘The puzzle of peace’!

Learn about key issues in peace and conflict research in two minutes from top experts in the field. Click here to watch.
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UNU-WIDER Winter School cohort

Capacity development in action: UNU-WIDER Winter School

In collaboration with Stellenbosch University, we organised an intensive winter school course on tax policy research, delivering training to 27 African researchers from 13 countries. Read more
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180 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...

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Blog
Inclusive Growth in Africa
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by Roger Williamson September 2013

24 September 2013 Roger Williamson Another big weekend for UNU-WIDER. The stage was well set on Thursday 19 September for a consideration of...

  • Economic policy
  • Equality and inequality
  • Structural adjustment (Economic policy)
Working Paper
Financial disincentives to formal work

The 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...

  • Formalization
  • Informal sector
  • Informality
Report
Myanmar Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises 2018 Qualitative Study

The 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...

  • SMEs
  • Manufacturing
  • Informal sector
Working Paper
The Poverty Macroeconomic Policy Nexus

The 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...

  • Mathematical models (Equilibrium (Economics))
  • Informal sector
  • Macroeconomics
Working Paper
From Local to Global and Informal to Formal

This 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...

  • Informal sector
  • Poverty
  • Women
Working Paper
A Macro Policy for Poverty Eradication through Structural Change

This 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...

  • Economic development
  • Informal sector
  • Macroeconomics
Working Paper
Decent Work and the Informal Economy

The 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...

  • Economic development
  • Informal sector
  • International agencies
Working Paper
Socio-Spatial Implications of Street Market Regulation Policy

Unlike 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...

  • Commercial policy
  • Competition
  • Farm produce
Working Paper
Consumption Smoothing Across Space

Panel 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...

  • Informal sector
  • Insurance
  • Risk management
Working Paper
Risk-Sharing and Endogenous Network Formation

In 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...

  • Informal sector
  • Insurance
  • Risk
Working Paper
Household Wealth in Latin America

This 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...

  • Families
  • Income distribution
  • Informal sector
Working Paper
Manufacturing, Services and Premature Deindustrialization in Developing Countries

This 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...

  • Economic development
  • Economic policy
  • Informal sector
Working Paper
The Informal Sector in Developing Countries

This 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...

  • Informal sector
  • Labour market
  • Market segmentation
Working Paper
Minimum Wage and Informality in Ecuador

This 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...

  • Informal sector
  • Labour market
  • Labour supply
Journal Article
Firm-Level Corruption in Vietnam

This 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...

  • Informal sector
  • Econometrics
  • Entrepreneurship
Working Paper
Measuring the Labour Income Share of Developing Countries

This 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...

  • Income distribution
  • Informal sector
  • Labour costs
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