
229 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Working Paper
Can the Context Mediate Macro-Policy Outcomes?Local institutional and structural (meso) factors can play a role in mediating the returns to a macro-social policy. I focus on the Brazilian cash-transfer-programme Bolsa Familia and check how contextual features influence the returns to transfers...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Industry in UgandaThe paper looks at the evolution of industry in Uganda examining drivers and constraints since the pre-colonial period in the 1940s to date. It is argued that the state played a central role in industrialization during the pre-colonial and immediate...
Journal Article
Institutions and African EconomiesThis article presents an overview of the current special issue ‘Institutions and African Economies’. The findings include: (1) greater prevalence of democratic regimes improved both agricultural productivity and the overall growth of African...
Working Paper
A Quest for Institutional Foundations Towards Inclusive Development in Sub-Saharan AfricaThe paper explores the paths towards building institutional foundations for inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewing institutional configurations as a system of multiple equilibria, the concepts of endogenous institutions and...
Blog
Africa’s Recovery from the Global Economic CrisisAugustin Fosu and Wim Naudé African economies have been shaken by the global economic downturn which followed the US-centered financial crisis of 2008...
Policy Brief
What Can the European Central Bank Learn from Africa?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...
Working Paper
The industrial policy experience of the electronics industry in MalaysiaDespite the use of industrial policies to stimulate economic growth by several successful developers, latecomers have faced mixed experiences. Hence, this paper analyses the industrial policy experience of the electronics industry in Malaysia. A...
Working Paper
Explaining Threshold Effects of Globalization on PovertyThe paper focuses on the non-linearity of the transmission of the impact of globalization on poverty and the existence of threshold effects. Institutions constitute a critical factor for the creation of threshold effects in the impact of...
Working Paper
Understanding the Relationship between Institutions and Economic DevelopmentThe paper tries to improve our understanding on the role of institutions in development by critically examining the current orthodox discourse on institutions and highlighting some of its key problems. After discussing some definitional problems, the...
Working Paper
Terms of Trade and Growth of Resource EconomiesThe current paper demonstrates a dichotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade, employing as case studies the two African countries, Botswana and Nigeria. Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of...
Working Paper
How Does Colonial Origin Matter for Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa?This paper investigates some of the existing hypotheses regarding the transmission of different colonial legacies to modern day economic growth. The fact that different colonial strategies were pursued by different colonizers in various territories...
Working Paper
Institutional Reforms Debate and FDI Flows to MENA RegionThe paper revisits the policy debate on institutional reform approaches to property rights protection and empirically examines it in the context of FDI flows to the Middle East and Northern Africa region (MENA). Using panel data on 11 MENA countries...
Working Paper
Institutional Quality, Reforms and Integration in the MaghrebUsing panel data this paper examines the effects of institutions on the success of reforms and integration in the Maghreb. Institutional quality measures are developed using fuzzy-set based transformations of civil liberties and political rights. We...
Working Paper
Institutional Reforms, Private Sector, and Economic Growth in AfricaThe aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of institutional reforms on the revival of African economies. We study the impact of positive changes in business environment indicators of the Doing Business project and the Economic Freedom Index of...
Working Paper
Collective Values, Behavioural Norms, and RulesEconomic growth and poverty reduction require for a country to establish efficient rules for economic and political transactions. Poor countries suffer from inadequate, inefficient transaction rules. Formal rules (e.g., laws, policies) must be nested...