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A Theory of Surplus Labour
35 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Microcredit and Poverty Alleviation: Can Microcredit Close the Deal?
M.G. Quibria In the wake of the worst famine of Bangladesh of the post-World War era Professor Muhammad Yunus launched a microcredit experiment in...
Working Paper
The African LionsThis paper mainly analyses the drivers of economic growth in Kenya and the linkages to the labour market dynamics, with a focus on population growth, its structure, and the prospects of reaping a demographic dividend. This is in recognition that...
Working Paper
Understanding Ghana’s growth success story and job creation challengesGhana’s status as one of the African Lions is linked to the country’s remarkable growth performance, which culminated in the attainment of lower middle-income status. However, employment response to growth has been weak. Additionally, growth has been...
Blog
Why are workers getting a smaller share of the cake in Mexico?As with many other developed and emerging economies, in recent decades Mexico has experienced a long-term decline in the labour income share. In other...
Working Paper
Return International Migration and Geographical InequalityThis paper explores entrepreneurship amongst return migrants, how their business locations and characteristics differ from other businesses, and the implications for rural-urban inequality. First, we examine, amongst returnees, the determinants of...
Working Paper
Public Policies to Promote Productive Occupation and Increase Formality Among the Moderately PoorPublic policy aimed at building capacity among the extremely poor (support for food and nutrition; health; education and, more recently, financial services), combined with a stable macroeconomic environment, has proved to be successful for poverty...
Working Paper
Structural transformation and sources of growth in TurkeyThis paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the supply and demand side of structural transformation in Turkey. Using the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, we find that labour productivity improvements explain more than half of...
Working Paper
Use of ICTs and the Economic Performance of SMEs in East AfricaThis paper assesses the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their impact on the economic performance of small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) of three East African countries: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Findings of the...
Blog
African Lions - Ghana's job creation successes and obstacles
Over the past two decades, Ghana’s economy experienced an average annual growth rate of 5.8 percent, and became a low-middle income country in 2007...
Blog
African Lions - Tapping the potential of Kenya's economic growth
From 2000-2014, like many other sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya experienced high growth, at an average of 4.37 percent. Unfortunately, the 2007...
Working Paper
Manufacturing Productivity, Deindustrialization, and ReindustrializationIn considering pathways to industrialization in the twenty-first century, cognisance needs to be taken of the fact that many countries have actually been deindustrializing. This paper analyses deindustrialization experiences internationally, by...
Blog
African Lions - Unpacking labor trends and growth in Mozambique
Mozambique, over the last two decades, has experienced explosive growth, with an average GDP growth rate of almost 8 percent between 1997-2015. Not...
Blog
Getting a high five - Advancing Africa’s transformative agenda
At his swearing in, the new African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina set out an agenda for the economic transformation of the continent...
Working Paper
Reigniting labour productivity growth in developing countriesWhile the negative effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on labour productivity are still fresh in people’s minds, the COVID-19 pandemic raises concerns that productivity will continue to decline. To boost labour productivity and regain...
Working Paper
Productivity growth effects of structural reformsWhich structural reforms affect labour productivity growth in developing countries? This paper answers this question by combining the local projections method and the inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (LP-IPWRA) method. We find that...
Displaying 16 of 35 results