
81 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Working Paper
Zaire after MobutuThe recent history of Zaire presents a unique opportunity to understand and explain humanitarian emergencies. This monograph follows an inductive approach in analysing the trajectory of state-building in Zaire as a significant explanatory variable of...
Working Paper
Financial Markets and GovernmentsA survey of the changing relationship between the market for political services and the market for financial services.
Working Paper
South Africa’s Emerging Black Middle ClassSouth Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of the black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the...
Working Paper
Varieties of Capitalists?Political scientists have generally seen two key features of African political economies—a relatively small or absent middle class, and a middle class that is unusually embedded in the state—as key explanations of the troubled political and economic...
Working Paper
Are Electoral Coalitions Harmful for Democratic Consolidation in Africa?Electoral coalitions are becoming increasingly popular among opposition parties in Africa because they offer many advantages with respect to reducing party fragmentation and increasing incumbent turnovers. At the same time, however, they are often...
Working Paper
Local Government, Taxes, and GunsThis paper evaluates transformative policy innovations with respect to security and taxation in the three main Colombian cities: Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. In the first two, such policies were associated with huge success. Elsewhere we (Gutiérrez et...
Working Paper
Can Industrial Policy Work under Neopatrimonial Rule?Technological latecomer countries face a dilemma, they need to pursue pro-active industrial policies to compensate for manifold disadvantages vis-à-vis established competitors, but at the same time, due to neopatrimonial politics and capacity...
Working Paper
Rethinking China’s Path of IndustrializationThis study shows that China’s post-1949 state-led industrialization has closely followed an underlying path that began in the late nineteenth century. It was initiated by pressing national defence needs and has since been motivated by the same and...
Working Paper
Institutional differences across resource-based economiesTo predict economic success and failure, academics and policymakers alike are interested in the differences in institutional structures across natural resource-based economies. This paper uses a political economy framework to examine the effect of...
Working Paper
Political economy of Nigerian power sector reformThe Nigerian power sector reform is necessitated by the chronic poor performance of the sector and has as its compass the 2005 Electric Power Sector Reform Act and the Roadmap for Power Sector Reform 2010. Implementing reform has resulted in...
Working Paper
The political economy of energy innovationThis paper empirically investigates the effects of environmental policy, institutions, political orientation, and lobbying on energy innovation and finds that they significantly affect the incentives to innovate and create cleaner energy efficient...
Working Paper
Border adjustment mechanismsThis paper examines, from a multidisciplinary perspective, plausible hypotheses for implementation of border carbon adjustment mechanisms, seen as a complement to strong environmental regulation. It highlights economic, legal, and political...
Working Paper
Do Structural Reforms always Succeed?In the last twenty years, Brazil has undergone several attempts of improving sustainable growth through stabilization programmes, and more recently, structural reforms in line with the Washington Consensus Agenda. The results, however, have been...
Working Paper
Governing clean energy transitions in China and IndiaChina and India will have to radically transform their electric power systems in order to decouple economic growth from unsustainable resource consumption. While the majority of transition literature has focused on the diverse socio-technical factors...
Journal Article
In the shadow of the citySub-Saharan Africa is the fastest urbanising region of the world. This demographic transformation has occurred in concert with two other trends in the region, nascent democratisation and stalled decentralisation. Using the case of Lusaka, Zambia...