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Development FinancingThe real value of official aid flows fell for much of the 1990s, and private capital flows to low-income countries remain mostly limited. The decline in aid flows may endanger the development process, since they finance much of the development budget...
Working Paper
Why do women co-operate more in women’s groups?We examine a public goods game in 83 communities in northern Liberia. Women contributed substantially more to a small-scale development project when playing with other women than in mixed-gender groups, where they contributed at about the same levels...
Journal Article
Public Provision, Commodity Demand, and Hours of WorkThe theoretical analysis of optimal commodity taxation is advanced, but there is only limited empirical evidence to guide commodity tax policies. With this paper, we contribute to this body of literature by empirically examining, using Finnish...
Journal Article
How should commodities be taxed?The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This article examines the validity of this claim in an optimal...
Journal Article
Ethnic Politics in Ranked and Unranked SystemsThis article explores how ethnic politics may operate differently in societies with “ranked” versus “unranked” ethnic systems, where ethnicity and class correlate closely versus very little. It focuses on two hypotheses suggested, but not tested, in...
Journal Article
Ethnic Divisions and Public Goods Provision, RevisitedA considerable amount of recent work in political science and economics builds from the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity leads to poor provision of public goods, a key component of poor governance. Much of this work cites Alesina, Baqir and...
Working Paper
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in ZambiaThe hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on public goods provision is widely accepted. Notably, most work on this issue fails to distinguish adequately between national versus subnational governance. We find that subnational...
Working Paper
Taxes and Tax Reform in Ethiopia, 1990-2004In 1991 the Ethiopian Revolution Democratic Front (EPRDF) toppled the old ‘socialist’ regime that had ruled the country for seventeen years. In contrast to the previous policy regime of hard control, EPRDF initiated a wide range of reforms that...
Working Paper
Getting Infrastructure Priorities Right in Post-Conflict ReconstructionIn this paper, an attempt is made to identify some key challenges for infrastructure sectors in post-conflict reconstruction. In spite of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, infrastructure can be damaged in conflicts, and reconstructing infrastructure...
Working Paper
Post-Conflict RecoveryCountries as diverse as Afghanistan, Angola, and Sierra Leone are now attempting to recover from major wars, often amidst continuing insecurity. The challenge is to achieve a broad-based recovery that benefits the majority of people. The economic and...
Working Paper
Unlocking Public Entrepreneurship and Public EconomiesUnlocking human potential requires a rich network of institutional arrangements in both private and public spheres. Opening the private sphere to entrepreneurship and complex market organization is well understood as a key to increasing the level and...
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
A New Way of Monitoring the Quality of Urban LifeA growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a...
Working Paper
Revenue Potential of the Currency Transaction Tax for Development FinanceThe paper assesses the potential of currency transaction taxes (CTT, widely known as the Tobin tax), to raise revenue for global development. Though Tobin proposed and others assessed CTTs in terms of reducing exchange rate volatility and improving...
Blog
Diversity debit vs. diversity dividend: Challenging the conventional wisdomIt is widely accepted in recent work in economics and political science that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on the provision of public goods...
Working Paper
Assessing Well-being Using Hierarchical NeedsDetermining whether well-being has improved is an important multidisciplinary task. It is important therefore to develop a multidimensional measure of well-being that reflects a wide spectrum of human needs. A new approach is presented in this paper...
Displaying 16 of 124 results