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From the Editor's Desk (January 2012)Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The...
Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The...
We explore a novel first-order dominance (FOD) approach to poverty mapping and compare its properties to small-area estimation. The FOD approach uses census data directly, is straightforward to implement, is multidimensional allowing for a broad...
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) give aid to Africa a new emphasis. Yet aid flows to Africa have trended downward over the last decade, and as a consequence more Africans now live in poverty. This is especially true of Sub-Saharan Africa. Any...
Aid is said to be fungible at the aggregate level if it raises government expenditures by less than the total amount. This happens when the recipient government decreases domestic revenue, decreases net borrowing, or when aid bypasses the budget...
Growth, poverty reduction, and social peace are all undermined when public expenditure management and taxation are weak and when the fiscal deficit and public debt are not managed successfully. And large-scale aid and debt relief cannot work without...
There has been significant amount of aid inflows to developing countries including Ghana, but these have been very volatile. Aid flows have been associated with low domestic resource mobilization and have reduced Ghana to a country heavily dependent...
This paper is a contribution to the literature on aid and growth. Despite an extensive empirical literature in this area, existing studies have not addressed directly the mechanisms via which aid should affect growth. We identify investment as the...
An important feature of aid to developing countries is that it is given to the government. As a result, aid should be expected to affect fiscal behaviour, although theory and existing evidence is ambiguous regarding the nature of these effects. This...
The proposals in this paper derive from studies undertaken at WIDER on questions relating to sustainable development in developing countries. The paper attempts to quantify the resource transfer implications of supporting feasible environment...
This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of interrelationships among the determinants of the quality of life (QOL). We show that various measures of well-being are highly sensitive to domains of QOL that are considered in the...
This paper reviews income distribution in developing (and transition) countries in recent decades. On average, before-tax income distribution is less unequal in developing countries than it is in industrial countries. However, unlike industrial...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid for Gender Equality and Development
The analysis of the optimal funding of education is complicated by the numerous and serious market failures which are likely to characterize a free market for education. Prominent amongst these are the likely external benefits of education, stressed...
This paper is the fruit of an attempt to distinguish the elements, present in a fiscal decentralization process, that are likely to contribute to efficiency enhancement in the provision of social services in developing countries. From the...
This study investigates the impacts of public expenditure innovations on exchange rate volatility in South Africa using quarterly data for the period 1970–2019. To achieve this objective, a version of the vector autoregressive impulse response model...
Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is...