
204 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Blog
Identifying 'What Works' in Foreign Aid: Experimental and Non-experimental Approaches24 September 2013 Rachel M. Gisselquist and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa UNU-WIDER's ReCom programme is centred around four core questions: what works, what...
Blog
What Does Good Governance Mean?
Rachel M. Gisselquist Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. The...
Blog
Taking Inequality into Account in the Post-2015 Development Agenda
Rachel M. Gisselquist There is much to commend in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as we approach their target deadline of 2015. In addition to...
Blog
Dear Nicholas Kristof, We Are Here, Too!
21 February 2014 Rachel M. Gisselquist Earlier this month, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a scathing critique of the role of...
Blog
Why countries best placed to handle the pandemic appear to have fared the worstDuring the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and...
Blog
Why the Aid Effectiveness Principles are important for developmentDemonstrating empirically the Aid Effectiveness Principles' global impact on development is a challenge. But according to Rachel M. Gisselquist...
Blog
What Can Experiments Tell Us About How to Improve Governance?Rachel M. Gisselquist and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa Over the past decade, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have become a staple of research in...
Blog
Clientelism – another reason to worry about US democracy
The last several months have given us many reasons to worry about US democracy – not least the riot at the US Capitol and the president’s refusal to...
Blog
A WIDER perspective on migration
While many WIDER Development Conferences emerge from ongoing projects, our latest conference in October — ‘ Migration and mobility: New frontiers for...
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...
Blog
WDR 2017 does not disappoint: Four implications for work in development
As a political scientist specializing in the comparative politics of development, including particular attention to issues of governance and democracy...
Blog
Headline data suggests low-income states are coping better with the pandemic than high-income states. But is this true?States with fragile state health systems have been commended for effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But if we take into account factors...
Blog
COVID-19 in India: cases, deaths, and vaccinationsThe Omicron variant resulted in a third major wave of Covid-19 in India, with the number of cases exceeding those in the second wave, albeit causing...
Policy Brief
Building evidence around the effectiveness principlesThis policy brief draws on the studies presented at the International Research Conference on the Effectiveness of Development Cooperation on 17–18 November 2022, in Brussels, Belgium and jointly organized by UNU-WIDER and the European Commission (DG...
Blog
Foreign aid can help stem the decline of democracy, if used in the right wayDemocracy is having a hard time. In India, once the world’s largest democracy, the pandemic has hastened the country’s slide toward authoritarianism...
Book
Fragility, Aid, and State-buildingFragile states pose major development and security challenges. Considerable international resources are therefore devoted to state-building and institutional strengthening in fragile states, with generally mixed results. This volume explores how...
Book
Development Assistance for PeacebuildingThis is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at www.tandfebooks.com and offered as a free PDF download from Taylor & Francis Group and selected open access locations. Development assistance...
Book Chapter
Benin - a pulverized party system in transitionBenin has seen a rapid proliferation of political parties since the country’s democratic transition in 1990. Recent counts suggest that over a hundred political parties are registered in this nation of just over 9 million people. No single party...
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
State Capability and Prospects for Close Co-ordinationRecent research highlights the considerable potential of industrial policy to support structural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Given the importance of the state in industrial policy, this paper considers the implications for these discussions...
Working Paper
Legal empowerment and group-based inequalityLegal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on...
Journal Special Issue
Legal Empowerment and Group-Based InequalityThe articles in the forthcoming special issue are already available online on full open access. The special issue will be officially published in March 2019, vol. 55, issue 3. Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles...
Journal Article
Legal Empowerment and Group-Based InequalityPart of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Blog
A ‘data revolution’ for sustainable development leaves gaps on inequality
Among the many things said about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the description by the President of the UN General Assembly’s 70 th...
Book Chapter
Foreign aid and peacebuildingForeign aid is a core component of peacebuilding and among the largest external financial flows to fragile states and conflict-affected areas. Nevertheless, troubling critiques have been raised about its overall impact and effectiveness. Some of the...
Blog
COVID-19 and the Global South — From crisis response to sustainable development
Around the world, the pandemic, and the measures taken to address it, have had far reaching effects on poverty, inequality, and governance. And even...