Working Paper
Is inequality underestimated in Mozambique?
Household budget surveys in sub-Saharan Africa are designed to facilitate poverty measurement and may fail to fully capture consumption in wealthy households. As a result, inequality is likely underestimated. We address upper tier consumption...
Working Paper
Contracts between smallholders and private firms in Mozambique and their implications on food security
The focus of this paper is the role played in rural contexts by contract farming agreements between smallholders and private investors. These contracts can take different forms, but in general are agreements under which producers commit to supply...
Working Paper
Exiting the fragility trap
Those fragile states whose stagnation is so tenacious despite generous aid programs, and substantial and costly interventions, are stuck in a ‘fragility trap.’ Caught in a low-level equilibrium, trapped states appear to be in a perpetual political...
Working Paper
Contract farming in Mozambique
This paper analyses the implication of contract farming on gender inequalities in rural Mozambique. Contract farming is often considered one of the major tools of agribusiness development: it broadly includes those arrangements under which producers...
Working Paper
Robustness tests for multidimensional poverty comparisons
This paper provides practical tests for the robustness of multidimensional comparisons of well-being. Focussing on counting-type multidimensional poverty measures, I draw on the properties of positive Boolean threshold functions to prove that the...
Working Paper
Gender inequality in employment in Mozambique
We investigate the trend in the gender employment gap in the expanding non-subsistence sector of the economy in Mozambique, a country still characterized by a large subsistence agricultural sector. We show evidence that the gender gap has widened...
Working Paper
Investigating growing inequality in Mozambique
In this paper, we investigate the long-term trend of consumption inequality in Mozambique. We show that an imbalanced growth path disproportionally benefited the better-off and caused increasing inequality, especially in more recent years, curbing...
Working Paper
The counting approach to multidimensional poverty
This paper investigates the levels and evolution of poverty in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe using the decomposability properties of poverty measures based on a counting approach. We compare poverty measures such as the Alkire and Foster...
Working Paper
Does women’s empowerment affect the health of children?
In developing countries, women’s decisions concerning their children’s health depend on ‘empowerment’ concerning decision-making, husband/partner’s use of violence, woman’s attitude towards this violence, available information, and resources. We...
Working Paper
Educational inequality in Mozambique
In very poor countries, inequality often means that a small part of the population maintains living standards far above the rest. This is also true for educational inequality in Mozambique: only a small segment of the population has access to higher...
Journal Article
Evolution of multidimensional poverty in crisis-ridden Mozambique
Mozambique experienced important reductions in the poverty rate until recently, before two major natural disasters hit, an armed insurgency stroke in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, and the country started suffering from a hidden debt crisis...
Working Paper
Language and student learning
This ethnographic study explores the implementation of bilingual education in Mozambique: how it is understood, adapted, and resisted by school directors, teachers, and local officials. Bilingual education uses local languages in early grades before...
Book
Mozambique at a Fork in the Road
Few countries have experienced as many political and economic changes as Mozambique. A vast and diverse country, it faced a particularly difficult start after a long period of colonial dominance followed by a deadly war that formally ended only in...
Journal Article
Can information correct optimistic wage expectations?
Forward-looking expectations are central to job search but often inaccurate. To test whether public information can help correct beliefs, we embed an experiment in a longitudinal survey of Mozambican graduates. We quantify responses of own-earning...
Working Paper
The impact of COVID-19 on urban informal workers in Maputo
Informal self-employed traders in developing countries are vulnerable to shocks as they often lack access to social insurance or formal finance. This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these urban traders in the capital of...
Working Paper
The evolution of inequality in Mozambique
After decades of war, ending in 1992, Mozambique embarked on a path of sustained economic growth and substantial poverty reduction. However, these positive dynamics started to revert from 2015, with per capita growth rates getting close to zero and...
Working Paper
Determinants of gender gaps in youth employment in urban Mozambique
In this study, we explore the correlates of the employment gender gap among urban youth in Mozambique. Young people are confronted with simultaneous decisions about education, work and family life influenced by social norms around gender roles. Using...
Working Paper
Effects of the COVID-19 crisis on household food consumption and child nutrition in Mozambique
This study investigates the short-term impacts of an aggregate socioeconomic shock on household food consumption and children’s nutrition using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique. In response to the economic downturn, households are...
Working Paper
Digital labour platforms as shock absorbers
Digital labour platforms have grown five-fold over the last decade, enabling significant expansion in gig work worldwide. We interrogate the criticism that these platforms tend to amplify aggregate economic shocks for registered users (workers)...
Working Paper
What drove the profitability of colonial firms?
The magnitude of returns to colonial-era investments in Africa has been addressed in an extensive literature, as have the nature and legacies of extractive colonial institutions. However, the link between these institutions and the profitability of...
Working Paper
Migration out of poverty
Internal migration plays an important role in the economic development of individuals, their families, and their country. This study describes Mozambique’s most common migration patterns from 1992 until 2017 using data from three population censuses...
Journal Article
The impact of COVID-19 on consumption poverty in Mozambique
This study assesses the impact of COVID-19 on household consumption poverty. To predict changes in income and the associated effects on poverty, we rely on existing estimated macroeconomic impacts. We assume two main impact channels: direct income...
Working Paper
Health and ethnic inequalities in Mozambique with special reference to leprosy
The subject of this paper is health and ethnic inequalities in Mozambique, with special reference to leprosy. It is argued that the health policies and strategies adopted in the colonial and post-colonial periods led to an unequal distribution not...
Working Paper
Misinformed, mismatched, or misled?
Inaccurate expectations of future wages are found in many contexts. Yet, existing studies overwhelmingly refer to high-income countries, and there is little evidence regarding the sources of expectational errors.Based on a longitudinal survey of...
Report
Baseline survey on the school-to-work transition of technical and vocational education graduates in Mozambique
The research detailed herein was planned and implemented by researchers at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), the Develop-ment Economics Research Group (DERG) at the University of Copenhagen...
Report
Inquérito de base à transição ensino-emprego dos graduados do ensino técnico-profissional em Moçambique
A investigação aqui apresentada foi planeada e implementada por pesquisadores do United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), do Grupo de Pesquisa em Economia do Desenvolvimento (DERG) da Universidade de...
Working Paper
The impact of COVID-19 on consumption poverty in Mozambique
This study assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique on household consumption poverty. To predict changes in income and the associated effects on poverty and inequality, we...
Working Paper
The macroeconomic impact of COVID-19 in Mozambique
This study aims to assess the economic costs of COVID-19 and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique, relying on a social accounting matrix. It produces numerical results that represent the direct effect on (or ‘shocks’ to)...
Working Paper
The determinants of occupational sorting
We examine the link between individual characteristics and sorting into different occupations using data from university students in Mozambique. We provide a comprehensive approach combining the main determinants of occupational sorting identified in...
Working Paper
Horizontal and intersecting inequalities in Mozambique
This study seeks to add to the research on inequality in least developed countries, namely in Mozambique, by measuring and mapping indicators of horizontal wealth inequality along geographic regions and ethnolinguistic identities. Using census data...
Working Paper
Informal freelancers in the time of COVID-19
Despite the severe negative economic shock associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence from many contexts points to a surge in sales on online platforms, as well as shifts in the composition of demand. This paper investigates how the pandemic has...