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...