Journal Article
Poverty Mapping Based on First-Order Dominance with an Example from Mozambique
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...
Journal Special Issue
Aid to Africa
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...
Working Paper
The impact of aid on total government expenditures
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...
Policy Brief
Fiscal Policy for Poverty Reduction, Reconstruction, and Growth
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...
Working Paper
Innovative Ways of Making Aid Effective in Ghana
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...
Working Paper
Aid and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
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...
Working Paper
The Fiscal Effects of Aid in Ghana
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...
Working Paper
A Global Environmental Compact for Sustainable Development
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...
Working Paper
Measuring the Quality of Life Across Countries
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...
Working Paper
Income Distribution and Tax, and Government Social Spending Policies in Developing Countries
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...
Working Paper
User Fees, Expenditure Restructuring and Voucher Systems in Education
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...
Working Paper
Decentralization and the Provision and Financing of Social Services
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...
Working Paper
The impacts of public expenditure innovations on real exchange rate volatility in South Africa
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...
Working Paper
Social Spending and Aggregate Welfare in Developing and Transition Economies
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...
Working Paper
Impact of Sectoral Allocation of Foreign Aid on Gender equity and Human Development
While developing countries have made some progress in achieving human development since the turn of the century, many are still lagging behind in important human development goals such as education, health, nutrition and access to clean drinking...