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Even though poverty and inequality have been of overriding concern in South Africa’s development policies and programmes since its democratization in 1994, measures of poverty, inequality, and related phenomena in the country do not show a clear improvement. In some important respects, they...
The two primary features of a job are its wage and how long it lasts. Today, there is an extensive literature on wages in the developing world thanks to the expansion of national household survey data. However, far less work has been conducted on job duration in these countries, primarily due to...
Plastics are universal and integrated into different sectors of the economy. Industrial policy requires countries to look at moving up the value chain and producing progressively more sophisticated products to contribute to improved economic development. The input materials that are used for...
East Asia’s successful experience in accelerating the process of industrial development with SEZs paved way for the use of SEZs as policy instruments in Africa. In southern Africa, Zambia and South Africa instituted SEZs in legal and institutional frameworks in the 2000s as mechanisms for...
There is growing recognition around the world that tradable services can play a valuable role in economic development. Africa is no exception, with the need for multiple routes to growth, particularly vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic. Tradable services — business activities that...
South Africa is, by most contemporary measures, the most unequal country in the world. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to country’s wealth inequality. It is crucial to accurately measure the concentration of wealth inequality over time, identify the root causes of the...
In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, at least 95 countries declared a national emergency, empowering governments to act in ways they would not normally to protect citizens. Such exceptional periods pose major risks for democracy and human rights, providing opportunities for leaders and states...
To celebrate its 35th birthday, UNU-WIDER has looked back at some of its greatest achievements. As the year closes, Armida Alisjahbana, Kunal Sen, Andy Sumner, and Arief Yusuf highlight the continued impact of UNU-WIDER’s flagship work and the future of knowledge about building more just...
Policy makers seeking inclusive growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural transformation, which is potentially inequitable, and keeping a check on rising economic inequality. How this dilemma is resolved by different countries and what factors influence...
Technological catch-up is bringing new asynchronies to development pathways. What does this mean for employment, globalization, and inequality? A chapter in the forthcoming volume The Developer’s Dilemma, which traces trends of structural transformation, offers a framework for understanding...
As the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, developing nations are struggling to deliver economic assistance and public services to their citizens, under pressures of fiscal constraints and tax revenue losses. To help governments in the developing world navigate through the crisis, it...
Democracy aid is a significant component of development cooperation. As a share of total aid, it has increased steadily since the mid-1990s. In 2018, countries in the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) devoted roughly 10 per cent of overseas development assistance (ODA) to this area....
Like many developing countries, Mozambique is struggling with problems of poverty, inequality, low productivity, unemployment, and low institutional capacity. The COVID-19 pandemic is now adding to these challenges. Finding solutions hinges on examining, understanding, and building the evidence...
The canonical approach to analyse the poverty impact of growth is based on the comparison of poverty before and after growth. Measurement tools endorsing this approach fail to capture the different experiences of poverty dynamic in the population: there can be groups of the population made...
Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between inequality and growth via growth and...
We investigate the relevance of beta (β, absolute and conditional) and sigma (σ) convergence in the economies of the Common Monetary Area of Southern Africa and in the provinces of the Republic of South Africa using panel data, allowing an understanding of growth and inequality in the...