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This study explores the relationship between household poverty and depth of informality by proposing a new measure of informality at the household level. It is defined as the share of activities (hours worked or income earned) without social insurance for wage workers in the household. We...
This note introduces the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database (ETD), which provides time series of employment and real and nominal value added by 12 sectors in 51 countries for the period 1990–2018. The ETD includes 20 Asian, 9 Latin American, 4 Middle-East and North African, and...
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 accept the results of the November election, with Republican support. Rachel Gisselquist argues that clientelism is yet another reason...
What was the impact on earnings of the economic crisis caused by the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ecuador? To what extent did social assistance programmes compensate household income losses? ECUAMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Ecuador, helps to assess the distributional...
On 17 February 2021 the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) and UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database (ETD) will be launched. The new database provides crucial information on changes in the economic structure of economies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America....
Over 70% of global trade goes through global value chains (GVCs). For firms in developing countries, insertion into GVCs has been associated with economic and social benefits. Yet, critics also point to power imbalances between lead firms in developed countries and supplier firms in the Global...
Sri Lanka, like the Nordic countries, is a social democratic nation with a strong welfare state. It is classified as a ‘high human development’ country by the United Nations, with a human development index above the average of 0.76 for countries in the same income classification....
Economics researcher Aimable Nsabimana shares the relevance and inspiration behind his recent work with UNU-WIDER on climate change and human development in Tanzania. How can research contribute to the wellbeing in Africa? In 2019, I spent some months at UNU-WIDER in Helsinki as a...
Director of UNU-WIDER, Professor Kunal Sen is a world leading expert in development economics and led on ESID’s research into economic growth. In this blog he outlines some of our main findings and positions on the value and drivers of economic growth, based on nearly a decade of research...
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spate of studies showing a close connection between inequitable access to health care, welfare services and adverse outcomes from the pandemic. Others have argued that democratic governments have generally failed relative to more...
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW. Corruption is widely believed to have an adverse effect on the economic performance of a country. However, many East and Southeast Asian countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption...
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW. In many low-income transition countries, where formal institutions such as courts do not function effectively, informal institutions are often used by firms to minimize transaction risks. We examine the role of informal institutions, in the forms of relational...
What is the effect of gender priming on solidarity behaviour? We explore a two-player solidarity game where players can insure each other against the risk of losses. In the utility function, priming is represented as the ‘change in weight’ given to the other player’s payoff...
In this paper we analyse informal work in Mexico, which accounts for the majority of employment in the country and has grown over time. We document that the informal sector is composed of two distinct parts: salaried informal employment and self-employment. Relative to self-employment and formal...
We study socioeconomic indicators of female labour force participation in off-farm formal employment in a subsistence agriculture setting in northern Ghana, where a new commercial farm provides a positive demand shock for low-skilled labour. We use a set of quantitative and qualitative data...
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention that involves dissemination of publicly...