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The issue of employer power is underemphasized in the development literature. The default model is usually one of competitive labour markets. This assumption matters for analysis and policy prescription. There is growing evidence that the competitive labour markets assumption is not valid for...
There exists a burgeoning empirical literature on the impact of aid fragmentation on development outcomes in aid-receiving countries, with it being widely recognized that aid fragmentation is deleterious. This paper adds to the existing literature by estimating the impact of aid fragmentation...
Rebels, militias, and criminal groups all govern civilians. Governing strategies adopted by armed groups during civil war likely influence citizens’ post-conflict political participation, with consequences for democratic politics. We theorize that an armed group’s position relative...
Multinational corporations shift a large share of their foreign profits to tax havens and, due to this corporate tax avoidance, governments worldwide lose a portion of their tax revenues. In this paper we study the consequences of multinational tax avoidance for the structure of government tax...
In this paper we reassess the relationship between inequality and human development, focusing on the differential effect associated with the concentration of national income at different parts of the income distribution. To do so, we rely on a large global panel of countries over the last decades...
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study examines industrialization in developing countries. It introduces the GGDC-UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, which provides consistent annual data of employment, real and nominal value added by 12 sectors in 51 economies for the...
Digital technologies can be deployed to improve job search, but their effectiveness in practice is disrupted. This column uses experimental data to investigate the effect of a digital job-matching platform on the labour outcomes of young people in Mozambique. The ‘treatment’ of a text...
Like most other countries, the government of Zambia introduced restrictions to control COVID-19, which considerably curtailed normal economic activity. A new WIDER and World Bank working paper, a multi-institutional collaboration of UNU-WIDER, the World Bank, the Zambia Revenue Authority and the...
Almost a century has passed since women in South Asia first raised a demand for equal rights in property, especially land, the single most important productive resource in most developing economies. Over time, the struggle broadened and diversified. Despite resistance from conservative lawmakers...
Across sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries there are striking differences in citizen willingness to pay taxes. For example, in Mali, Senegal, and Ghana, around half of those surveyed ‘strongly agreed’ that the government has the right to make people pay taxes, but in Cote d'Ivoire...
How best to increase and mobilize revenue is a key issue that confronts contemporary developing economies, but the same problems were faced —and solved— by today’s developed economies. In my latest WIDER Working Paper, I turn to history to study how strong fiscal states were...
Modern states are complex organizations which perform a broad range of functions. They have an important role in economic and human development. The consensus from recent research suggests that effective states provide crucial public goods and services, such as universal education, public health...
African countries raise lower amounts of tax as a share of national income (GDP) than other countries. Researchers are interested in understanding why this is the case. Tax performance studies —statistical analyses of factors driving the tax-to-GDP ratio— mainly focus on economic...
A few months ago, I was asked to deliver a lecture at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies on the UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset (GRD). The GRD is the most complete source of cross-country government tax and revenue data, with the newly updated version covering over...
We study the impact of corporate taxes on firm-level investments and business activity by exploiting a 6 percentage-point reduction in the corporate tax rate in 2012–2014 in Finland. We use detailed administrative data and a difference-in-differences method comparing small corporations (tax...
Redistributive systems in Africa are still in their infancy but are expanding in order to finance increasing public spending. This study aims at characterising the redistributive potential of six African countries: Ghana, Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa. These...