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Can agricultural development programs improve health-related outcomes? We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of a large-scale agricultural extensionprogram in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility for the program reduced the...
Motivated by the siloed nature of much poverty research, as well as the challenge of finding inclusive operational definitions of poverty, this study reflects on the merits of seeking to reconcile economic (quantitative) and anthropological (qualitative) analytical approaches. Drawing on...
At the beginning of this decade, large offshore natural gas fields were discovered in north-east Mozambique. Investment is now flowing into the country, and a boom in the natural gas sector is expected. According to estimates from Mozambique’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, additional...
Africa’s rising public debt continues to attract increased attention regionally and internationally. The narrative about Africa seems to have gradually shifted from ‘Africa rising’ to ‘rising debt in Africa’. In December 2018, I attended the African Economic Research...
This paper examines the impact of the introduction of the value-added tax on inequality and government revenues using newly released macro data. We present both conventional country fixed effect regressions and instrumental variable analyses, where VAT adoption is instrumented using the previous...
The North Indian village of Palanpur has been the subject of close study over a period of six decades from 1957/8 to 2015. Himanshu et al. (2018) have documented the evolution of the village economy over this period in an exhaustive study entitled How Lives Change: Palanpur, India and Development...
Monetary policy is believed to have a disproportionate effect on firms, depending on their size. Financially constrained firms with limited access to capital markets are expected to be more sensitive to changes in interest rates; this is characteristic of small firms. This paper empirically...
This paper has three primary objectives. First, it provides a broad overview of the available South African data used to examine gender in the labour market, with specific reference to the South African Revenue Services (SARS) tax data which has recently been made available. Second, the paper...
This paper provides a retrospective assessment of the effects of trade policies on South African manufacturing since the transition to democracy, examining the differences and commonalities in the views of economists in favour of and against an acceleration of trade liberalization. Data from...
This study investigates the effect of real exchange rate volatility on the distribution of income between labour and capital in South Africa. Both symmetric and asymmetric effects are considered. Using quarterly data for 1985:1–2018:3 and local linear projection, we find that the immediate...
This article is from a forthcoming UNU-WIDER special issue of the International Journal of Microsimulation In this paper we explore the eligibility criteria for the social benefits that form part of the Productive Social Safety Net programme in Tanzania — the Basic Cash Transfer and...
This article is from a forthcoming UNU-WIDER special issue of the International Journal of Microsimulation A key challenge facing developing countries when they are gradually building up their social protection system is the presence of a large informal sector. Social safety nets should be...
This article is from a forthcoming UNU-WIDER special issue of the International Journal of Microsimulation The aim of this paper is to explore the redistributive effects of taxes and benefits in Ecuador using two different approaches: direct use of reported taxes and benefits in survey data,...
This article is from a forthcoming UNU-WIDER special issue of the International Journal of Microsimulation We use four novel, cross-country comparable tax-benefit microsimulation models for Ecuador, Ghana, Tanzania and South Africa to analyse ex ante the expansion of a universal old-age...
The purpose of this report is to give a nuanced picture of the SME business environment in Myanmar as a complement to the 2017 MSME quantitative survey conducted within the project ‘Towards Inclusive Development in Myanmar’. This project is a collaboration between the Central...
The ability to raise revenues from taxes – called “fiscal capacity” – is a crucial aspect for the functioning of any state. Being able to tax citizens, and collect revenues efficiently, is a cornerstone of state formation and survival. Secondly, greater fiscal capacity...