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Over the past two decades, there has been unprecedented attention to the promotion of human development via government spending in the social sectors as a conditio sine qua non for economic growth and improved aggregate welfare. Yet the existing evidence on the subject remains limited...
At the heart of an effective extractive resource-based economic transformation and development is an effective regulatory framework that guides the promotion of investments into the sector, the procedure for responsible extraction, and the management of the utilization of such resources. Ghana...
We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...
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 household survey data, and use of simulated taxes and benefits obtained from ECUAMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model...
In this paper, we study the impact of ethnic fragmentation on the provision of private and public schools, separately. The distinction is made because the two types of schools have different objective functions, a factor which can influence the relationship between ethnic fragmentation and public...
This paper extends UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2016/79, which examined the economic situation in Tanzania during the resurgence of gold and diamond production after 1999, with the situation that emerged as the country began to exploit its very large resources of natural gas mainly from the Indian...
Energy subsidy reform is critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and tackling climate change. This paper sets out the evidence on the scale of subsidies and their impact. It then reviews the actions of donors in encouraging and supporting energy subsidy reforms. I find that,...
In high HIV-prevalence contexts, marriage can lead to significant risks through spousal behaviours. Yet, individuals cannot rely on their spouse to reveal their HIV status. Couples’ HIV testing and counselling can provide spouses with credible information about each other’s HIV status...
Government revenues are central to funding public expenditures in all countries. Increasingly, developing countries must look to raise domestic revenue through taxes as they have very large spending needs on human development, education, health, and job creation. All of these are expensive, and...
The increasing focus on domestic resource mobilization in developing countries means that, for researchers and policy makers, access to accurate and timely data is more important than ever. The Government Revenue Dataset (GRD) — developed by the International Centre for Tax and Development...
In 2016 WIDER Annual Lecture 20 was given by Professor Martin Ravallion. He discussed the economic and political issues surrounding the use of direct interventions, such as cash transfers and in kind contributions, against poverty. There is much hope for these interventions, but also much...
Ian Bremmer published a treatise on the stability of states built on the notion that states fall along a curve resembling a slanted “J” when plotting their stability against openness. States in the turnover process are considered unstable, and are at risk of either reversing to a...
According to a standard economic theory, capital should flow from rich capital-abundant countries to poor capital-scarce countries. However, a reverse pattern has prevailed in the world economy. This is the so-called Lucas paradox. In addition, it has been shown that counterintuitively there...
This survey of the 2016 replenishments of three multilateral development bank soft funds and of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria shows that a significant re-set of the multilateral development finance system is taking place, with grant funding from traditional donors generally in decline...
This paper puts sub-Saharan Africa’s economic development into perspective. While much did not go as hoped for at independence, much of the region has been on a more promising development trajectory since the mid-1990s, as we illustrate using growth, poverty, and human development...
We use household survey data to investigate the effects of formal, private property rights to agricultural land on agricultural investment, land valuation and access to credit in Tanzania. Results show that while there are no detectable effects of formal, private land property rights (written...