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From the book: Industries without Smokestacks
Understanding the relationship between food access and welfare is critical in the design of social welfare policies, but the literature on this relationship is scarce. Employing the framework by Van Praag (1968) to a household survey data on Ghana, we investigate the monetary income required by...
In the first part of this blog, Alan R. Roe writes about the difficulties governments face in predicting revenues from extractive industries. Read part two here. Countries endowed with rich mineral or oil and gas resources have many competing uses for the revenues that arise from the...
This paper examines the influence of political considerations on intergovernmental fiscal transfers in Ghana. The two-step system GMM approach was used to estimate transfers and elections data for 167 districts from 1994 to 2014. The analysis was country-wide and covers swing districts as well as...
We use four novel, cross-country comparable tax-benefit microsimulation models for Ecuador, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Africa to evaluate ex ante the expansion of a universal old-age pension in a static setting. Universal pensions would significantly reduce poverty and inequality in settings in...
The decision to migrate is often influenced by the experience of earlier migrants from one’s household. Earlier migrants provide information on likely opportunities and potential risks and can offer support at destination to later migrants. We explore patterns of migration within...
This paper examines irregular South-South migration from China to Ghana, and the role it has played in transforming livelihoods and broader developmental landscapes. It looks at the entry from the mid-2000s of approximately 50,000 Chinese migrants into the small-scale gold mining sector. They...
To attract greater levels of foreign direct investment into their gold-mining sectors, many mineral-rich countries in sub-Saharan Africa have been willing to overlook serious instances of mining company non-compliance with environmental standards. These lapses in regulatory oversight...
A large informal sector is a challenge for developing countries building up social protection systems. Expanding social safety nets reduces poverty, but financing them can increase the tax burden, potentially reducing availability of formal sector jobs. This paper quantifies impacts on income...
This paper analyses the evolution of fiscal and monetary variables in Ghana, from the discovery of oil in 2007 through to 2014. It documents the deterioration of fiscal and monetary discipline over this period, which resulted in a rebound of debt, a deterioration of the external balance, and a...
This report documents GHAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ghana. This work was carried out by the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) and the University of Tampere in collaboration with the project partners. The results presented in this report are derived using...
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...