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Publications (53)
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from the Sena Sugar Estates, 1920–74
ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | Forced wage labour (FWL) in colonial-era Portuguese Africa came to encompass a majority of working age men and persisted until the early 1960s. On the basis of reconstructed financial records from the Sena Sugar Estates in today's Mozambique, we estimate the long-run...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from countermeasures in Germany
We study how the stringency of policy measures to counter the COVID-19 pandemic affects individuals’ trust in formal institutions. Drawing on micro-level panel data from Germany spanning an 18-month period from the onset of the pandemic, we show that, on average, there is a pronounced negative...
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This paper compares two important sources of tax revenue statistics for African countries, namely the Africa Tax Administration Forum’s African Tax Outlook and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research's Government Revenue Dataset. We consider the background...
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We examine the long-term impact of forced labour on individual risk behaviour and economic decisions. For that, we focus on a policy of coercive cotton cultivation enforced in colonial Mozambique between 1926 and 1961. We combine archival sources about the boundaries of historical cotton concessions...
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– Evidence from Mozambique
The political consequences of economic inequality have been debated in academic and policy circles for centuries. The nature of this relationship seems highly dependent on specific contexts, with empirical studies showing mixed evidence on how economic inequality affects voting and other forms of...
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Following the abolition of slavery, various forms of compulsory labour were adopted by colonial powers to develop their economies. This paper analyses the contemporary consequences of compulsory cotton production—a forced labour system that operated in colonial Mozambique from 1926 to 1961. During...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
This article examines the impact of foreign aid and taxes on government spending for 67 developing countries during 1980–2013 using dynamic heterogeneous (panel) time-series techniques. We find that spending, aid and tax ratios comprise an equilibrium (cointegrated) relation.On average, the aid...
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Individuals are at their most mental plasticity in their impressionable years (ages 18–25 years) forming long-term attitudes and behaviours essential to functioning in a society, such as trust.In this paper we ask how exposure to natural disasters within the impressionable years may affect the...
– New findings from the Government Revenue Dataset
Across the Global South, governments continue efforts to increase domestic revenues and capacity for public spending. As concerns over debt distress grow and following the IMF and World Bank’s fall meetings, we share important research advancements made with UNU-WIDER’s Government Revenue Dataset...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– High poverty and low trust
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, sub-Saharan African countries faced the dilemma of how to minimize viral transmission without adversely affecting the poor. This study proposes an index of lockdown readiness, taking into account housing conditions and income security, and analyses how this...
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– A neural network approach
Double taxation treaties, by assigning taxing rights to rival countries and thereby eradicating double taxation, aim to facilitate cross-border trade and investment. The eradication of double taxation is achieved through reductions in withholding tax rates on passive income in source countries...
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– Explaining elite political alignments in a deeply divided society
The role of ethnicity in political behaviour remains unsettled theoretically. Instrumentalist theories emphasize cognitive processes, arguing that political actors strategically employ ethnicity to attain certain goals, while expressivist theories highlight affectual forces, arguing that actors are...
Working Paper
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– Legacies of the Great Recession and the consequences of the ‘trust crisis’
This paper investigates how persistent changes in trust caused by the Great Recession have affected how governments and citizens across Europe responded to the next global crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.We show that increases in individualism and mistrust towards institutions caused by individual...
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– Beyond accountability and responsiveness
This paper establishes how accountability quality might mediate the effect of tax revenue on sustainable development in 41 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1990–2019. The empirical evidence is based on three empirical strategies: generalized method of moments, instrumental variable Tobit...
Blog
Over the past few months, we have been carrying out extensive research in Mozambique as part of the Inequality and governance in unstable democracies – the mediating role of trust project. The research aims to understand the long-term impacts of cotton concessions —a forced labour system implemented...
Working Paper
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There is substantial empirical literature on the impact of climate vulnerability on economic outcomes in developing countries. However, this literature is still weak on the impact of climate vulnerability on tax revenue mobilization. To enrich the existing literature, this paper aims to investigate...
Displaying 16 of 53 results