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Publications (21)
Working Paper
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While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer-term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on political and economic crises to assess what we can learn from the long...
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– Evidence from a field experiment in India
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention that involves dissemination of publicly available...
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While the effects of corruption on bilateral trade have been relatively well explored, its effect on the composition of trading partners has not been studied. In this paper, we argue that corruption in a country is likely to impose asymmetric costs on its trading partners depending on their...
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– Assessing the relative effectiveness of egalitarian governance and healthcare system capacity on the COVID-19 pandemic
Scholars of public health typically focus on societal equity for explaining public health outcomes. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spate of studies showing a tight connection between inequitable access to healthcare, welfare services, and adverse outcomes from the pandemic. Others have...
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– The case of Brazil
Through rapid urbanization, Brazil—previously a country where most workers were in the agricultural sector—went through a strong process of structural transformation that lasted almost four decades until economic liberalization at the beginning of the 1990s. During the same period, income inequality...
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This paper evaluates structural change, inequality dynamics, and industrial policy in South Africa between 1960 and the present day. We find that South Africa experienced growth-enhancing structural transformation until the early 1970s, before entering a period of premature deindustrialization...
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– Structural transformation and inclusive growth in Thailand
Between 1981 and 2017, real gross domestic product in Thailand grew at an average annual rate of 5.7 per cent. Agricultural output grew more slowly than industry or services, and its gross domestic product share consequently declined. Industry’s gross domestic product share increased, and the share...
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The Bangladesh economy has undergone significant structural changes over the last four decades. The share of agriculture in GDP has declined, while the significance of industry and service sectors has increased. These structural changes have been associated with persistent challenges such as lack of...
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– An investigation of India’s employment guarantee programme
Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries.We focus on one such administrative failure—the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a life cycle...
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This study examines the structural transformation–inclusive growth nexus for Ghana. The data cover the post-independence period for Ghana and are phased into three periods: the post-independence period to the start of the economic recovery programme (ERP) and structural adjustment programme (SAP)...
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– A survey of structural transformation and inequality dynamics
This paper discusses the ‘developer’s dilemma’—a tension emerging from the fact that developing countries are simultaneously seeking structural transformation and broad-based growth to raise incomes of the poor. Simon Kuznets originally hypothesized that structural transformation may have a tendency...
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In this paper, we analyse the relationship between China’s structural transformation and the inclusiveness of its economic growth. China’s economy has undergone significant structural changes since it initiated the economic reforms in 1978. Economic activities have shifted from the low-productivity...
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– Kuznets’ ‘developer’s dilemma’ in Indonesia
We focus on special characteristics of the manufacturing sector, in terms of employment generation and productivity growth, that enable the rapid, resilient economic catch-up of developing countries. We consider the ‘developer’s dilemma’ and the relationship between manufacturing value added or...
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– Theory and evidence from India
What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...
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– The future of structural change in the developing world
This paper traces a set of major trends and future scenarios in global structural change. It argues that across multiple domains of change, developing economies are facing novel constellations of lateness and prematurity in technological and economic development. The paper explores these novel...
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– Two episodes
Developing countries face a trade-off between the twin objectives of structural transformation and inclusive growth. This is the ‘developer’s dilemma’. This study analyses the dilemma as it manifested itself in the Indian context, and identifies two distinct episodes over the post-independence...
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