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I had the privilege to participate in the UNU-WIDER Winter School as one of the lecturers. In this blog, I explain my main takeaways for students and why I found this capacity development initiative important and urgent. Having more data, particularly on tax avoidance in African countries, brings...
Working Paper
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– The political economy of compliance
This paper explores the link between trust in government, policy-making, and compliance. It focuses on a specific channel whereby citizens who are convinced that a policy is worthwhile are more motivated to comply with it. This in turn reduces the government’s cost of implementing a policy and may...
The importance of conducting high-quality analysis for policy advice cannot be understated. The UNU-WIDER Winter School for tax policy research delivered the right tools for my day-to-day work. I’m an economist working as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Policy Planning and Research Department of the...
My motivation for doing economics research comes from the wish to see every human being have their basic needs met and enjoy their life. My interest is in public economics. This knowledge helps me to analyze how state economic policies affect the population and thus helps me find the best policies...
– One of the best global training programmes in tax research
Across Africa, governments are now waking up to the fact that taxation targets or economic development goals will not be met without policies that are based on scientific evidence. More effective revenue collection is required to achieve broad-based growth and fiscal sustainability. This paradigm...
‘I intend to see a world in which tax policy research is based on evidence, and policy decisions are data-driven.’ This is an aspiration expressed by a participant of the WIDER Winter School 2022. The comment summarizes well the reasoning behind the course and UNU-WIDER’s goals for domestic revenue...
On the third day of the annual UNU-WIDER Conference on 8 September, RISE presented findings from three studies on COVID-19's impact on education systems. These studies underline the urgent need to remediate learning losses, but they also illustrate how systems can ‘build back better’. RISE’s panel...
Around the world, the pandemic, and the measures taken to address it, have had far reaching effects on poverty, inequality, and governance. And even as the need for global action has increased, many wealthy countries have turned inwards — with closed borders, stockpiling of vaccines, and...
The opening keynote of the recent WIDER Development Conference, COVID-19 and development – effects and new realities for the Global South, was given by Oriana Bandiera, Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, an accomplished economist with several awards under...
The World Bank recently estimated that two-thirds of all jobs in developing countries are at risk of automation. This shocking statistic raises an important question: ‘What can policy makers do to prepare for this tech revolution?’ From 11-13 September UNU-WIDER hosted our 2019 WIDER Development...
– Views from Experts
13 September through 15 September 2018, UNU-WIDER hosted the Think development - Think WIDER conference in Helsinki, Finland. Over three days, participants from fifty-nine countries gathered at the Marina Congress Center to discuss the past, present, and future of development economics and the field...
It’s early July and I’m back in Maputo, Mozambique, looking over the calm sea at the boats that fish the waters for the seafood that makes visiting this part of Africa such a treat. The sunset here is a delicate combination of pale turquoise, light grey, and warm pink. Coming from the Finnish summer...
Blog
In my last blog I wrote about the common factors at play in political and economic transitions. Using the case of South Sudan, I demonstrated how these factors laid the groundwork for a fragility trap. In this post, I explain what this means. Trap begins with missed opportunities for reforms In the...
What does it mean to be a fragile state? According to the IMF, fragile states are those in ‘which the government is unable to reliably deliver basic public services to the population – [they] face severe and entrenched obstacles to economic and human development.’ It is with this understanding that...
No country is immune from unexpected crises, such as sudden breakouts of violence, war, or natural disasters. Even if some can be predicted, experience shows that the intensity, scale, and geographic spread of crises cannot be forecast with any kind of certainty. One particularly vulnerable group...
Every single day, approximately 830 women die from causes related to childbirth. Despite considerable advances in maternal health over the last three decades (Hogan et al. 2010) as well as worldwide commitment to reducing maternal deaths, sufficient reductions have not been achieved. These deaths...
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