Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (34)
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.
– Who Belongs to Africa's Middle Class?
Part of Journal Special Issue
The Political Economy of Africa's Emergent Middle Class
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.
– Retrospect and Prospects
Part of Journal Special Issue
The Political Economy of Africa's Emergent Middle Class
Working Paper
pdf
– A Harbinger of Political Change?
South Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of the black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the middle class are no more likely to hold...
Working Paper
pdf
– Implications for Food System Transformation
We examine the implications of the rise of a middle class in East and Southern Africa for food consumption patterns and the food system. A unique classification of food items shows that highly processed food has one-third of the purchased food market, with comparable shares in rural and urban areas...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Middle Class, Private Sector and Economic Outcomes in Africa
Political scientists have generally seen two key features of African political economies—a relatively small or absent middle class, and a middle class that is unusually embedded in the state—as key explanations of the troubled political and economic trajectories of many African societies. This paper...
Working Paper
pdf
Scholars and practitioners once commonly linked ‘African culture’ to a distinctive ‘African capitalism’, at odds with genuine capitalism and the demands of modern business. Yet contemporary African business cultures reveal that a capitalist ethos has taken hold within both state and society. The...
Working Paper
pdf
The informal sector makes up an overwhelming share of both gross domestic product and total employment in Africa. In this paper, we lay out some of the basic characteristics of the informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa, relevant institutions, and development issues. Proposed policy approaches...
Working Paper
pdf
Agriculture and food cultivation production remains a key sector in the Vietnamese economy in terms of productive activities, income generation, and national export earnings. Higher world market prices should therefore in principle have a beneficial impact on rural farmers. This is based however on...
Working Paper
pdf
– State Health Insurance Scheme of Andhra Pradesh, India
The objectives of the study are three-fold: to investigate who are vulnerable to welfare loss from health shocks, what are the household responses to cope with the economic burden of health shocks and if policy responses like state health insurance schemes are effective in reducing the economic...
Working Paper
pdf
I investigate the relationship between children’s endowment and parental investment using a rich dataset on a cohort of children from Ethiopia, who were surveyed at ages eight, twelve and fifteen. Children’s endowment is measured by scores on tests of cognitive skills/ability. A child’s enrollment...
Working Paper
pdf
– a Retrospective Approach for Research Enquiry
This paper examines the impacts of the financial, food and fuel crises on the livelihoods of low-income households Nigeria. It uses primary household level data from Nigeria to analyse the impacts of induced price variability on household welfare. Our results indicate that aggregate shocks have...
Blog
– Mobility and Vulnerability in Latin America and the Caribbean
Luis-Felipe Lopez-Calva [1] The concept of social class and specifically middle class, has been widely discussed in sociology and other social sciences, but mostly ignored in modern economics. In practice, the middle class has been defined in terms of income, consumption patterns, occupational...
Working Paper
pdf
– a Subjective Well-Being Approach
A subjective well-being approach is followed to assess the magnitude of inefficiency in the use of income. The information comes from a Mexican survey and an X-inefficiency technique is used. The paper shows that there exists substantial inefficiency in the use of income at all income levels, even...
Working Paper
pdf
Using panel datasets from Mexico and Chile for the 2000s, we examine the determinants of middle-class intra-generational mobility. We define the middle class by means of a latent index of economic wellbeing that is less sensitive to short-term fluctuation and measurement error than standard measures...
Blog
– Can Microcredit Close the Deal?
M.G. Quibria In the wake of the worst famine of Bangladesh of the post-World War era Professor Muhammad Yunus launched a microcredit experiment in 1976 to assist a group of poor, highly indebted households, in Chittagong, Bangladesh. This experiment, which was to later emerge as the Grameen Bank...
Working Paper
pdf
– Structural Path Analysis for 1997-2007
Current explanations for private consumption’s diminished role in China focus on the expansion of exports and investments. Using structural path analysis, we find additional contributing factors. First, growth patterns during 1997-2007 favoured sectors with low production multipliers. Secondly...
Displaying 16 of 34 results