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Publications (43)
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Measurement, trends, impacts and policies
Many low- and middle-income countries are achieving good rates of economic growth, while high inequality remains a priority concern. Some countries meanwhile have low growth, high inequality, and pervasive poverty—often linked to their fragility. There is now active debate on how countries should...
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Davies et al. (2008, 2011) provided the first estimates of the global distribution of wealth, using 2000 as the benchmark year. These estimates have been revised and updated since 2010, and the purpose of this paper is to explain the ways in which the estimation methodology has evolved and improved...
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– An ordinal approach
In order to understand whether a reduction in overall poverty has improved the situations of the poorest, it is crucial to distinguish them from the moderately poor population. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms to distinguish subsets of the poor in a multidimensional counting framework. We...
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This paper sets out to investigate the wellbeing of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It undertakes spatial and temporal comparisons of women’s wellbeing using data from the Demographic and Health Survey and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. Using the multidimensional first...
This special issue introduction provides a historical perspective in order to contextualize the political economy of Africa’s emergent middle class. In doing so, three overarching research questions are discussed to better understand the middle class’ transformative potential. First, who constitute...
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The existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in the context of a developing country that can only...
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– Evidence from Brazil and South Africa
Human capital models imply that both the distribution of education and returns to education affect earnings inequality. Decomposition of these ‘quantity’ and ‘price’ components have been important in understanding changes in earnings inequality in developed and developing countries. This paper...
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The paper explores the paths towards building institutional foundations for inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewing institutional configurations as a system of multiple equilibria, the concepts of endogenous institutions and institutional changes are used to address the question of how...
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– Cross-country and Intertemporal Comparisons
This paper evaluates fairness in educational achievements through the ordered pair (WEEOp, IEOp) whose components provide: (i) A measure of social welfare which accounts for the achievement of less-advantaged pupils and (ii) a synthetic index of inequality in educational opportunities. Students’...
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– Learning from Social Accounting Matrices
This paper is the first to address the challenges of measuring the labour income share of developing countries. The poor availability and reliability of national accounts data, and the fact that self-employed people, whose labour income is hard to capture, account for a major share of the workforce...
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– New Evidence from Individual Income Tax Returns
This paper presents new evidence on the study of income mobility in Ecuador over the period 2004–11. We utilize longitudinal data of individual income tax returns to measure income mobility both at the top and at the middle of the income distribution, and we find three main empirical results. First...
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The paper proposes an analysis of the recent distributional dynamics in Uganda. This analysis is performed by endorsing an opportunity egalitarian perspective, in order to evaluate the outcome dynamics of specific groups of the population and infer the role of growth in the evolution of inequality...
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– Study on the Inequality–Development Relation Using Top Income Shares Data
This paper uses recently published top 1% income share series in studying the inequality– development association. The top income shares data are of high quality and cover about a century for some countries and thus provide an interesting opportunity to study slow development processes. The...
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– An Examination of the Factors Influencing Happiness among the Extreme Poor in Rural Ghana
Every person desires some level of inner fulfilment at different stages of life and this could come from a combination of several factors including material and resource acquisition and social prestige. The challenge, however, is whether happiness levels across the different social strata are the...
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– The Case of Botswana 1921-2010
In Sub-Saharan Africa we find some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. Nevertheless, we generally know very little about the historical development of inequality. In this paper we look at how inequality developed in colonial and post-colonial Botswana. We show that income...
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– Do Poor South Africans Underestimate Their Health Needs?
Researchers often rely on household survey data to investigate health disparities and the incidence and prevalence of illness. These self-reported health measures are often biased due to information asymmetry or differences in reference groups. Using the World Health Organization study on global...
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