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Publications (13)
Blog
– Why is 'Resetting the international monetary (non)system' one of the most popular economic titles at Oxford University Press?
The UNU-WIDER book ‘Resetting the International Monetary (Non)system’ by José Antonio Ocampo was recently ranked among the top ten economics books on Oxford Scholarship Online. Like all of UNU-WIDER’s publications, the book is free Open Access. In it, Professor Ocampo lays out a proposal for...
Blog
– An interview with Michael Keen
Michael Keen, Deputy Director of the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department, will be the keynote speaker at this year’s WIDER Development Conference on Public Economics for Development. Back in 2014 we interviewed him at our offices in Helsinki, and asked him about his work on poverty, tax, and spending...
My previous blog, which you can read here, commented on the manner in which mining companies had been able to respond to the recent decline in metals prices by significantly reducing their costs of production. In fact, this response arose partly from an exogenous event (lower energy prices), partly...
The recent publication of the 3rd edition of ICMM’s The Role of Mining in National Economies (hereafter RoMiNE3) provides us with the welcome biennial review of the global situation as it affects the large mining and metals industry. In addition to its regular update of the Mining Contribution Index...
Blog
– New findings, new questions
There are now a range of estimates of the global scale of tax avoidance. These include: the $600 billion annual tax loss estimated by IMF researchers Crivelli et al. (2015; 2016), which divides roughly into $400 billion of OECD losses and $200 billion elsewhere; the $100 billion annual tax losses...
There has been great excitement in recent years about the huge oil and gas finds, offshore and onshore, in a number of lower- and lower-middle-income countries such as Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and, more recently, Kenya. The scale of the potential reserves, future production levels and government...
Blog
In an earlier blog we showed how the trend from 1996 to 2012 in low- and middle-income countries had been one of unambiguously increasing resource dependence – measured in terms of exports. However, most of that sixteen year period coincided with a time of rising commodity prices. A question that we...
Blog
From 2000-2014, like many other sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya experienced high growth, at an average of 4.37 percent. Unfortunately, the 2007-2008 election-related violence as well as the global financial crisis halted much of Kenya’s economic progress, meaning it has lagged slightly behind...
Over the past two decades, Ghana’s economy experienced an average annual growth rate of 5.8 percent, and became a low-middle income country in 2007. Though Ghana’s average annual employment growth between 1993 and 2013 has been higher than sub-Saharan Africa’s—3.7 percent versus 3.0 percent—its...
Blog
The recent anti-corruption summit in London highlighted a much-publicized issue in development—transparency is crucial in the minerals sector. However, an event at UNU-WIDER made it clear that this is only one of many key issues related to the extractive industries, government revenues, and...
Mozambique, over the last two decades, has experienced explosive growth, with an average GDP growth rate of almost 8 percent between 1997-2015. Not only that, but, for the most part, Mozambique has a track record of solid macroeconomic policies, like controlling inflation, reducing current account...
Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country, has recorded high growth in recent years. Indeed, real GDP growth rate was 6.31 in 2014 (compared to the regional average of 4.35). Life expectancy has also increased (by 6.9 years since 1980) and so has mean years of schooling...
I spent the last couple of days at a fascinating workshop at UNU-WIDER on the role of extractive industries in development. Tony Addison, UNU-WIDER Chief Economist-Deputy Director, and Alan Roe, UNU-WIDER Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow and Oxford Policy Management Associate are pulling together...
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