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Publications (26)
Donors increasingly speak of locally led aid response, but often do not walk the walk. Case in point is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the humanitarian and development agency of the largest donor country in the world. In late 2021, USAID set a target that 25% of its...
Blog
Amadou Boly is Special Assistant in the Economic Governance and Knowledge Management Complex at the African Development Bank (ADB). Before that, he was a research fellow and a coordinator of the visitor programme at UNU-WIDER. In this blog, he reflects on his journey since leaving UNU-WIDER and...
– Four pieces of advice for policymakers
From profit shifting to sanction evasion, illicit financial flows divert funds away from essential poverty-fighting and infrastructure programs. A growing body of research provides essential insights for policymakers on how to tackle this key development challenge.Illicit financial flows (IFFs) are...
Blog
– UNU-WIDER Visiting PhD and Scholar programmes
Every year about 20 visitors come to Helsinki to find a new home at UNU-WIDER in our Visiting Scholars and PhD Fellowship programmes. Although their stay is only three months, the connections they make last much longer, with past visitors’ continued engagement through our research opportunities...
Blog
– The annual profits multinational corporations shift to tax havens continues to climb and climb
About a decade ago, the world’s biggest economies agreed to crack down on multinational corporations’ abusive use of tax havens. This resulted in a 15-point action plan that aimed to curb practices that shielded a large chunk of corporate profits from tax authorities.But, according to our estimates...
The importance of domestic revenue mobilization and taxation for sustainable development is widely acknowledged in global development discussions, but for real change to happen the amounts of development aid and political engagement need to live up to commitments.Key factors of development...
The world has been trying to curb profit shifting to tax havens for a decade, but consistent time series evaluating the impact of these reforms have been largely absent. This column uses a new time series of global profit shifting covering the 1975–19 period to estimate that the fraction of...
Blog
It was surreal to take a springtime walk along the harbor in Helsinki on my way to UNU-WIDER’s headquarter offices for the first time. My initial application to the UNU-WIDER PhD Fellowship programme had been rejected. In 2021, I applied again and was genuinely surprised to be accepted —shocked...
Does foreign aid end up in the pockets of elites instead of contributing to inclusive economic development? A recently published journal article offers new evidence of elite capture of World Bank loans by analysing data on bank accounts and shell companies in offshore financial centers. The...
'I say to the Russian oligarchs and the corrupt leaders who bilked billions of dollars off this violent regime: no more… We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.' – Joe Biden at the 1 March 2022, State of the Union Address One way that Western sanctions on Russia are supposed to work is by...
– How tax havens facilitate corruption in the extractive industries
In many countries, news of an oil discovery or the award of an exploration license is rarely greeted with enthusiasm by the general public. Any hopes of widespread development quickly vanish once people realize only a small elite group stands to benefit. Estimates of global foreign bribery suggest...
Blog
I now work as an assistant professor at Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. I visited UNU-WIDER in 2017, when I was in the third year of my PhD in development economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. During...
Blog
– My experience in an online cohort of visiting PhD Fellows
Everyone that has been engaged in a PhD experience agrees that the whole process is a tough and sometimes lonely challenge. However, the visiting PhD fellowship at UNU-WIDER equipped me with additional discussions, guidance and networks needed to overcome these challenges. If you are now starting...
– Three key questions for understanding shifts in global poverty
In 2010 and the following years, there was attention to the fact that much of global poverty had shifted to middle-income countries (for example here, here, and here). The world’s poor hadn’t moved of course, but the countries that are home to large numbers of poor people had got better off on...
Blog
Virgi Agita Sari joined UNU-WIDER as a visiting PhD fellow in the summer of 2017. Coming from Indonesia, Virgi joined five other fellows from across the globe. Upon completing the three-month fellowship, she returned to the University of Manchester to finish her PhD in Development Policy. In 2019...
In introducing Staffan Lindberg’s keynote at the WIDER Development Conference, UNU-WIDER Senior Research Fellow and political scientist Rachel Gisselquist says that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to new restrictions on rights and freedoms at a time when experts have been warning about the decline...
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