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Publications (41)
Journal Article
– Evidence from financial liberalization
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW This study examines the redistributive effects of financial liberalization, including domestic and external finance reforms, implemented in 64 emerging and low-income countries over the past four decades. To identify these effects, we employ a 'doubly robust' estimation...
Working Paper
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– New projections of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
In this paper, we present new projections for a range of global poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically, extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality, maternal mortality, and access to clean water and basic sanitation.Our projections, based on...
Working Paper
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Cameroon is an example of a developing country where the transition from agriculture to services has defied standard patterns seen in developed countries. While prior research has explored this shift’s impact on economic growth, its effects on women’s representation in the labour market have been...
Working Paper
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The current context of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the most vulnerable socio-economic groups to greater financial risk and thus could lead to exacerbating income inequality. The crisis creates an opportunity to demand further structural and systemic reforms for redistributive justice.Our paper...
Working Paper
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The study aims at bridging gaps in both theoretical and empirical literature pertaining to multigenerational persistence. From a theoretical standpoint, it argues that parental altruism is influenced by social heterogeneity rather than income-based heterogeneity. One’s position in the social...
Working Paper
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How strong is the transmission of socio-economic status across generations in Latin America? To answer this question, we first review the empirical literature on intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity for the region, summarizing results for both income and educational outcomes. We...
Book Chapter
– An integrated approach
In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income inequality around the globe. To address this research...
Working Paper
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– Few harmed much, fewer still harmed too much
Building on Rawls’ theory of justice and Sen’s theory of capabilities, I present an outline of social justice under climate shocks, illustrating it with the experiences of persons with disability. Social justice holds when inequality is responded to by rules that afford more primary goods, such as...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
I evaluate the impact of the right to education from the passing of the Right to Education Act in India in 2009. This Act guaranteed free education to children aged 6–14 years, including children with disabilities. Given that the school participation deficit associated with disability is large, I...
Working Paper
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This paper examines peer effects on students’ gender norm perceptions and skills formation. I use a Uruguayan nationally representative survey of 9th grade students and exploit the quasi-random variation in the proportion of female peers across classes within schools for causal identification...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Hindu Succession Act in India
This paper examines the impact of the Hindu Succession Act on married women’s time use in India. The Hindu Succession Act was amended between 1976 and 2005 by giving equal inheritance rights to women for inheriting property. To estimate the effect of the equal inheritance reform, I devise a...
– 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...
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.
– Accounting for inequality changes in Spain during the recession
The author discusses a new approach which decomposes inequality into the contributions of population groups by income sources. The author estimates a matrix with rows and columns which indicate different population groups and income sources, respectively, with each element indicating the marginal...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
The contact hypothesis posits that having diverse neighbours may reduce one’s intergroup prejudice. This hypothesis is difficult to test as individuals self-select into neighbourhoods. Using a slum relocation programme in India that randomly assigned neighbours, I examine the effects of exposure to...
Working Paper
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– An empirical test of COVID-19 deaths across the world
How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID deaths is conditional on the existence of healthcare...
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.
Most developed countries have accepted, in principle at least, the 50‐year‐old commitment of contributing 0.7 per cent of gross national income to supporting the development of developing countries. But what if all countries made a universal development commitment, meaning a scaled contribution? We...
Working Paper
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– Comment on 'Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence'
An influential paper by Berg et al., ‘Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence’, uses the SWIID data to examine the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth in both developing and developed countries. It finds that while inequality is harmful for growth, redistribution does not...
Working Paper
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In this paper, we use the World Income Inequality Database to assess the main trends in inequality within countries since around 1990. We cope with the heterogeneity in the original information (regarding the measure of resources, equivalence scale, etc.) by focusing on the trends rather than on the...
Working Paper
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The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented global crisis. The task for economic policy is to help keep people alive, enterprises afloat, and households out of poverty. The pandemic has macroeconomic dimensions. First, it affects macroeconomic stability and growth. Second, the tools of...
Working Paper
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– An integrated approach
In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income inequality around the globe. To address this research...
Blog
– Explaining income distributions with ‘decompositions’
The understanding of inequality requires the analysis of changes in income distributions across countries and over time as well as the identification of its drivers. To achieve this we use different statistical tools to identify the distributional patterns and summarize the results using inequality...
Working Paper
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– New evidence from sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa continues to post one of the highest gender gaps in educational outcomes in the world. Gender gaps in educational outcomes might be attributed to an uneven allocation of household resources towards the schooling of boys and girls. In this paper, we interrogate this issue using...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a public federal university in Brazil
Can students’ rank in the ability distribution of their class impact their academic achievement? We aim to answer this question using a discontinuity generated by a rule for the distribution of students between classes at a prestigious Brazilian university. The rule means that in almost 30 per cent...
Working Paper
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Most Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries have accepted, in principle at least, the 50-year-old commitment of contributing 0.7 per cent of gross national income to supporting the development of countries in the Global South. But what if all countries made a universal...
Working Paper
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– Across-region study
This study aims to examine the drivers of inequality of opportunity in health outcome among children below 5 years of age, using the Sudanese 2014 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. It investigates the variation in inequality across and within regions, decomposing inequality into a portion that is...
Working Paper
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– Accounting for inequality changes in Spain during the recession
I discuss a new approach which decomposes inequality into the contributions of population groups by income sources. I estimate a matrix with rows and columns which indicate different population groups and income sources respectively, with each element indicating the marginal change in the inequality...
Journal Article
A key debate in studies of native-migrant relations relates to the barriers to integration created by ethno-cultural differences and socio-economic disadvantage. How do changes in socio-economic inequality between ethnic groups affect interethnic ties in a divided society? I investigate this...
Working Paper
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This paper estimates the relationship between differences in skills measured among within-country ethnic groups and individual human capital accumulation in eight African countries. Our results show that the skills of an individual in these countries depends more on the human capital levels of their...
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is particularly difficult because of data and analytical challenges. While most middle-income countries produce comprehensive household surveys these...
Working Paper
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The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of human rights on income distribution and poverty by exploring how both aid and trade can influence poverty and income distribution through human rights. The analysis employs data for 125 countries and uses a number of panel data methods. The results...
– Shreya Bhattacharya - 2018 PhD Fellow
In the fall of 2018 UNU-WIDER welcomed 11 doctoral students from around the world as part of our PhD Fellowship Programme. The students, from Ghana, India, Malaysia, Brazil, Ethiopia and Kenya, came to UNU-WIDER for three months to work on their research under the guidance of a UNU-WIDER researcher...
– Pui Yi Wong - 2018 PhD Fellow
In the fall of 2018 UNU-WIDER welcomed 11 doctoral students from around the world as part of our PhD Fellowship Programme. The students, from Ghana, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Ethiopia, Togo and Kenya, came to UNU-WIDER for three months to work on their research under the guidance of a UNU-WIDER...
Displaying 32 of 41 results