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Publications (13)
Blog
30 October 2014 Dominik Etienne and Annett Victorero The last decade has witnessed a revival of concern over the impact of high-income concentration on economic development and wellbeing. The global distribution of income has for decades resembled a ‘champagne glass’ (figure 1). Today, the top 20...
– Policy Changes and Lessons
For the last quarter of the twentieth century, Latin America suffered from low growth, rising inequality, and frequent financial crises. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century the region has enhanced its growth performance, reduced social polarization, and improved macroeconomic...
Blog
23 April 2014 Justin Yifu Lin and Yan Wang At the onset of its miraculous rise in 1979, China had been trapped in poverty for centuries and was poorer than most sub-Saharan African countries. Thanks to the right strategies for transformation, China achieved an average annual growth rate of 9.8 per...
Blog
– The Role of Conditional Cash Transfer – An Interview with Armando Barrientos
24 January 2014 In this interview Professor Armando Barrientos reviews the recent UNU-WIDER project on inequality in Latin America which looks at the regional trend of decreasing inequality since 2000 and the reasons behind it. The current trend stands out as it goes against the historical high and...
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...
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...
Blog
– Mozambique and Vietnam Compared
Channing Arndt, Andres Garcia, Finn Tarp, and James Thurlow Economic growth typically reduces poverty, but global averages conceal wide variation at the country-level, where even rapid growth may not significantly improve the incomes of the poor. In some of sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest growing...
Blog
Annett Victorero Latin America has for a long time been synonymous with high inequality, economic instability and authoritarian politics. However, over the last ten years, the region has started to show considerable improvement in all of these areas. Growth has been sustained, the region has...
Blog
Tony Addison A visit to Buenos Aires in September provided a good vantage point to look at the euro zone’s deepening crisis. Angle readers will recall that Argentina went through a painful adjustment process some ten years ago. This culminated in the peso being forced off its peg to the US dollar in...
Policy Brief
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Africa is the developing region most at risk from the global economic crisis. Its recent strong growth has been interrupted. Already home to the largest number of low-income countries in the world, the region is now likely to experience higher unemployment and poverty; increases in infant mortality...
Policy Brief
pdf
– Is a New Paradigm for Recovery in Developing Countries Emerging?
One year into the global economic crisis, it has become clear that the paradigm for international development has changed irrevocably. With leadership, moral authority and the capacity of the West in international development diminishing, developing countries’ recovery and future growth will...
Blog
Luc Christiaensen Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER At the G8 July summit in Aquila, Italy, US$ 20 billion was pledged to support farmers in poorer countries. Is the world getting serious about food security? To be sure, while growing water shortages and climate change pose important challenges...
Policy Brief
pdf
The success of Africa's exports, as well as its spatial development, depends on lowering transport costs. In this Policy Brief, we address a number of pertinent questions on transport costs in Africa, such as 'what are transport costs?', 'do transport costs matter for trade?', 'how important are...
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