Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (58)
Working Paper
pdf
As it transitions to an oil-producing country, Uganda’s investments in infrastructure and physical capital will increasingly depend on the ability of the construction sector to respond to surges in demand and transform investment effort into outcomes. Using administrative and survey data, this paper...
Working Paper
pdf
– How much, when, and how will it be governed?
We study Uganda’s journey to become a petroleum producer and provide estimates regarding the size and timing of the oil revenues to be expected. At an average US$38 per capita per year over a 33-year period, oil revenue by itself will not be transformational for the Ugandan economy, but it could...
Working Paper
pdf
– A framing paper
A significant natural resource discovery creates excited popular expectations of imminent wealth. But the size of a boom is usually overestimated and the delay in receiving revenues is underestimated. This paper takes stock of the sequencing, timing, and scale of the development of a natural...
Working Paper
pdf
– Country study—Tanzania
There are large volumes of gas offshore Tanzania, which has raised hopes of a boom. But those hopes look set to be disappointed. A boom would depend on there being a sizeable flow of revenue to government from producing and exporting gas. This paper sets out the scale of the gas, and the array of...
Working Paper
pdf
The construction sector plays a critical role in delivering quality infrastructure, which in turn influences the use of natural resource revenues towards achieving structural change and industrial development. We use industrial organization and political economy lenses to describe and understand the...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper is about understanding the cycle of global copper price booms and busts over Zambia’s economic history. We explore how the mining industry has been managed, and wider economic management during boom periods. We find that successive Zambian governments did not use copper revenues to...
Working Paper
pdf
– The case of the oil and gas industry in Ghana
Local content and local participation policy and legislation have come to stay in Ghana’s oil and gas industry. The policy and legislation have been described largely as adequate, promising, and necessary to promote local content and local participation in the oil and gas industry. Implementation of...
Working Paper
pdf
The construction sector plays a key role in providing structures for economies.This paper surveys the literature on key issues pertaining to the construction sector. It starts by summarizing our knowledge about differences in unit costs across time and space. It then discusses key bottlenecks in the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Reflections on investment surges and new gas
This paper is a sequel to an earlier paper that looked in broad terms at many of the issues that Mozambique faces today in managing its new extractive resources. The paper first describes the investment surge that has already been prompted by new gas discoveries in Mozambique. It then summarizes...
Working Paper
pdf
– How can policies best create benefits for Tanzania?
Tanzania is rich with natural resources, which have significant potential to contribute to the country’s economic development. Several laws recently passed in Tanzania are dedicated to establishing linkages between foreign firms in natural resource extraction and the local economy. This paper...
Working Paper
pdf
The construction sector is a key enabler for social and economic development worldwide. In Tanzania, the sector growth rate is well above the general economy and has maintained positive growth in response to the country’s investments in commercial and residential buildings and infrastructure...
Working Paper
pdf
The research explores the structure and performance of Ghana’s construction subsector, in light of the country’s 2007 oil discovery. Using primary and secondary data resources, we discuss how marginal costs and expenditure shocks may vary within the construction sector for subsectors such as housing...
Working Paper
pdf
In recent years, Mozambique has made international headlines for the significant hydrocarbon deposits found offshore. These have increased the country’s extractive resource endowments, in addition to its mining and onshore natural gas sector. It is expected that these industries will contribute to...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper analyses policy options to promote local content in Uganda as it transitions into an oil-producing country. It contends that productive linkages between oil and gas exporters and domestic suppliers in a range of ‘connected’ goods and services sectors can be a source of broad-based...
Working Paper
pdf
Oil resources are neither a curse nor a blessing. The sound management of these resources can make them beneficial or otherwise. In order to translate Ghana’s oil resources into inclusive development amid high expectations, several laws and regulations have been passed and new institutions created...
Working Paper
pdf
– Diversification in Africa’s resource-rich economies
The exploitation of natural resources is a huge opportunity, but one that carries considerable risks. Relative prices in resource-exporting economies tend to push them towards economic structures dominated by the resource sector. This paper explores ways to achieve diversification in a resource-rich...
Working Paper
pdf
We conducted a systematic review to identify policy interventions that improve education quality and student learning in developing countries. Relying on a theory of change typology, we highlight three main drivers of change of education quality: first, supply-side capability interventions that...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resort to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re-election. Using a panel dataset of 51 African countries covering the period 1980 to 2012...
Working Paper
pdf
– A New Approach to Development Policy
Successful development programs rely on people to behave and choose in certain ways, and behavioral economics helps us understand why people behave and choose as they do. Approaching problems in development using behavioral economics thus leads to better diagnosis and to better-designed solutions...
Working Paper
pdf
Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper examines...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Research Review and Agenda
The poor can and do save, but often use formal or informal instruments that have high risk, high cost, and limited functionality. This could lead to undersaving compared to a world without market or behavioural frictions. Undersaving can have important welfare consequences: variable consumption, low...
Working Paper
pdf
– Comparing Design and Implementation Errors Across Alternative Mechanisms
Identifying the poorest for selection into social transfer programmes is a major challenge facing programme implementers. An innovative cash transfer programme in northern Kenya trialed three targeting mechanisms to learn lessons about which approach is most effective at minimizing inclusion and...
Working Paper
pdf
– Aggregating Impacts of School-Feeding Programmes on Education, Health and Nutrition: Two Proposed Methodologies
School-feeding is an important intervention to attract children to school and augment their learning. The benefits of school-feeding cover several domains. Key to the overall assessment of these benefits is understanding how different implementation models compare to each other and to other...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Impact of Oportunidades’ Electronic Payment System in Mexico
This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico’s Oportunidades programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via a bank account is found to have implications in terms of reallocation between saving...
Working Paper
pdf
The reduction in deaths from diarrheal diseases is one of the significant public health successes of the twentieth century. That said, the disease still accounts for a significant burden of childhood morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Progress made in the past has, to a...
Working Paper
pdf
– The WDR+20 Landscape of Core and Supportive Functions
This paper discusses shifts in development assistance for health (DAH) since 1990, analyses the nature of the current distribution of funding, and considers future implications. Based on Jamison et al. (1998) and Frenk and Moon (2013), we introduce an ‘essential functions’ framework, which provides...
Working Paper
pdf
In this paper we argue that the recent evidence on individuals’ decision making is of high relevance for the measurement of poverty when switching from a static and certain to a dynamic and uncertain framework. The numerous proposed measures of multi-period poverty and vulnerability have until now...
Working Paper
pdf
– Challenges and Opportunities
This paper primarily focuses on how global funding has supported interventions that have proven to be successful in reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality around the world. The growth rate of development assistance targeted towards these specific interventions has varied greatly over the...
Working Paper
pdf
– the Role of Aid
Financing and the role of aid within the water sector are poorly understood. We estimate the levels of spending achieved in developing countries during the Millennium Development Goals period to be US$80 billion per year. Aid represented a substantial proportion of total sector financing in sub...
Working Paper
pdf
Preventable and treatable childhood diseases, notably acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases are the first and second leading causes of death and morbidity among young children in developing countries. The fact that a large proportion of child deaths are caused by these diseases is...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper analyses the distribution of total aid and aid to the social sectors between 2009 and 2011. Its key findings are four-fold. First, despite the stated objectives of donors, total aid disbursements are broadly neutral, favouring neither the most deprived nor relatively well-off countries...
Working Paper
pdf
– What Matters for Learning in East Africa?
Raising schooling quality in low-income countries is a pressing challenge. Substantial research has considered the impact of cutting class sizes on skills acquisition. Considerably less attention has been given to the extent to which peer effects, which refer to class composition, also may affect...
Displaying 32 of 58 results