Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (28)
Journal Article
This paper investigates the process of adjustment in employment. A dynamic model is applied to a panel of six Tunisian manufacturing industries observed over a period of 25 years, from 1971 to 1996. Industries are assumed to adjust their labor inputs toward a desired level. A labor requirement...
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.
– A bridge between micro and macro estimates?
The Nordic model relies on high tax rates to finance an extensive welfare state. If labour supply elasticities are large, the burden of financing the model can be large even if, arguably, the practice of providing subsidised goods that support labour supply is likely to mitigate these effects. We...
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.
– A counter-argument to the recommendation in the Mirrlees Review
The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This article examines the validity of this claim in an optimal income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...
This paper examines the effects of health-oriented food tax reforms on the distribution of tax payments, food demand and health outcomes. We offer an illustration of how one can take into account the uncertainty related to both demand estimation and health estimates and to produce confidence...
– Economywide Analysis for Ethiopia and Uganda
Rapid urbanization is an important characteristic of African development and yet the structural transformation debate focuses on agriculture’s relative merits without also considering the benefits from urban agglomeration. As a result, African governments are often provided conflicting...
– Evidence from a Group-Based Aid Project in Mozambique
This paper evaluates the impact of an intervention to improve farming techniques and food security in the Gaza area of rural Mozambique. We examine the impact of a group-based approach to technology adoption in subsistence agriculture, using panel data collected by our research team on over 200...
Fish stocks around the world are heavily overexploited in spite of fishing policies in several parts of the world designed to limit overfishing. Recent studies have found that the complexity of ecological systems and the diversity of species, as well as negative impact of fishing activities on...
– An Empirical Analysis
The theoretical analysis of optimal commodity taxation is advanced, but there is only limited empirical evidence to guide commodity tax policies. With this paper, we contribute to this body of literature by empirically examining, using Finnish consumption data, the relation between working hours...
A considerable amount of recent work in political science and economics builds from the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity leads to poor provision of public goods, a key component of poor governance. Much of this work cites Alesina, Baqir and Easterly (1999) as providing empirical proof. This...
– an Exploratory Analysis
This article explores how ethnic politics may operate differently in societies with “ranked” versus “unranked” ethnic systems, where ethnicity and class correlate closely versus very little. It focuses on two hypotheses suggested, but not tested, in Donald Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Their...
– Productivity, Policy Syndromes, and the Importance of Institutions
Recent evidence from an exhaustive political-economy study of growth of African economies—the Growth Project of the African Economic Research Consortium—suggests that ‘policy syndromes’ have substantially contributed to the generally poor growth in Sub-Saharan Africa during post-independence. The...
– Comparative Path Analysis for Mozambique and Vietnam
While economic growth generally reduces income poverty, there are pronounced differences in the strength of this relationship across countries. Typical explanations for this variation include measurement errors in growth–poverty accounting and different compositions of economic growth. We explore...
Africa is urbanizing rapidly. Yet most dual economy models focus on the sectoral rather than spatial dimensions of development. This article adopts a “dual–dual” approach to measuring rural/urban and farm/nonfarm linkages. We develop an economy-wide model of Ethiopia that distinguishes between...
Africa’s urban poor increasingly represent a key constituency for electoral mobilization. Opposition parties, which are pivotal for democratic consolidation, have nevertheless exhibited disparate success at obtaining votes from this constituency. To explain why, this study focuses on the case of...
– the Case of Mozambique
We provide a comprehensive approach for analyzing the evolution of poverty using Mozambique as a case study. Bringing together data from disparate sources, we develop a novel 'back-casting' framework that links a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to a micro-simulation poverty module. This...
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.
Vietnam has been among the most successful East Asian economies, especially in weathering the external shocks of recent globalization crises. Examination of economic performance and policy responses shows rising dependence on foreign finance around each crisis, and actions by the government to...
Journal Article
The role of agriculture in development remains much debated. This paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty, as opposed to growth alone. The contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth performance, its indirect impact on growth in other...
Economic growth in Vietnam was resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. Impacts on employment and poverty are also disputed. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose growth and distributional outcomes. Results indicate that the 2008...
Journal Article
– Africa's urban poor in opposition strongholds
Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest urbanising region of the world. This demographic transformation has occurred in concert with two other trends in the region, nascent democratisation and stalled decentralisation. Using the case of Lusaka, Zambia, this study argues that in the context of multi-party...
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.
– Turnout, partisanship and protest
The youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Yet, despite their numerical importance and the historical relevance of generational identities within the region, very little is really known about the political participation of Africa’s youth. In order...
Journal Article
– Comparative Global Evidence
Objectives. The study seeks to provide comparative global evidence on the role of income inequality, relative to income growth, in poverty reduction.Methods. An analysis-of-covariance model is estimated using a large global sample of 1980–2004 unbalanced panel data, with the headcount measure of...
Journal Article
In the light of the current global financial and economic crises, how would governments in sub-Saharan Africa allocate their budgets across sectors in response to a binding debt-servicing constraint? Within a framework of public-expenditure choice, the present paper estimates constraint-consistent...
Journal Article
In this article, the question of the location of exporters of manufactured goods within a country is investigated. Data from 354 magisterial districts in South Africa are used with a variety of estimators to identify the determinants of regional manufactured exports. It is found that the home-market...
Journal Article
This paper argues that relative exchange rates between the host countries of foreign direct investment affect their competition for FDI. Specifically, if the host country currency appreciates against the source country's currency more than that of its rival, FDI inflows of the host country will...
Journal Article
This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on public sector fiscal behaviour in Côte d'Ivoire. A special interest is the relationship between aid, debt servicing and debt, given that Côte d'Ivoire is a highly indebted country. The theoretical model employed differs from those of previous studies...
Journal Article
This paper models transnational terrorism as a three-way strategic interaction involving a government that faces armed opposition at home, which may spill over in the form of acts of terrorism by the state's opponents against the government's external sponsor. The external sponsor also utilises...
Journal Article
This paper investigates short and long-run effects of trade liberalization on employment and wages. Employment and wage equations are estimated using data (1971–96) for importable and exportable industrial sectors in Tunisia. Causality tests show that causality is unidirectional. Wages strongly...
Journal Article
This paper reports on recent work on improving the effectiveness of aid allocations, and extends the scope of analysis beyond the aid-policy-growth-poverty linkages to include three new elements: a broader range of poverty-relevant objectives and effectiveness constraints of aid; practical...
Displaying 28 of 28 results