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Publications (67)
This book provides cutting edge analytical insights into if and how the MDGs are likely to be achieved. The volume presents empirical analyses of key determinants of the MDG target variables, which recognise that most of the MDG targets are endogenously related. These inter-dependencies are crucial...
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The Millennium Development Goals have become the frame of reference for most of the development community: the standard by which performance will ultimately be judged. Given their importance, considerable attention has been paid as to whether these goals will be met or not. The overwhelming...
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– Implications for the MDG Poverty Target
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major investments in the social sector; but how much they will...
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– Prospects of Meeting the MDG Target
This paper uses two large repeated cross-sections, one for the early 1990s, and one for the late 1990s, to describe growth in school enrolment and completion rates for boys and girls in India, and to explore the extent to which enrolment and completion rates have grown over time. It decomposes this...
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This paper investigates the extent to which the decline in child mortality over the last three decades can be attributed to economic growth. In doing this, it exploits the considerable variation in growth over this period, across states and over time. The analysis is able to condition upon a number...
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In order to track progress in MDG1 and explicitly link growth, inequality, and poverty reduction, several measures of ‘pro-poor growth’ have been proposed in the literature and used in applied academic and policy work. These measures, particularly the ones derived from the growth incidence curve...
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– Implications for the MDG Poverty Target
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major investments in the social sector; but how much they will...
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pdf
– An Assessment of Progress With Respect to Water and Sanitation: Legacy, Synergy, Complacency or Policy?
Access to water and sanitation (target 10) is an important ingredient of quality of life. As per WHO-UNICEF assessments, globally, 77 per cent of population had access to water in 1990. This proportion has increased to 83 per cent in 2002, thus, on track to achieve the target of halving the...
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This study explores the effects of macroeconomic factors on total factor productivity (TFP) in 34 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1980-2002. The econometric analysis shows that external debt is negatively and significantly related to TFP. Other factors that have significant negative...
– Recent Innovative Developments
Conventional wisdom recommends the superiority of private ownership of enterprises. The reality confronts it with a rich diversity in ownership and governance structures. This volume examines five types of unorthodox ownership and governance form emerging in the industrial sector across major...
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Differences in economic and theological approaches to debt cancellation result from differences in disciplinary assumptions in respect of purpose, method, and argument. We argue that they provide alternative commentaries upon the need for debt cancellation, but that it is not possible to demonstrate...
WIDER Symposium on Adaptive Efficiency and Evolving Diversity of Enterprise Ownership and Governance
A property rights regime covers rights to use, lease, donate, bequest, and sell assets or collect the incomes generated by assets. A clear and transparent property rights regime facilitates investment and economic growth. While private property is considered by many to be the most superior type of...
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– Perspectives from a New Qualifier, Tanzania
In 1970 the external debt of Tanzania, a least developed country, was 16.8 per cent of GDP and 58.6 per cent of exports. The ratio of per capita debt to per capita income was 14.4 per cent. By 2001 the debt had reached just over 100 per cent of GDP and over 11 times the value of exports, with a per...
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– The Economics of La Lega and Mondragón
This paper develops a theory of endogenous league formation and considers its implications for policy in developing countries. We generalize from features of the two most prominent European co-op leagues, Mondragón and La Lega, to develop the first formal model of the endogenous formation of co...
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– The Case of Kenya
This study critically reviews the education sector in Kenya and the challenges facing the sector in achieving universal primary schooling. The study argues that the introduction of cost-sharing system in Kenya has resulted in high dropout and repetition rates, low transition and completion rates...
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Kenya’s external debt has continued to swell over the years, and despite the country meeting its debt commitment through regular servicing, this has been done at the expense of key social services such as health, education, water and sanitation. Although good health is a pre-requisite to...
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Sustainable development is a long-term process, and as such must be examined carefully. Development implies structural changes of many different types, ranging from purely economic aspects to those affecting the personal circumstances of people. Changes take time, all the more so when dealing with...
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Late 1990, Egypt witnessed major and radical changes in all areas of its national life—political, legal, economic and social—as a reflection of implementing an economic reform programme in order to achieve progress in its economic indicators. This paper aims to examine the extent to which Egypt has...
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– The Kenya Case
The Kenyan economy had a growth of –0.3 per cent in the year 2001, the lowest growth in the post-independence era. The dismal growth performance coincided with the period when the government was involved in grassroot consultations with civil society and other stakeholders, to find out the causes of...
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– A Case for Enhanced HIPC Initiative
The financing of Pakistan’s substantial current account deficits within the framework of IMF and the World Bank structural adjustment programmes—about 6 per cent of GDP in the early 1990s led to a debt crisis in the late 1990s. IMF considered this level of current account deficit quite feasible in...
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The objective of this paper is to arrive at a better understanding of the implications of debt relief savings for poverty reduction in HIPC countries by focusing on one important channel of impact—human capital accumulation. Our simulation results suggest that poverty and growth objectives would be...
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In this paper we focus on the question: will the HIPC debt reduction programme help in the transformation of the development assistance business and change the rules of the ‘debt game’ in Africa? We concentrate on the donor and official creditor side, by exploring how the growing debt of African...
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– Problèmes et Solutions
This paper evaluates Cameroon’s foreign debt situation by analysing its evolution (structure, debt service payment, debt ratio, borrowing conditions, etc.). The analysis is extended by examining the internal debt situation, taking into account its weight in the global endebtness of the county. After...
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– Evidence from East Asia
This paper investigates the benefits and associated agency costs of using internal capital markets through affiliating with groups using data of two thousand firms from nine East Asian economies between 1994-6. We find that mature and slow-growing firms with ownership structures more likely to...
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– Context and Outlook for Debt Sustainability and Resource Flows
This paper analyses debt relief efforts by creditors to alleviate the debt burden of low-income countries. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative builds on traditional debt relief, and for the first time involves relief on multilateral debt. It seeks to reduce debt to sustainable...
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This paper looks at public sector debt in developing countries, being concerned specifically with the relationship between aid inflows and the public sector borrowing requirement net of aid loans. After examining the public sector budget constraint and various conditions under which aid might lead...
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– Thinking beyond the HIPC Initiative to Solving Structural Problems
This paper attempts to answer the following question: If the HIPC Initiative is fully successful and managed to write-off all debt that is owed by Africa, will the debt problem be over? The answer is ‘no’. This pessimist answer is arrived at by examining the historical origin of African debt and the...
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– Evidence for Italian Public Enterprises' Investment
This study examines the effect of the hardening of the budget constraint on the investment behaviour of Italian state owned enterprises (SOEs). It carries out a natural experiment that exploits the 1987 shift of budget regimes due to the pressure of European Union economic policies on the Italian...
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– The Case of Italian State-Owned Firms and the European Union
This paper contributes to the literature on the role of decentralization in hardening the budget constraint of public enterprises. Following Qian and Roland the study adopts a ‘federalist’ approach. However, it interprets federalism as the upward devolution of domestic economic policies to a...
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– Cas de la Côte d’Ivoire
In the 1980s most of Sub-Saharan African countries (SSA) especially the HIPCs faced an unprecedented indebtedness. Different mechanisms of debt relief as well as economic reforms have been put in place with the objective of enabling these countries to reach long-term economic growth and reduce their...
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– A Rent Seeking Model of China’s Township-Village Enterprises
I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown to...
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This paper analyzes the ‘Silicon Valley model’ as a novel economic institution in the domain of technological product system innovation such as computers. We focus on the information structural relationship as well as governance relationships between venture capitalists and a cluster of...
Displaying 32 of 67 results