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Publications (23)
Blog
Discrimination against women and girls is a pervasive and long-running phenomenon that characterises Indian society at every level. India’s progress towards gender equality, measured by its position on rankings such as the Gender Development Index has been disappointing, despite fairly rapid rates...
Blog
Helsinki: symbol of peace in Aceh On the 15 August 2005, a government banquet hall in Helsinki became the centre point for international media. It was a day when the peace settlement between the Indonesian government and Aceh Independence Movement (Gereka Aceh Merdeka, GAM) known as the Helsinki...
Public sector schools operate within the broader context of political systems and the management of school systems can be influenced by political factors. Yet, there is a lack of quantitative or causal evidence on how political factors shape education systems and outcomes in developing countries...
Blog
When elephants fight, the grass suffers. According to an African proverb, when elephants fight, the grass suffers. In other words, when the big and powerful fight, it is the small who suffer. At UNU-WIDER’s recent conference, Responding to Crises, the focus of the debate was primarily on the grass —...
Rising powers have had a profound impact on the WTO. For over half a century the trading system was dominated by the US and other advanced industrialized states, with developing countries and their interests severely marginalized. However, over the course of the Doha Round of trade negotiations...
The issue of institutional development has come to prominence during the last decade or so. During this period, even the IMF and the World Bank, which used to treat institutions as mere 'details', have come to emphasize the role of institutions in economic development. However, there are still some...
– Concepts and Policies
The concepts of formal and informal remain central to the theory and practice of development more than half a century after they were introduced into the debate. They help structure the way that statistical services collect data on the economies of developing countries, the development of...
Policy Brief
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The volume Institutional Change and Economic Development fills some important gaps in our understanding of the relationship between institutional changes and economic development. It does so by developing new discourses on the 'technology of institution building' and by providing detailed case...
Working Paper
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– Property, Politics and Development Trajectories
As institutional approaches have come to dominate the mainstream of development economics, they have outgrown earlier and simpler analyses of ‘property rights’. This paper focuses on the work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, which suggests that the distribution of property rights to a ‘broad...
Working Paper
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– The Successful Experience of Switzerland (1870-1950)
This research paper discusses the role of institutions in the rapid growth and successful international integration of Switzerland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In analysing the emergence and consolidation of the institutions whose existence was crucial, the paper looks...
Working Paper
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– Industrial Catching-up, Institutional Innovation and Financial Fragility
This paper seeks to explain the dynamics of Brazilian industrial catch-up in the last 60 years by discussing its background institutional conditions as well as its main macroeconomic features. After a brief introduction, the second section describes how after the institutional innovations introduced...
Working Paper
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– A Historical Perspective on Institutions and Uneven Development
This paper argues for an ‘ancient’ institutional school, predating Thorstein Veblen’s ‘old’ institutionalism. In this view, going back as far as the thirteenth century, institutions tended to be seen as specific to a mode of production. Here both institutions and development itself are context...
Working Paper
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– Development Strategies and Institutions in Taiwan and China
Conventional explanations of Taiwan and China’s economic success point to the shift from an import-substituting industrialization (ISI) strategy to an export-oriented industrialization (EOI) strategy. This paper argues that the development strategies in Taiwan and China have always been a...
Working Paper
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New institutional economics lacks a theory of state formation which could help us to deal with the mega question of why some states became more efficient than others at establishing and sustaining institutions. Some kind of middle range theory could be formulated based upon historical case studies...
Working Paper
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Taxation provides one of the principal lenses in measuring state capacity, state formation and power relations in a society. This paper critically examines three main approaches (economic, administrative and political economy) to understanding taxation. It also examines differences in tax...
Working Paper
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– A Comparative Analysis of Mauritius, Botswana and Uganda
This paper examines the relationship between institution building and economic performance in Mauritius, Botswana and Uganda. The rationale for comparing these cases is simple. While the three have been super-economic stars in their own right, they have achieved substantially different outcomes...
Displaying 16 of 23 results