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Publications (26)
Research Brief
pdf
Microfinance evaluations reveal a positive impact on per capita income, non-land asset value and poverty incidence. Across countries and methodologies, microfinance is most likely to have a short-term positive effect; regionally, the most positive impacts are seen in Africa. Women tend to benefit...
Development aid by itself cannot ‘save the planet’. Yet, development aid and institutions have the potential to remain important catalytic actors in achieving developmental and global environmental objectives. Developing countries must be crucial players in successful climate change mitigation as...
Research Brief
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The most successful projects and programmes are those that give local partners real ownership over the development process. Aid to health is not always allocated to the areas where it is most needed. Aid fragmentation creates extra costs for recipient countries and reduces the effectiveness of...
Research Brief
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– The Role of Land
Land-based services will become increasingly important as global public goods in the context of changing climate, particularly in terms of mitigation and adaptation. Carbon sequestration, irrigation, infrastructure and local environmental services will all need significant investment in order to...
Research Brief
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Aid has had positive effect on growth and poverty reduction on average in the long term. There is no evidence of aid systematically increasing infl ation or reducing the amount of credit available to private industry. In general aid that is channeled to human capital appears to be effective at...
Research Brief
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Most studies show that education aid has a modest but positive effect on enrolment levels. Less is known about the effect of aid on the quality of education. The effectiveness of education aid is to a large degree dependent on the stability of the institutions in the recipient country. Institutional...
Research Brief
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– Crucial for the Spread of Social Protection Programmes
Evaluations of social protection programmes have been much more comprehensive in Latin America than in sub-Saharan Africa. Monitoring and evaluation protocols are crucial to facilitate improvements in government effectiveness. Anti-poverty transfer schemes seem to be subjected to more evaluation...
Research Brief
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Each dollar of aid per year provides 0.17 people with access to water or sanitation. This amounts to a cost of US$5.88 per person. Due to economies of scale, countries with large populations benefit more from aid to the water and sanitation sectors. Institutional reforms that facilitate the...
Research Brief
– What We Know and What We Need to Know
In the 1960s food aid made up nearly 20 per cent of overall overseas development aid, today that figure is five per cent. Increasingly food aid is provided as emergency relief rather than as a form of long term support and many donors have expressed strong interest in switching from food to cash...
Research Brief
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The goal of economic growth combined with environmental protection in developing countries requires not just financial and technological resources, but also the local capacity to design and implement successful policies. Aid programmes for capacity-building related to climate change are most...
Research Brief
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The three goals of promoting development, adaptation to climate change, and climate change mitigation are in reality inseparable policy areas and as such there is a compelling case for addressing them simultaneously. Climate finance aimed at helping developing countries to make adaptations to deal...
Research Brief
China is the world’s largest developing country and its huge population requires a similarly large agricultural sector to sustain it. A major challenge for China faces is working out how increasing demands for food can be met at the same time as reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Despite the...
Research Brief
Even the most optimistic analyses accept that many low-income countries (LICs) will remain low income for some time to come. Consequently, when assessing the policy options available to LICs it is important to take a long term view. In the WIDER Working Paper ‘Aid, Fiscal Policy, Climate Change, and...
Research Brief
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Review shows that global agricultural production must be increased by about 70 per cent by 2050 in order to provide sufficient nourishment for the world’s growing population. Focusing on tropical climates to 2050, climate change is likely to reduce the rate of agricultural productivity growth. The...
Research Brief
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Development aid aimed at increasing productivity in the fisheries sector has at times had a negative effect by encouraging or facilitating overfishing. A percentage increase in capacity enhancing or bad subsidies in sub-Sahara Africa, all else being equal, will increase catch loss per square...
Research Brief
If food aid is to be more effective donors need to consider both the goals of the aid, and its economic implications. In May 2012, shortly before the annual G8 summit, the Obama administration announced the ‘New Alliance for Food Security’. The project enlists 45 private companies who are to invest...
Displaying 16 of 26 results