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Publications (48)
Measuring the effectiveness of local government in Ghana is hampered by incomplete records, but despite that there are still visible patterns, write Daniel Chachu, Michael Danquah, and Rachel M. Gisselquist.Decentralisation, or the transfer of power, responsibilities, and resources from central to...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A comparative assessment of data and performance
In this chapter, we conceptualise an ideal framework that captures three reinforcing levers for measuring local government performance in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically Ghana, namely policy pronouncement, political processes and internal operations, and policy implementation. Given data...
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.
– Evidence from Ghana
In this study, we provide causal evidence of the immediate and near-term impact of stringent COVID-19 lockdown policies on employment outcomes, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict stay-at-home orders were issued and enforced in two spatially...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Tasks, Skills, and Institutions
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.
Part of Journal Special Issue
What sustains informality
What are the linkages between national savings and sustainable economic growth? Why are there differences in the amounts of savings between different countries? In March, we introduced our research on Ghana at the UNU-WIDER Domestic savings project workshop. A compilation of the different working...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– An impediment to structural transformation and inclusive growth in Ghana
From the book:
The Developer’s Dilemma
Erica stands under a rudimentary market stall in Accra, Ghana, selling fruits — she has done this every day for 10 years now. Like many women in the Global South, Erica was only able to attend school for a few years before having to leave to work and support her family. Initially she was training to...
Technical Note
pdf
Agricultural subsidies may have significant productive and distributional consequences, and policy-makers need to be able to assess these impacts as a part of the overall tax and benefit policy. Microsimulation models offer a tool for such analysis also in developing countries, but their coverage...
Millions of Africans lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but state social security systems were of little help to people who lost their income.This is the conclusion of a study conducted by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, UNU...
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 micro-level analysis
The financial sector in rural areas, where most of the poor people in sub-Saharan Africa are found, has transformed massively in recent times, notably through the increased penetration of several types of rural financial intermediaries in addition to rural and community banks and microfinance...
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.
– Dead end or stepping-stone?
Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labor markets of many low- and middle-income countries. A key issue in this regard concerns the extent to which informality itself is a persistent state. Using panel data from Ghana, South Africa...
In summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and avoiding societies from becoming more unequal. Now we are releasing a cross-country comparative study that analyses the distributional effects of the...
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.
We estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data from composite budgets of all 216 MMDAs, we employ both non...
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.
– Evidence from Ghana
Using household data from the latest wave of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, this paper utilizes machine learning techniques – IV LASSO – that allows for the treatment of unconfoundedness in the selection of observables and unobservables to examine the structural effect of gender wage differences...
Technical Note
pdf
This note, with emphasis on VAT and excise taxes, illustrates how indirect taxes are modelled in the context of GHAMOD, a tax-benefit microsimulation model for Ghana. GHAMOD is similar to the EUROMOD base platform, and its built-in Statistics Presenter Tool supports simple analyses of ex-ante policy...
Informal activities are widespread in many developing countries. In many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries informal economic activities account for more than one-third of economic output and more than two-thirds of employment. Workers engaged in informal activities tend to be less productive and...
Blog
– What needs to happen next time
Coronavirus lockdowns brought the world to a standstill. Rules on hygiene and social distancing have reshaped daily life, schools and businesses had been closed, and gatherings banned. Almost 2.7 billion workers, representing around 81% the world’s workforce, have been affected by partial or full...
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.
– Evidence from a quasi-experiment in Ghana
This study provides new evidence on the effect of shortening the duration of pre‐university education on long‐term labour market outcomes in Ghana, exploiting the education reform of 1987 as a natural experiment. Our results indicate that the drastic cut in the duration of pre‐tertiary education...
From the book:
Mining for Change
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.
– An analysis of the impact of successive migration on rural household welfare in Ghana
Part of Journal Special Issue
Migration and Those Left Behind
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Building knowledge about migration governance and policy in the Global South is a priority for research and policy. The studies in this special section offer both new empirical insights and new frameworks for analysis, with key policy implications, that can enrich our discussion of these topics...
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.
– The Impacts of China's Informal Gold Rush in Ghana
Part of Journal Special Issue
Migration Governance and Policy in the Global South
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.
– Evidence from a Behavioral Microsimulation Model for Ghana
Part of Journal Special Issue
SOUTHMOD: Modelling Tax-benefit Systems in Developing Countries
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.
Understanding the relationship between food access and welfare is critical in the design of social welfare policies, but the literature on this relationship is scarce. Employing the framework by Van Praag (1968) to a household survey data on Ghana, we investigate the monetary income required by...
Blog
– Information asymmetries and other disadvantages of host governments
In the first part of this blog, Alan R. Roe writes about the difficulties governments face in predicting revenues from extractive industries. Read part two here. Countries endowed with rich mineral or oil and gas resources have many competing uses for the revenues that arise from the production of...
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.
– The Case of Ghana
To attract greater levels of foreign direct investment into their gold-mining sectors, many mineral-rich countries in sub-Saharan Africa have been willing to overlook serious instances of mining company non-compliance with environmental standards. These lapses in regulatory oversight and enforcement...
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.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Macroeconomic Perspectives on Aid
– A tax-benefit microsimulation model for Ghana
Better social protection coverage and greater benefits in developing countries would certainly be welcomed by many. More and better forms of social protection would reduce extreme poverty, build resilience against shocks and even help households to move out of poverty, by making it possible for...
Displaying 32 of 48 results