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Publications (463)
– Lessons from Index-Based Livestock Insurance
IN PRODUCTION: SCHEDULED FOR PUBLICATION IN JUNE 2024This study outlines the origins and evolution of an international award-winning development intervention, index-based livestock insurance (IBLI), which scaled from a small pilot project in Kenya to a design that underpins drought risk management...
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.
Political clientelism — which reflects strategic, discretionary, and targeted exchange of private goods and services for political support to the incumbent — has characterised distributive politics in the Global South for decades. The conditional nature of exchange between political parties and...
– Ending Poverty While Protecting Nature
BOOK IN PRODUCTION: ESTIMATED PUBLICATION LATE 2024/EARLY 2025
– Impact, Recovery and the Future
A key challenge for the post-COVID global economy is whether the disproportionate impact of the crisis on informal workers, who form the majority of the world’s workforce, will be acknowledged. Or whether harmful and negative stereotypes will persist.Today, despite the role of these essential...
– Economic Transformation in a Climate-Conscious World
The pathways to economic development are changing. Environmental sustainability is no longer a choice but a necessity to maintain a competitive edge in the global economy. Just like in nature, where survival hinges on adaptation, this publication shows how nations adjust to, and take advantage of...
Sustainable economic development hinges on the ability of firms and households to maintain growth and wellbeing. How have Tanzania’s firms and households performed in recent decades, and what policies can improve their resilience against future shocks?Firms that export are better able to sustain...
– Policy lessons for low- and middle-income countries
Despite advancements for gender equality in some spheres, labour market outcomes for women continue to be worse than for men. Gender gaps in pay, labour force participation rates, and measures of job quality are stubbornly persistent and continue to hamper women’s economic empowerment globally...
– A firm and household perspective
This book addresses performance and strategies adopted by firms and households in Tanzania to navigate shocks and achieve sustainability. How successful have firms and households been in building resilience to sustain their growth and development? Has the ability to navigate successfully through...
The focus of this study is the idea that choice is hierarchical so that there exists an order of acquisition of durable goods and assets as real incomes increase. Two main approaches to deriving such an order are presented, the so-called Paroush approach and Item Response Theory. An empirical...
– A Framework for Rethinking the Role of Finance in Serving the Real Economy
The study proposes an alternative framework for rethinking the role of finance in serving the real economy from the perspective of New Structural Financial Economics. It challenges conventional wisdom that developing countries should take the financial structure of developed countries as the...
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.
– Routes to social and economic empowerment
In recent decades, trends in female labour force participation rates have been very heterogeneous across developing countries, despite widespread economic growth, fertility decline, and narrowing gender gaps in education.However, globally, gender gaps in wages and labour force participation are...
– Interrogating the Present as History
This study highlights the monopolization and exclusion from high-value knowledge in analysing divergent and, recently, partially convergent income trends across 200-odd years of the global capitalist economy. A southern lens interrogates this history, in the process showing how developing command...
– Structural Transformation, High Inequality and Environmental Fragility
This publication examines the process of economic development of the last 50 years or so under the neoliberal model in terms of impacts on growth, inflation, income and wealth distribution and structural change. The analysis includes a historical perspective from the nineteenth century to the...
The 2022 Annual Lecture was delivered by Daron Acemoğlu. His lecture challenged techno-optimism, which maintains that technological advances will ultimately benefit society at large, and discussed what the path of digital technologies and artificial intelligence imply for the future. Artificial...
– The Institutional Diagnostic Project
Few countries have experienced as many political and economic changes as Mozambique. A vast and diverse country, it faced a particularly difficult start after a long period of colonial dominance followed by a deadly war that formally ended only in 1992. However, despite impressive growth after multi...
It is arguable that the most important event in the world economy in recent decades has been the rise of China, from being on a par with sub-Sahara Africa at the start of economic reform to being an economic superpower today. That rise remains under-researched. Moreover, the great structural changes...
– Earnings inequality and polarization in eleven countries
Concerns about widening income inequality within countries continue to gain prominence in public debate worldwide. In the last decade, attention to the concentration of income at the very top of the distribution (top 1%) has increased. This concentration largely originates from the accumulation of...
Globalization is in retreat. Trade tensions between China and the United States are escalating, as illustrated by bans to the trade of semiconductor chips. The pandemic exacerbated an already difficult economic reality, raising new concerns about the resilience of global supply chains. Further...
There has been a revival of interest in the state’s role in economic development. Recent research argues that the most successful economies are those where effective states provide crucial public goods and services. The historical emergence of effective tax systems and the related processes by which...
– Patterns, Determinants, Consequences
One of the key features of modern economic growth is the process of structural transformation, which is the movement of workers from agriculture to manufacturing and services. In this study, the author identifies different routes to structural transformation that we see in the developing world. They...
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.
This special issue presents new research on the state and its links to economic and social development. The special issue focuses on the processes of institutional transformation of the state, looking at how fiscal states arise in the developing world.The resulting set of articles presents a variety...
– The Changing Nature of Work and Inequality
Developed countries have experienced a polarization in earnings and in employment, namely stronger growth in the earnings and jobs for the most and least skilled workers at the expense of those in the middle. This pattern has been attributed to differences in tasks—whether a given job is routine and...
– A clearer picture of informal work
Most workers in developing countries work in the informal labour market Lower-tier informal work leads to a dead end in the countries in this study, with little opportunity to move up the job ladder While those in upper-tier informal work are the most likely to transition to formal labour market...
– Intergenerational Mobility, Income Inequality, and Development
In the Global South economic mobility across generations or intergenerational economic mobility is in and of itself an important topic for research with consequences for policy. It concerns the 'stickiness' or otherwise of inequality because mobility is concerned with the extent to which children's...
– Transforming Informal Work and Livelihoods in Developing Countries
Using a range of countries from the Global South, this book examines heterogeneity within informal work by applying a common conceptual framework and empirical methodology. The country studies use panel data to study the dynamics of worker transitions between formal and heterogeneous informal work...
– Evidence from an international research conference
This policy brief draws on the studies presented at the International Research Conference on the Effectiveness of Development Cooperation on 17–18 November 2022, in Brussels, Belgium, jointly organized by UNU-WIDER and the European Commission (DG INTPA) under its capacity as the leading entity of...
– Findings from an international research conference
This policy brief draws on the studies presented at the International Research Conference on the Effectiveness of Development Cooperation on 17–18 November 2022, in Brussels, Belgium and jointly organized by UNU-WIDER and the European Commission (DG INTPA) under its capacity as the leading entity of...
– Diversity in Development
NOW IN PAPERBACK WITH REVISED PREFACE | Gunnar Myrdal published his magnum opus Asian Drama, in 1968, to conclude that Asia's development prospects were gloomy. Since then, contrary to Myrdal's expectations Asia has been transformed beyond recognition, the development of nations and living standards...
This study reviews what we know about parental investments and children's human capital in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs). First, it presents definitions and a simple analytical framework. Then discusses determinants of children's human capital in the form of cognitive skills, socioemotional...
– A Retrospective in the Time of COVID-19
The pandemic of 1918–20 — commonly known as the Spanish flu — infected over a quarter of the world's population and killed over fifty million people. It is by far the greatest humanitarian disaster caused by an infectious disease in modern history. Epidemiologists and health scientists often draw on...
– Can legal reforms trump social norms?
Almost a century has passed since women in South Asia first raised a demand for equal rights in property, especially land, the single most important productive resource in most developing economies. Over time, the struggle broadened and diversified. Despite resistance from conservative lawmakers...
– Structural Transformation, Inequality Dynamics, and Inclusive Growth
The developer’s dilemma is thus: developing countries seek inclusive economic development — i.e., structural transformation — sufficiently broad-based to raise the income of the poor. Inclusive economic growth requires falling income inequality to maximise income growth at the lower end of the...
Displaying 32 of 463 results