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Publications (337)
– 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...
– 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...
– 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 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...
– 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...
– 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...
– 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...
– 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...
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.
The special issue contributes significantly to critical issues related to the nature of informal employment and its determinants, how informal firms can grow their business and productivity, and the effects of labour market regulations and social insurance policies on informality.
Background Note
pdf
Introduction Only recently has the importance and potential of behavioural sciences been recognized as a critical tool to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This long-awaited recognition comes from the highest levels of the United Nations, with the Secretary-General recently issuing a...
Background Note
pdf
IntroductionThe South African youth wage subsidy started in 2014 to increase employment and create jobs for low-wage youth. The subsidy was temporarily raised in value and expanded to reach more workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the lockdown period, the government used the subsidy to curb...
Book
Esta obra ofrece un análisis del sistema monetario internacional y de las reformas que es necesario emprender para que cumpla el papel activo en el siglo XXI. arte del diagnóstico según el cual no existe un sistema coherente, sino un ordenamiento ad hoc: el “no sistema” (término de viejas raíces)...
– Concepts, Methods, and Determinants
Social mobility — defined as the ability to move from a lower to a higher level of education or occupational status, or from a lower to a higher social class or income group — is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society. There are disagreements about what constitutes social...
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.
– Vietnamese and Afghan migrants in Canada, Germany, the UK, and the US
Migration is an inherent feature of human history. A rich literature considers the experiences of global migrants across diverse environments. This special issue explores such experiences with a focus on inequality between migrants and host populations in countries of settlement. It asks: why are...
– Framework and policy guidebook
This framework utilizes business interests and the distribution of political power to understand the episodic nature of economic growth in fragile and conflict-affected states. Conflict, state capacity, and legitimacy are analysed alongside the business environment and structural transformation to...
Background Note
pdf
– The South African experience
Introduction: data for development Globally, one of the key factors associated with increasing use of data to inform policy-making has been the increased availability of new administrative data sources. In 2014, the National Treasury of South Africa (NT) pioneered the development of new tax...
Background Note
pdf
IntroductionThe literature on the concept, measurement, causes, and correlates of sub-national institutional governance is not new. From the seminal work of Putnam et al. (1993) to recent attempts by Iddawela et al. (2021), several authors have explored untapped spaces that contribute to our...
Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public...
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 section presents the main findings about long-run trends in inequality in China and its driving factors as they emerge from a country case study carried out under a UNU-WIDER-supported project. Special focus in the umbrella project were on three issues: (i) the role of earnings...
Displaying 32 of 337 results