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Publications (125)
Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) have become a symbol of national success and a means for global, commercial and geopolitical influence. But how well do they contribute to national development goals? Furthermore, global decarbonization threatens the future of many fossil fuel-financed SWFs. Here, we...
While multinational corporations (MNCs) make up only 1.9% of firms operating in Uganda, they are overrepresented among tax holiday beneficiaries. New estimates reveal that Uganda’s revenue losses due to these tax expenditures peaked at USD 42 million in 2020.A new dataset allows for the first...
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...
The post-COVID-19 economic recovery and Russia’s war with Ukraine have caused some natural resource prices to reach new highs. Although forecasting the price of internationally-traded commodities is notoriously difficult, recent estimates suggest that prices will remain high through 2024. The high...
New research for UNU-WIDER explores the differences between revolutionary mass mobilizations in democracies versus dictatorships. Evidence from Lebanon and Iraq supports the argument that revolutions in democracies follow different trajectories—and may be less likely to succeed in their objectives...
Tax revenues and political institutions placing constraints on the executive power may reinforce each other over time and this may also bring a shift in the composition of revenues. To test these hypotheses, we use historical cross-country data covering 31 countries for 1800– 2012. Results confirm...
Local governments in India—known as panchayats—are sometimes criticised for failing to deliver benefits earmarked for vulnerable regions or households to the intended recipients. Mis-targeting of benefits is often attributed to political clientelism, where funds are diverted opportunistically to...
Political clientelism is the strategic, discretionary, and targeted exchange of goods and services between politicians and voters for political support. In many low- and middle-income countries, clientelistic practices such as vote-buying and ‘machine politics’ are ubiquitous.While clientelism is...
Along with several other African countries, Zambia has introduced a withholding system for value-added tax (VAT) to improve revenue collection and compliance. Even though VAT withholding policies are applied in several countries in Africa and similar industry-specific policies in Europe, empirical...
I had the privilege to participate in the UNU-WIDER Winter School as one of the lecturers. In this blog, I explain my main takeaways for students and why I found this capacity development initiative important and urgent. Having more data, particularly on tax avoidance in African countries, brings...
Government responsiveness is an integral feature of representative democracy. Its importance could be amplified in times of crisis, especially if citizens cannot rely on market actors for help. Governments can soften the impacts of negative shocks to the status quo, or exponentiate them by their...
Blog
The Omicron variant resulted in a third major wave of Covid-19 in India, with the number of cases exceeding those in the second wave, albeit causing less severe illness on average. In this post, Kundu and Gisselquist draw on several nationally representative data sources to illuminate key Covid-19...
Blog
– The power of ideas & the limits of technocracy
What will it take to shake loose the distemper of our times, and initiate a virtuous spiral of renewal? In a recent UNU-WIDER webinar, Alan Hirsch and I explored why a narrow focus on growth and good governance will not be enough to get South Africa (and, by analogy, other countries similarly...
In introducing Staffan Lindberg’s keynote at the WIDER Development Conference, UNU-WIDER Senior Research Fellow and political scientist Rachel Gisselquist says that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to new restrictions on rights and freedoms at a time when experts have been warning about the decline...
During the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and other public services, that suffered the highest rates of COVID-19. Indeed, countries rated to be best prepared to respond to public health threats...
Blog
Director of UNU-WIDER, Professor Kunal Sen is a world leading expert in development economics and led on ESID’s research into economic growth. In this blog he outlines some of our main findings and positions on the value and drivers of economic growth, based on nearly a decade of research. You hear...
Displaying 16 of 125 results