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Publications (43)
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...
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...
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is particularly difficult because of data and analytical challenges. While most middle-income countries produce comprehensive household surveys these...
Blog
The celebration of the 30th Anniversary of UNU-WIDER presented the ideal opportunity to look back, take stock, and plan ahead. Where else can a group of early career researchers have the chance to present at a conference including Nobel Laureates such as Joseph Stiglitz, Martti Ahtisaari and Amartya...
Blog
Just over a year ago, in March 2014, UNU-WIDER published a report entitled: What do we know about aid as we approach 2015? It notes the many successes of aid in a variety of sectors, and that in order to remain relevant and effective beyond 2015 aid must learn to deal with, amongst other things, the...
Blog
In the run up to the announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) in September every development issue is clamouring for attention. The constituencies behind each issue run the risk of being accused of ‘bandwagoning’—linking their particular issue to the SDGs when the arguments for such...
Blog
30 October 2014 by Roger Williamson In this interview Professor Anthony Shorrocks describes the methodology to research global household wealth, developed by him and colleagues when he was Director of UNU-WIDER. The initial 2006 study with its headline that 2% of households owned half of global...
Blog
27 August 2014 In this interview Justin Lin, Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER, talks about how the state can enable the process of structural transformation of the economy, how to fund the necessary investments of this transformation, structuralism versus new structuralism, how...
Blog
– The Role of Inequality and Institutions
27 August 2014 Vladimir Popov Modern economic growth started in the West, not because of the efficiency of various capitalist institutions (elimination of serfdom, free cities, universities). It was the redistribution of wealth and income (enclosure in Britain) that resulted in an increase in...
Blog
23 April 2014 Justin Yifu Lin and Yan Wang At the onset of its miraculous rise in 1979, China had been trapped in poverty for centuries and was poorer than most sub-Saharan African countries. Thanks to the right strategies for transformation, China achieved an average annual growth rate of 9.8 per...
Blog
30 April 2013 Tony Addison As April closes, our thoughts turn to UNU-WIDER’s spring/summer programme. And it’s a busy one. June sees us back in Stockholm, this time to talk about aid, climate change and the environment at the ReCom results meeting. There is also our big Learning to Compete...
Blog
Tony Addison As the snow continues to lie deep across Helsinki, UNU-WIDER is putting the last touches to the ReCom results meeting on ‘aid and the social sectors’, which takes place at Sida in Stockholm on 13 March. Do join us if you are in Stockholm or via the video cast. Further details and how to...
Blog
Tony Addison We start the new year at a fast pace, preparing for the ReCom results meeting on ‘Aid and the Social Sectors’ in Stockholm on 13th March, and the development conference in June on ‘Learning to Compete: Industrial Development and Policy in Africa’. Coming up later in the year is our...
Blog
Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later this month, as well as our WIDER Annual Lecture by Lant Pritchett of Harvard University (you can also register here to view it as a webcast) just...
Blog
Luc Christiaensen and Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen If a person suddenly becomes poor, for example, due to an unexpected death or illness in the family, they will have a rather different experience and understanding of poverty than someone who has been impoverished almost their entire life. Importantly...
Blog
– Emerging Challenges for Post-2015 MDGs
Rolph van der Hoeven and Peter van Bergeijk One of the most important trends that emerged since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is the rapid growth of some large developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil. Figure 1 illustrates the shift of the economic weight of...
Blog
Tony Addison With our temperatures now well above zero, we head for the official end of the Finnish winter on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday). As reported last month, the annual bird migration is well under way. Arriving too, are UNU-WIDER’s many visitors on our PhD internship and visiting scholar...
Blog
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a glimmer of better days to come. I heard birdsong for the first time last week, and the great annual bird migrations into our northern lands are now underway...
Blog
– Making Growth more Inclusive, Part 2
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But there is now much concern about whether impressive growth rates are yielding enough poverty reduction. The present debate about their poverty lines is a...
Blog
– What Does This Mean for the Fight Against Global Poverty? Part I
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But there is now much concern about whether impressive growth rates are yielding enough poverty reduction. The present debate about their poverty lines is a...
Blog
Tony Addison The present currency turmoil is both a product and a cause of profound changes now underway in the global economy. Part 1 of this two-part article, which appeared in the October Angle, focused on Latin America and Europe. Part 2 discusses the latest turbulence in the eurozone as well as...
Blog
Tony Addison The present currency turmoil is both a symptom and a cause of profound changes now underway in the global economy. In part 1 of this two-part article, we focus on Latin America and Europe. Part 2 discusses China, and will appear in the November Angle. There is a famous British poster...
Blog
Tony Addison A visit to Buenos Aires in September provided a good vantage point to look at the euro zone’s deepening crisis. Angle readers will recall that Argentina went through a painful adjustment process some ten years ago. This culminated in the peso being forced off its peg to the US dollar in...
Blog
Tony Addison 'Birds of a feather flock together', the old saying goes. So too do investors. Today, those investment birds are a depressed lot. The summer talk is of a 'double dip recession', 'Euro zone collapse', and the USA and Europe 'turning into Japan'—years of economic stagnation. It's enough...
Blog
– The Case of Nokia's N95 Smartphone
Jyrki Ali-Yrkkö, Petri Rouvinen, Timo Seppälä, Pekka Ylä-Anttila Available statistics biases the true picture of the current stage of globalization, which is characterized by widespread outsourcing and offshoring. Our concern is that these flaws in available measures may lead to misguided policies...
Blog
– Lessons for Developing Countries
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan China and India have become global economic powers. Even at the market exchange rate, China overtook Japan in 2010 as the second largest economy. China’s trade and financial activities, India’s emergence as a technology and innovation hub, and both countries...
Blog
It's imperative to demolish myths around the economic achievements of China and India and get a better sense of the real challenges. The author of the book, 'Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India' (Princeton University Press, 2010) discusses here some of the...
Blog
Martin Medina As world leaders gather in Copenhagen this month for the fifteenth United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) the challenges facing developing country industrialization have again been brought to the fore. One of the central challenges relates to industrial waste, which both...
Blog
Alice Amsden, Alisa DiCaprio, and James Robinson To understand what role elites play in the process of economic development, we need to establish first who they are. Though most definitions are welfare neutral, in popular discourse elites take on a negative connotation. This conceptual confusion has...
The project centers on the inter-linkages between the major developing countries of Brazil, India, China and South Africa and the global economy, with a special emphasis on the implications of China's growth on smaller economies and the rest of the world. The research areas include changing patterns...
– Growth, Trade, Investment and Institutional Developments
There has been considerable media coverage of China’s trade and financial activities, on India’s emergence as a technology and innovation hub, and on the commerce and investment interactions between China, India, Brazil, and South Africa and other developing nations. For example, China has been...
Getting an accurate picture of poverty and inequality trends and patterns in the world's most populous country is central to understanding changes in global inequality and poverty - these alter significantly when China is included or excluded. China's future performance is obviously central to the...
Blog
by Meghnad Desai The emergence of four economies from the ‘South’ as important players in the global economy has attracted attention. These four economies, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS) were thought, for different reasons, to be hopeless ‘basket cases’ during the second half of the...
Blog
by Guanghua Wan Poverty reduction can be achieved through growth and/or improved distribution. However, growth can lead to a decrease or increase in inequality. Thus, it may not translate into poverty reduction. Meanwhile, poverty and growth depend on the level and dynamics of inequality. This...
Getting an accurate picture of poverty and inequality trends and patterns in the world’s most populous country is central to understanding changes in global inequality and poverty – these alter significantly when China is included or excluded. China’s future performance is obviously central to the...
Getting an accurate picture of poverty and inequality trends and patterns in the world's most populous country is central to understanding changes in global inequality and poverty – these alter significantly when China is included or excluded. China's future performance is obviously central to the...
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional disparities exist. This project will investigate the...
Blog
by Guanghua Wan Introduction Inequality in income and consumption has been increasing dramatically in China since mid- 1980s. In particular, China’s regional inequality has attracted considerable attention. In the past 20 years or so, the costal areas have experienced phenomenal growth while the...
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional disparities exist. This project will investigate the...
Blog
by James K. Galbraith I t is well-known that economic inequality rose drastically in Russia during the transition (Sheviakov and Kiruta 2001). For China, Khan et al. (1999) report a 42.5% increase in a Gini measure of household income inequality in China between 1988 and 1995 alone. But the...
Blog
by Martin Ravallion There has been much debate about how much poor people in developing countries gain from trade openness, as one aspect of ‘globalization’. Some observers have argued that poor people share amply in the gains from external trade in developing countries, while others argue that the...
Blog
by Anthony L. Venables Economic activity is distributed extremely unevenly across space. At the international level there are rich countries and poor ones-underdevelopment can be viewed as a manifestation of spatial inequality. Within countries there are regional disparities; per capita income in...
WIDER Symposium on Adaptive Efficiency and Evolving Diversity of Enterprise Ownership and Governance
A property rights regime covers rights to use, lease, donate, bequest, and sell assets or collect the incomes generated by assets. A clear and transparent property rights regime facilitates investment and economic growth. While private property is considered by many to be the most superior type of...
Displaying 43 of 43 results