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Publications (202)
Blog
– The Earth Trembles in Haiti
Evans Jadotte On Tuesday January 12 2010, a 7.0 Richter scale earthquake, off the coast of Haiti destroyed its capital Port-au-Prince. It also razed the cities of Léogane, Petit-Goâve, Grand-Goâve, Jacmel, and Les Cayes. It came as a terrible unexpected shock to one of the poorest countries in the...
– Why that’s a problem and how to fix it
Less than 10% of the workers in sub-Saharan Africa save for old age, the lowest rate for any region in the world. That implies most of the breadwinners today won’t be able to afford basic items after retirement. A pension plan is meant to commit employers to make regular savings so that employees...
Research Brief
In 2008 Doucouliagos and Paldam published a paper, hereafter known as DP08, based on a meta-analytic approach to the aid-growth question. Working with a database including 68 studies on the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth they arrived at a pessimistic result. This is in line...
– Bad Luck or Bad Policy?
16 December 2014 John Page On 20 November 2014 the United Nations celebrated the 25th Africa Industrialization Day. But perhaps ‘celebrate’ is not exactly the right word. Africa’s experience with industrialization over the past quarter century has actually been disappointing. In 2010, sub-Saharan...
Blog
– The World Turns Brighter
by Tony Addison This year is set to see a new chapter open in Africa’s debt story and, for once, it looks like a positive story—as the region begins to access the international capital market in ways that could fund development and poverty reduction. Today 20 African countries have a sovereign...
Research Brief
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– The Impact of Development Aid and Democracy Assistance
Development aid was effective in promoting democratic transitions during the 1990s in African countries beset by economic crisis domestic discontent, and a high dependency on aid. Development aid also influenced democratic transition indirectly through conditionalities that required unpopular...
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
by Stephen BrowneEvery ‘conflict country’ is a special case. What distinguishes Rwanda is the intensity of human destruction to which the country succumbed in 1994. One seventh of the population, mostly from the Tutsi minority, was massacred in the space of three months. The academic, commercial...
Research Brief
In 1959 the Netherlands discovered vast natural gas resources in the North Sea. This discovery led to a rapid increase in the country’s national wealth. However in the 1960s the Netherlands experienced an economic crisis. The natural gas reserves were one of the causes of this crisis, as the Dutch...
Research Brief
– The Case of Sierra Leone
Phillip Michael Kargbo's UNU-WIDER working paper, 'Impact of Foreign Aid on Economic Growth in Sierra Leone: Empirical Analysis' examines the impact of foreign aid on growth in Sierra Leone using a variety of econometric approaches. The paper finds that in the period 1970-2007 aid has a significant...
Blog
by Rolph van der Hoeven Discussion of aid, both its level and effectiveness, overwhelmingly focuses on issues of national economic management. This is the approach taken, for example, in the World Bank’s major 1998 report, Assessing Aid. But aid cannot be seen in isolation from the issue of global...
Research Brief
– What Does the Evidence Say?
Donors are concerned about how their aid is used, especially how it affects public spending. For low-income countries that receive significant amounts of aid relative to GDP, most of the aid spent in the country is given to the government either directly, or by financing services that would...
Research Brief
It is widely recognized that entrepreneurship is of critical importance to industrial development. Despite this importance we know little about the skills of business owners and managers in developing countries. In the WIDER Working Paper ‘The Role of Training in Fostering Cluster-Based Micro and...
Blog
4 July 2013 Roger Williamson On 4 June 2013 I attended an interesting effort on the part of UNU-WIDER to communicate research results to development policy makers and practitioners. Top academics and researchers from around the world (see event site here) took to the stage, followed by the Swedish...
Blog
– What did we Learn?
24 June 2013 Tony Addison The Stockholm ReCom results meeting at Sida on 4 June was a lively exchange on all aspects of foreign aid and climate change finance (including the role of private finance). Roger Williamson provides his perspective on the day, elsewhere in this issue of Angle. For myself...
Blog
by Oliver Morrissey Aid effectiveness has attracted considerable attention in the economic development literature since the late 1990s, both in terms of research publications and policy debates. Something of a consensus is emerging that aid does have a positive impact on growth, although debate...
Displaying 16 of 202 results