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Publications (74)
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...
Blog
– Institutions and the Industrial Revolution
by Patrick Karl O’Brien ‘Good’ institutions have become a core ingredient of most modern day explanations of economic growth and development. The recently published WIDER book on Institutional Change and Economic Development (see the previous Angle article by Ha-Joon Chang) emphasizes that what is...
It’s early July and I’m back in Maputo, Mozambique, looking over the calm sea at the boats that fish the waters for the seafood that makes visiting this part of Africa such a treat. The sunset here is a delicate combination of pale turquoise, light grey, and warm pink. Coming from the Finnish summer...
Policy Brief
pdf
– Levar aos Pobres os Benefícios da Paz
Este resumo na área das políticas apresenta os resultados de um projecto do UNU/WIDER sobre a guerra e a reconstrução em África da autoria de Tony Addison, que se encontra actualmente publicado sob o nome de From Conflict to Recovery in Africa. Tal como este estudo deixa bem claro, a paz é...
While many WIDER Development Conferences emerge from ongoing projects, our latest conference in October — ‘Migration and mobility: New frontiers for research and policy’ — offered a different opportunity: to focus attention on an important cross-cutting topic in much of UNU-WIDER’s recent work...
Blog
The tragedy for the Afghan people of the Taliban re-taking control of the country in August 2021 is the denouement of a process 20 years in the making. The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and the national security forces over the course of a few days is not a “surprise” to anyone, but was a...
Policy Brief
pdf
– Making Peace Work for the Poor
This policy brief summarizes the results of a UNU/WIDER project on war and reconstruction in Africa directed by Tony Addison, which is now published as From Conflict to Recovery in Africa. As this study makes clear, peace is often elusive and economic policy can play a major role in supporting the...
Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine began in March 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, but it wasn’t until February 2022 that Russia shocked the world with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, starting Europe’s biggest war since WWII. Defeating expectations that Russian military forces would...
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
– 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...
Research Brief
pdf
– A Trade-Off Between Governance and Democracy?
In Mozambique donors have shifted focus from project aid to budget support in an effort to reform the public sector and ‘justice, legality and public order’. While budget support has increased state capacity and helped Mozambique’s donor community find common ground, it has had a negative impact on...
Continued lockdown measures are straining the social contract between citizens and governments. As this column explains, in contexts where there are low levels of trust in the state as well as high economic inequality – including some countries in sub-Saharan Africa – this could lead to growing...
Blog
I recently returned from a week at the University of Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa, speaking at a conference honouring Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu who had been Chancellor of the university for 25 years—and had helped to encourage and defend students and staff during the hardest years of...
Policy Brief
pdf
– Understanding Entrepreneurship and Violent Conflict in Developing Countries
Although the impacts of violent conflict on investment, production, incomes and inequality have been widely studied on an aggregate level, comparatively less is known about the more diverse impacts of such conflict at the micro (particularly firm) level. Understanding such impacts can improve...
Blog
Tony Addison and Tilman Brück There is a special role for entrepreneurship to play in making peace work. The recently published UNU-WIDER study, Making Peace Work: The Challenges of Social and Economic Reconstruction, details how the related goals of peace, prosperity and participation need to be...
What does it mean to be a fragile state? According to the IMF, fragile states are those in ‘which the government is unable to reliably deliver basic public services to the population – [they] face severe and entrenched obstacles to economic and human development.’ It is with this understanding that...
Displaying 16 of 74 results