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Blog
– Dois poemas de Neide Sigaúque
Aqui não dá para dormir, quanto mais para sonharSou a Neide Sigaúque,mulher,oriunda do leito Austral do terceiro mundo,Moçambique, terra de boa gente.Nasci num país independente.Independente da luta de libertação dos meus pais,mas dependente de ajuda externa do ocidente.Um país com economia pendente...
Blog
On 15 May, poet Neide Sigaúque was commissioned to perform two poems on the themes of the WIDER Development Conference The world at crossroads – securing the future generations held in Maputo, Mozambique.One cannot sleep here, let alone dream I am Neide Sigaúque,A womanfrom the southern side of the...
In Mozambique, analysing how and why food prices change is crucial. Understanding the dynamics of price formation is fundamental to mitigate the adverse effects of price volatility to the economy. Detailed data on the prices of key food items in Mozambique is, however, limited in both quantity...
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– Does labour market information speed job-taking in Mozambique?
High youth unemployment rates and long school-to-work transition times pose a threat to low-income countries’ sustainable growth prospects. Using a randomized control trial experiment conducted in Mozambique, we find strong evidence that providing information on wages and unemployment reduces the...
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We examine the long-term impact of forced labour on individual risk behaviour and economic decisions. For that, we focus on a policy of coercive cotton cultivation enforced in colonial Mozambique between 1926 and 1961. We combine archival sources about the boundaries of historical cotton concessions...
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Budget reliability is the first pillar of Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA). In this study, we construct an expansion of the PEFA government response accuracy indicator and test its decomposition, with an application to the government budgets and state general accounts of...
Blog
– Report from the 2023 IGM Annual Conference
More than 70% of the Mozambican population depends on subsistence agriculture. As such, the agriculture sector is undoubtedly of fundamental importance to the country’s wellbeing. It has enormous potential to reduce poverty, promote food security, and generate income and employment. Despite its...
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– Evidence from Mozambique
The political consequences of economic inequality have been debated in academic and policy circles for centuries. The nature of this relationship seems highly dependent on specific contexts, with empirical studies showing mixed evidence on how economic inequality affects voting and other forms of...
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Following the abolition of slavery, various forms of compulsory labour were adopted by colonial powers to develop their economies. This paper analyses the contemporary consequences of compulsory cotton production—a forced labour system that operated in colonial Mozambique from 1926 to 1961. During...
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– Evidence from Mozambique
Using a unique panel survey of final-year undergraduates at six of the largest universities in Mozambique, we study the wage premium associated with completing an undergraduate degree. Conditional on a very rich set of controls, including pre-degree earnings, objective measures of ability, and...
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– A bird’s eye view based on existing databases
Using publicly available databases and drawing on a wide range of indicators, this paper reviews the institutional performance of Mozambique across seven broad categories: rule of law and judicial independence; voice and freedom of expression/association; political participation; accountability and...
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– Examining socio-psychological characteristics and information provision
Worldwide, enterprises are hit by disasters such as cyclones and floods. Despite being impacted negatively, most enterprises do not prepare for future disasters. This study aims at understanding the determinants of enterprises’ disaster preparedness. It first examines whether specific socio...
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– A comparative perspective
We examine the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated tax-benefit measures in seven sub-Saharan African countries, focusing on the onset of the crisis.We evaluate impacts on disposable incomes, considering variations across income groups; assess the effectiveness of tax...
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– A social accounting matrix approach
This study makes use of Mozambican social accounting matrices (SAMs) for the years 2007 and 2019, which we compare to uncover structural changes. Our findings reflect the significant short- and long-term challenges that Mozambican policy makers face. Broad-based dynamic change and structural...
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– Evidence from an ethnographic study in Mozambique
This ethnographic study explores the implementation of bilingual education in Mozambique: how it is understood, adapted, and resisted by school directors, teachers, and local officials. Bilingual education uses local languages in early grades before a gradual shift into Portuguese, which most...
Blog
Over the past few months, we have been carrying out extensive research in Mozambique as part of the Inequality and governance in unstable democracies – the mediating role of trust project. The research aims to understand the long-term impacts of cotton concessions —a forced labour system implemented...
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Different concepts of inequality lead to different positions in discussions about whether economic growth leads to increasing inequality. This study investigates how over 1,100 young adults in Mozambique perceive inequality and whether their perceptions are based on relative or absolute terms. It...
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– The case of post-war migration in Mozambique
Internal migration plays an important role in the economic development of individuals, their families, and their country. This study describes Mozambique’s most common migration patterns from 1992 until 2017 using data from three population censuses. We focus on the most important moves between...
Blog
– Key findings from the IGM Annual Conference 2022
Since 2016, the private sector in Mozambique has faced several external shocks, including terrorism in Cabo Delgado, Cyclones Idai and Kenneth, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Ukrainian conflict and its impact on commodity prices and inflation. What is the state of the Mozambican private sector today...
– The case of Mozambique
Designing and implementing public policies requires caution to guarantee the best use of scarce resources, especially in middle- and lower-income countries. One of the ways to achieve this goal is to simulate the potential tax and benefit impacts of different policies that are under consideration...
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We study the effectiveness of social protection benefits in reducing income and consumption poverty in five sub-Saharan African countries—Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia—in normal times and times of widespread economic crisis. Using tax–benefit microsimulation models with...
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Informal self-employed traders in developing countries are vulnerable to shocks as they often lack access to social insurance or formal finance. This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these urban traders in the capital of Mozambique, Maputo. Drawing on longitudinal phone...
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This study investigates the short-term impacts of an aggregate socioeconomic shock on household food consumption and children’s nutrition using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique. In response to the economic downturn, households are expected to adjust their food choices both in terms of...
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This study presents and discusses structural features of the Mozambique economy through the lens of a recently constructed 2019 social accounting matrix (SAM). This is an important reality check of the SAM construction process since it brings together various data sources that are not necessarily...
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In this study, we explore the correlates of the employment gender gap among urban youth in Mozambique. Young people are confronted with simultaneous decisions about education, work and family life influenced by social norms around gender roles. Using data from a panel of individuals in 2017 and 2020...
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– 1996/97–2019/20
After decades of war, ending in 1992, Mozambique embarked on a path of sustained economic growth and substantial poverty reduction. However, these positive dynamics started to revert from 2015, with per capita growth rates getting close to zero and household real consumption reducing in all areas of...
Blog
– Experimental evidence from Mozambique
Digital technologies can be deployed to improve job search, but their effectiveness in practice is disrupted. This column uses experimental data to investigate the effect of a digital job-matching platform on the labour outcomes of young people in Mozambique. The ‘treatment’ of a text message...
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– Evidence from COVID-19
Digital labour platforms have grown five-fold over the last decade, enabling significant expansion in gig work worldwide. We interrogate the criticism that these platforms tend to amplify aggregate economic shocks for registered users (workers). Based on the universe of records from a matching...
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– Labour coercion and trade preferences on the Sena Sugar Estates (1920–74)
The magnitude of returns to colonial-era investments in Africa has been addressed in an extensive literature, as have the nature and legacies of extractive colonial institutions. However, the link between these institutions and the profitability of firms remains unclear. We reconstruct the annual...
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– Experimental evidence from sub-Saharan Africa
Can digital labour market platforms reduce search frictions in either formal or informal labour markets? We study this question using a randomized experiment embedded in a tracer study of the work transitions of graduates from technical and vocational colleges in Mozambique. We implement an...
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The subject of this paper is health and ethnic inequalities in Mozambique, with special reference to leprosy. It is argued that the health policies and strategies adopted in the colonial and post-colonial periods led to an unequal distribution not only of certain diseases but also of health...
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This paper estimates the causal impact of teacher content knowledge on student achievement in Mozambique, a low-income country where a large share of fourth-graders fail to meet the minimum requirements of literacy and numeracy. I use nationally representative data from the Service Delivery...
Millions of Africans lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but state social security systems were of little help to people who lost their income.This is the conclusion of a study conducted by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, UNU...
The next decade is a make-or-break for the world’s most vulnerable countries. To tackle the unprecedented confluence of COVID-19, climate, and economic crises, new solutions are desperately needed. Scientific research is one key for finding long-lasting solutions. Least developed countries (LDCs)...
In summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and avoiding societies from becoming more unequal. Now we are releasing a cross-country comparative study that analyses the distributional effects of the...
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This paper analyses the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and related tax-benefit measures in 2020 in a cross-country comparative perspective for five African countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. We first estimate the impact of the crisis on disposable incomes...
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This paper builds on a longitudinal school-to-work transition phone survey experiment to quantify the effects on attrition of communicating with participants. Specifically, we study the impact of sending topically relevant information on job market conditions via SMS at the start of each survey...
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– The Mozambican case
At independence in 1975, the Frelimo government took over public administration from the colonial system and started to transform it. The public financial management (PFM) system was adapted to the central planning and management of the economy in line with nationalist and Marxist-Leninist thinking...
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This paper explores agricultural performance of Mozambique, its institutional weaknesses, and the underlying factors that underpin an unsatisfactory performance during many decades. We point to the role of systemic political instability and violence combined with challenges to state legitimacy...
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– The case of Mozambican firms
Using panel data of manufacturing enterprises in Mozambique between 2012 and 2017, we investigate how changes in perceived quality of governance are related to firms’ law compliance. Controlling for firm-level unobserved heterogeneity, we look at three aspects of governance and their components...
– Three lessons to inform next steps
At the start of the last decade, Mozambique’s prospects looked stellar. Following from the early 1990s, when peace finally arrived after a devastating and protracted armed conflict, this vast country in Southern Africa could look back proudly on a sustained period of rapid growth and poverty...
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This study assesses the impact of four coal mines in Mozambique on the socioeconomic outcomes of the local population. We combine four waves of household surveys with coal mine locations data and employ a difference-in-difference model. The timing of the surveys allows us to control for pre-trends...
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– 1997–2017
This study seeks to add to the research on inequality in least developed countries, namely in Mozambique, by measuring and mapping indicators of horizontal wealth inequality along geographic regions and ethnolinguistic identities. Using census data for 1997, 2007, and 2017, we identify possible...
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– Practical guidance on measuring intergenerational mobility from a simulation framework
Despite the importance attributed to intergenerational educational mobility in the process of development, there remains little consensus on how mobility should be measured. We present analytical and empirical evidence regarding the sensitivity of alternative estimators to different forms of...
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– Insights from a digital matching platform in Mozambique
Despite the severe negative economic shock associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence from many contexts points to a surge in sales on online platforms, as well as shifts in the composition of demand. This paper investigates how the pandemic has affected both the supply of and demand for...
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This study assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique on household consumption poverty. To predict changes in income and the associated effects on poverty and inequality, we rely on macroeconomic impacts estimated by Betho et...
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– A social accounting matrix approach
This study aims to assess the economic costs of COVID-19 and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique, relying on a social accounting matrix. It produces numerical results that represent the direct effect on (or ‘shocks’ to) the economy associated with the pandemic. We...
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– Evidence from Idai
Cyclone Idai, the most devastating cyclone ever recorded in Southern Africa, caused havoc in large parts of central Mozambique, especially the port city of Beira, upon its landfall in March 2019. This study reviews and compares measurements of the impact, using various sources of remote sensing data...
Displaying 48 of 196 results