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Publications (25)
– But not without some unintended results
About three years have passed since the South African government introduced the COVID-19 Temporary Employer-Employee Relief Scheme (TERS) in response to the pandemic and associated lockdown regulations. Given the extent of unemployment in South Africa even prior to the pandemic, the policy’s primary...
Blog
Nearly half the working-age population and nearly two-thirds of the unemployed live in areas designated as townships under apartheid spatial laws. Originally developed as 'labour dormitories', they have been challenging to develop as more vibrant local economies and residential areas. What can the...
Simon Kuznets’ pipe dream was to have economic inequality data that rarely existed when he was writing. What are the pipe dreams of today’s development economists? How about a rigorous development economics book, or set of books, you could read in a spare hour or two? A book that provides an...
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...
– Evidence from tax administrative and survey data in Zambia
Like most other countries, the government of Zambia introduced restrictions to control COVID-19, which considerably curtailed normal economic activity. A new WIDER and World Bank working paper, a multi-institutional collaboration of UNU-WIDER, the World Bank, the Zambia Revenue Authority and the...
Blog
According to the World Bank, Indonesia has reached the upper-middle income status in 2019 after spending almost two decades in the lower-middle income country group. Despite the setback of COVID-19 the Indonesian government aspires to become a ‘developed’ country by 2045, when the country will...
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...
Around the world, the pandemic, and the measures taken to address it, have had far reaching effects on poverty, inequality, and governance. And even as the need for global action has increased, many wealthy countries have turned inwards — with closed borders, stockpiling of vaccines, and...
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...
The opening keynote of the recent WIDER Development Conference, COVID-19 and development – effects and new realities for the Global South, was given by Oriana Bandiera, Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, an accomplished economist with several awards under...
The Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project has been tracking the daily spending of 60 poor households in rural Bangladesh for the last six years. Analysis of the data collected – especially the changes to spending patterns that have occurred during the pandemic – reveals four areas where policymakers...
Blog
– A curse or a blessing?
Much has been written on India as an outlier in Global Value Chains (GVC). Despite being one of the largest and fastest-growing markets located in direct proximity to ‘Factory Asia’ (Baldwin, 2008), India is documented to have low participation in global networks, especially amongst South Asian...
Youth (those aged 15–29) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face notoriously precarious employment prospects. Youth unemployment is the highest in the world — currently 23% in Arab States and 30% in Northern Africa in 2019, and nondecreasing.1 Unemployment among young women in the region is...
Informality is a pervasive phenomenon in the labour markets of developing countries. Two billion workers, representing 61.2 per cent of the world’s employed population, are in informal employment. Emerging and developing countries account for more than 93 per cent of total global informal employment...
Blog
– What needs to happen next time
Coronavirus lockdowns brought the world to a standstill. Rules on hygiene and social distancing have reshaped daily life, schools and businesses had been closed, and gatherings banned. Almost 2.7 billion workers, representing around 81% the world’s workforce, have been affected by partial or full...
Blog
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the global economy, with world output contracting at 3.5% in 2020, and no recovery likely before the fourth quarter of 2021. Similar to other developing regions, sub-Saharan Africa recorded a 2.6% decline, following strong growth of 3.2% in 2019...
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