Publications (198)

A recent study examines how inequality is perceived among young adults in Mozambique and how perceptions of inequality correlate with different demographic characteristics, including gender. It focuses on how young Mozambicans view the disparities between rich and poor people and why. Additionally...

Zambia is putting in place fiscal measures to improve the efficient collection of domestic revenue to finance social and public infrastructure. This analysis shows how much more revenue can be accumulated if tax evasion was at the bare minimum. Tax gap describes the share of the potential tax...

Along with several other African countries, Zambia has introduced a withholding system for value-added tax (VAT) to improve revenue collection and compliance. Even though VAT withholding policies are applied in several countries in Africa and similar industry-specific policies in Europe, empirical...

Several sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have achieved substantial economic growth in the past 30 years. Likewise, access to education has considerably expanded, as reflected in rising enrolment rates for both men and women. Female labour force participation (FLFP) rates, however, are stagnant in...

Governments in low- and middle-income countries face a trade-off between raising tax revenue to strengthen social protection and creating incentives to enter formal employment. In developed countries so called in-work transfers (i.e., social benefits paid upon condition of being employed) have been...

The volume, Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods, and Determinants , brings together leading scholars from a range of social science disciplines working on a variety of issues related to social mobility. Three motivations guide this joint effort: identifying important knowledge...

Domestic revenue mobilization (DRM) — the generation of government revenue from domestic tax and non-tax resources — plays a crucial role in building an enduring financing architecture for sustainable development. This brief summarizes the dynamics of DRM trends across the past four decades...

The volume, Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods and Determinants, brings together leading scholars from several disciplines to advance research practice on social mobility. Three sets of motivations guide this joint effort: identifying important knowledge gaps; bringing...

Risk-based approaches are becoming commonplace for tax authorities as a tool for enforcement. Improvements in technology, technological adoption and in some cases machine learning, hold great promise for finding the taxpayers who are most likely to avoid taxes, thus improving the detection of non...

O Ensino Técnico-Profissional (ETP) é frequentemente visto como uma solução milagrosa que resolve questões que vão desde o desemprego juvenil até à mudança estrutural relacionada com o mercado de trabalho. Isto é particularmente verdade para os países em desenvolvimento com um ensino básico...

Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is often seen as a silver bullet resolving issues ranging from youth unemployment to labour market-related structural change. This is particularly true for developing countries with deficient basic education and high numbers of youth seeking to...

Recent analysis of inequality trends — which relies on the World Income Inequality Database (WIID) Companion , a pair of rich new datasets — assesses the extent to which inequality trends depend on certain views about inequality, including whether absolute or relative income changes matter more and...

How could countries in the Global South develop their tax systems further and improve compliance? This analysis shows how two tax administration interventions impacted the number of small business taxpayers and presumptive tax revenues in Uganda. One-stop-shops — where citizens could register for...

What was the impact on earnings of the economic crisis caused by the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ecuador? To what extent did social assistance programmes compensate household income losses? ECUAMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Ecuador, helps to assess the distributional...

Even though poverty and inequality have been of overriding concern in South Africa’s development policies and programmes since its democratization in 1994, measures of poverty, inequality, and related phenomena in the country do not show a clear improvement. In some important respects, they show...

The two primary features of a job are its wage and how long it lasts. Today, there is an extensive literature on wages in the developing world thanks to the expansion of national household survey data. However, far less work has been conducted on job duration in these countries, primarily due to the...

Plastics are universal and integrated into different sectors of the economy. Industrial policy requires countries to look at moving up the value chain and producing progressively more sophisticated products to contribute to improved economic development. The input materials that are used for...

East Asia’s successful experience in accelerating the process of industrial development with SEZs paved way for the use of SEZs as policy instruments in Africa. In southern Africa, Zambia and South Africa instituted SEZs in legal and institutional frameworks in the 2000s as mechanisms for catalysing...

There is growing recognition around the world that tradable services can play a valuable role in economic development. Africa is no exception, with the need for multiple routes to growth, particularly vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic. Tradable services — business activities that can be exported or...

South Africa is, by most contemporary measures, the most unequal country in the world. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to country’s wealth inequality. It is crucial to accurately measure the concentration of wealth inequality over time, identify the root causes of the current...

Monetary policy affects the real economy through various channels, including the interest rate, exchange rate, credit, and asset price channels. The credit channel has recently received considerable attention. Small firms are more sensitive to changes in interest rates. Small firms which are...

Regional integration in Africa has potential for increasing regional trade and contribute towards industrialization and economic development. Agro-processing trade offers numerous opportunities for southern Africa countries and is a potential area of business to reduce poverty in the region. However...

It is important to understand how working conditions faced by workers in Vietnamese SMEs affect levels of compensation. This is salient given the scope of SMEs in Vietnam — they contribute to approximately 45% of the country’s GDP and 60% of its employment. There are no clearly defined financial or...

During the last three decades Vietnam has undergone a considerable economic transformation. However, little research has considered the role that financial reform has played in the development of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). A focus on the financing of SMEs is of particular importance...

Much work has been done on inequality in South Africa, but to date the literature that assesses the dynamic response of income or wealth distribution to economic policy actions is almost non-existent. This information gap is caused by data shortcomings that make it difficult to provide accurate...

According to South Africa’s National Development Plan Vision 2030, serious action needs to be taken to reduce poverty and encourage economic growth. One of the main challenges involves reducing the unemployment rates in South Africa, particularly among youth. In South Africa, young and large firms...

The impact of medical deductions and medical credits on income inequality is a subject of discussion in South Africa, as well as in many other countries, raising critical questions about the fairness of the medical tax system and the impact on affordability for the poor. An in-depth analysis of...

The transformation of Asia’s education and health systems over the last 50 years has been breathtaking and unprecedented in human history. There are some central features of this transformation that clearly stand out. Over the last 50 years, all Asian countries have been able to expand citizen...

Comprehensive harmonization is crucial to eliminate inefficiencies that hamper free movement of goods and services in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Territorial collaboration between metropolitan clusters and rural areas connected by transport corridors is a potential key...

Diversifying the agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa is important for the combat against poverty and climate change. In Malawi there are plans for legalizing the cultivation of industrial hemp, which would at best bring possibilities for Malawi and South Africa to complement each other in...

Special economic zones (SEZ) in Africa are generally regarded as underperforming relative to their peers in the rest of the world. To explain this underperformance and to support success in the future it is important to analyse the key features and what is lacking in the design of African special...

Since the end of apartheid, South Africa’s economic challenges have disrupted efforts to establish a society of inclusive growth and prosperity. Understanding how South Africa can break the pattern of sluggish growth, high unemployment, inequality and poverty is a pressing policy issue. The overall...