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Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Political clientelism — which reflects strategic, discretionary, and targeted exchange of private goods and services for political support to the incumbent — has characterised distributive politics in the Global South for decades. The conditional nature of exchange between political parties and...
UNU-WIDER operates at the intersection of research, capacity development, and policy engagement, with a mission to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people. Each year, we publish hundreds of papers, open access books, journal articles, convene dozens of events and capacity development...
In a landmark judgment in June 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled against the use of race-conscious admissions in colleges and universities. This decision marked a controversial end to affirmative action in US higher education admissions.Race-conscious admissions policies at American universities have...
Donors increasingly speak of locally led aid response, but often do not walk the walk. Case in point is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the humanitarian and development agency of the largest donor country in the world. In late 2021, USAID set a target that 25% of its...
Measuring the effectiveness of local government in Ghana is hampered by incomplete records, but despite that there are still visible patterns, write Daniel Chachu, Michael Danquah, and Rachel M. Gisselquist.Decentralisation, or the transfer of power, responsibilities, and resources from central to...
Demonstrating empirically the Aid Effectiveness Principles' global impact on development is a challenge. But according to Rachel M. Gisselquist, Patricia Justino and Andrea Vaccaro, the value of these principles lies in mobilizing support for normative commitments such as establishing effective...
Blog
The Omicron variant resulted in a third major wave of Covid-19 in India, with the number of cases exceeding those in the second wave, albeit causing less severe illness on average. In this post, Kundu and Gisselquist draw on several nationally representative data sources to illuminate key Covid-19...
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Vietnamese and Afghan migrants in Canada, Germany, the UK, and the US
Migration is an inherent feature of human history. A rich literature considers the experiences of global migrants across diverse environments. This special issue explores such experiences with a focus on inequality between migrants and host populations in countries of settlement. It asks: why are...
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 introducing Staffan Lindberg’s keynote at the WIDER Development Conference, UNU-WIDER Senior Research Fellow and political scientist Rachel Gisselquist says that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to new restrictions on rights and freedoms at a time when experts have been warning about the decline...
During the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and other public services, that suffered the highest rates of COVID-19. Indeed, countries rated to be best prepared to respond to public health threats...
Blog
Democracy is having a hard time. In India, once the world’s largest democracy, the pandemic has hastened the country’s slide toward authoritarianism. In the US, the Trump administration’s attacks on democratic norms reached new lows when the former president, backed by the Republican party, refused...
– Focus on data
This month, a partnership between UNU-WIDER and the Groningen Growth and Development Center (GGDC) brings a new database on economic transformation public. The first findings from the Economic Transformation Database (ETD), and what they could imply, are outlined in an article that appeared in the...
Among the many things said about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the description by the President of the UN General Assembly’s 70th session, Mogens Lykketoft, that the SDGs represented ‘an unprecedented statistical challenge’. In addition to the 17 goals, there are 169 targets and 232...
Blog
The last several months have given us many reasons to worry about US democracy – not least the riot at the US Capitol and the president’s refusal to accept the results of the November election, with Republican support. Rachel Gisselquist argues that clientelism is yet another reason to worry...
Blog
In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, at least 95 countries declared a national emergency, empowering governments to act in ways they would not normally to protect citizens. Such exceptional periods pose major risks for democracy and human rights, providing opportunities for leaders and states to...
Blog
States with fragile state health systems have been commended for effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But if we take into account factors such as favourable climate and the age structure of the population, the COVID-19 impact is, in fact, greater on states with weak institutions, explain...
Blog
– My experience as a visiting PhD Fellow
I am now in my fourth year as a PhD student in development studies at SOAS, University of London, working on my thesis, ‘The Dynamics of Chinese Private Outward Foreign Direct Investment in Ethiopia: A Comparison of Light Manufacturing Industry and Construction Material Industry’. This PhD journey...
Blog
– Learning and growing with UNU-WIDER
UNU-WIDER has featured prominently in my research career to date. It began during my PhD when I visited the Helsinki office as a Visiting PhD Fellow to spend the spring working on my thesis with two wonderful mentors, Carla Canelas and Rachel Gisselquist, before returning to University Cheick Anta...
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Data, measurement, and trends
Inequality and social exclusion receive considerable contemporary policy attention. In the field of international development, inequality—both vertical (between individuals and households) and horizontal (between groups)—is a core concern in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Despite...
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
This collection of studies considers the impact of migration in the Global South on those who do not migrate: children, partners, and families left behind; sending communities; and national economies. In so doing, it speaks to continuing research ad policy discussions on the 'migration-development...
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Building knowledge about migration governance and policy in the Global South is a priority for research and policy. The studies in this special section offer both new empirical insights and new frameworks for analysis, with key policy implications, that can enrich our discussion of these topics...
The questions of whether aid has impact and is effective have been the subject of a considerable literature, including attention to the aggregate impact of aid on growth across countries (Arndt, Jones, & Tarp, 2010, 2015, 2016; Burnside & Dollar, 2000; Easterly, 2003; Hansen & Tarp, 2001; Jones &...
The UNU-WIDER research programme on foreign aid (ReCom) began in 2010, in a period of strong aid scepticism. Dambisa Moyo’s well-known book, Dead Aid (2009), is just one example. The aid sceptics of the twenty-first century maintained that since economists could not find an aggregate relationship...
– Pui Yi Wong - 2018 PhD Fellow
In the fall of 2018 UNU-WIDER welcomed 11 doctoral students from around the world as part of our PhD Fellowship Programme. The students, from Ghana, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Ethiopia, Togo and Kenya, came to UNU-WIDER for three months to work on their research under the guidance of a UNU-WIDER...
The articles in the forthcoming special issue are already available online on full open access. The special issue will be officially published in March 2019, vol. 55, issue 3. Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and...
A considerable body of recent research suggests that inequality between ethnic groups has major socioeconomic implications. ‘Economists have long recognised that there is an association between inequality and development’, reported the Economist in 2015, drawing on a much-discussed article by...
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
A considerable body of research suggests that horizontal inequality between ethnic groups has major socioeconomic implications, in particular for peace and economic development. Much of this work focuses on horizontal inequality as an independent causal variable, rather than an outcome of various...
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
– Four implications for work in development
As a political scientist specializing in the comparative politics of development, including particular attention to issues of governance and democracy, I have followed this year’s World Development Report with special interest. I have not been alone. WDRs usually attract attention, but this year’s...
Blog
The ‘Responding to crises’ conference was marked by wide range of topics. Opening the event was former Finnish Defence Minister and UN Special Rapporteur, Elisabeth Rehn, who gave us the benefit of her experience, not least in the impact of war on women and girls, and the need to follow up on the...
I had the pleasure of attending UNU-WIDER’s ‘Responding to crises’ conference last week. The theme was highly topical and session topics far-reaching, which makes the task of teasing out core ideas difficult. It may seem, as a result, that research on crises occurs in silos. However, as a poverty...
Displaying 32 of 58 results