Book Chapter
Mexico’s Oportunidades and the Raise of Social Protection in Latin America
Flera länder i Latin- och Sydamerika har under det senaste decenniet infört sociala trygghetssystem för att minska den utbredda fattigdomen. Miguel NiñoZarazúa går här igenom bakgrunden till dessa reformer och vilka effekter de har fått. Fokus ligger...
Policy Brief
Mobilizing Talent for Global Development
Talent (combining creativity, education, skills, and knowledge) is associated with human capital and provides a very valuable economic resource. In the past, the emigration of human capital from developing countries raised fears because of the...
Journal Special Issue
Spatial Issues in Africa
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Journal Special Issue
Spatial Inequality and Development
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Working Paper
Public and Private Expenditures on Human Capital Accumulation in India
We study a model of human capital driven growth, where the parent’s human capital serves as a productive input in the child’s human capital production only when that of the former exceeds a minimum level required to intellectually contribute to the...
Working Paper
Dimensions of African Inequality
This paper discusses dimensions of inequality in sub-Saharan Africa and their causes. It starts with a review of the empirical evidence about inequality during the colonial period as well as the post-independence era. Then it discusses the forces...
Working Paper
The Success of Learnerships?
Vocational training programmes, like South Africa’s learnership programme, which combine classroom learning and on-the-job training seem like the type of intervention which can create skills, get young people into jobs quicker, and reduce youth...
Working Paper
Education, Skill, and Earnings
This paper provides evidence on the nature of returns to education in Ghana and confirms the emerging empirical literature on the convexity of returns to education in Ghana. Using a basic Mincerian, model we find that returns to education more than...
Working Paper
Capacity Development for the Transformation of Africa
Countries need capacity for a variety of reasons, including sustaining economic growth, generating jobs, reducing poverty, effectively managing development programmes, and transforming societies and economies. A lot of effort has been expended to...
Working Paper
Health shocks and the intergenerational transmission of inequality
This paper explores the intergenerational effects of parental health shocks using longitudinal data from the Young Lives project conducted in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is found that health shocks to poorer parents reduce investments in children...
Working Paper
The Practice of Industrial Policy – Lessons for Africa
African countries are facing great opportunities but also formidable challenges in accelerating economic growth and sustaining a high level of economic performance. The experiences of East Asian countries may offer valuable insights for African...
Working Paper
Skills-Biased Labour Demand and the Pursuit of Inclusive Growth in South Africa
This paper examines the changing nature of occupational labour-market trends in South Africa and the resulting impact on wages. We observe high levels of demand for skilled labour that have intensified a trend already established before 1994. Over...
Working Paper
The long(er)-term impacts of Chile Solidario on human capital and labour income
This paper examines Chile Solidario, a social protection programme that provides poor households in Chile with preferential access to a conditional cash transfer programme designed to facilitate investments in children’s health and education. We...
Working Paper
Provision of Public and Merit Goods
This paper is part of a larger UNUIWIDER research project which examines the problems of the provision of basic social goods, such as health care, education, maternal care and safe water, in the developing countries. These services have...
Working Paper
The Role of Knowledge and Capital in Economic Growth
This paper discusses new ideas in growth theory focusing on how to make sustained growth feasible. It first reviews models that broadened the notion of capital to include human capital and the state of technology. The paper next surveys models which...
Working Paper
Selective Policies for Export Promotion
This paper considers the rationale for and limitations to selective export promotion policies in developing countries, with a focus on manufactured exports. It draws upon the experience of the most successful exporters in the developing world - the...
Working Paper
Selecting Priorities for Poverty Reduction and Human Development
Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. At least 45 per cent of the population cannot meet their minimum basic needs. Human development indicators are amongst Africa's worst, including a very high level of illiteracy. The country was...
Working Paper
Economics Theories of the Household
The aim of this paper is to review the principal assumptions and aspects of the unitary household model and collective models of household behaviour. Empirical studies are presented to assess whether the theories can offer adequate descriptions of...
Working Paper
The interaction of institutional quality and human capital in shaping the dynamics of capital structure in Vietnam
The aim of this paper is to find which of two theories of capital structure—trade-off theory or pecking order theory—best explains the capital structure decision of non-state firms during the post-transition process in Vietnam. We also investigate...
Working Paper
Does Educational Achievement Help to Explain Income Inequality?
In this paper we propose to measure the inequality of educational achievements by constructing a Gini index on educational attainments. We then use the proposed measure to analyse the relationship between inequality in incomes and educational...
Working Paper
Private beats public
This paper estimates a private school learning premium in Tanzania by implementing a flexible value-added model with unique administrative data on exam scores. The dataset covers 635,000 secondary school students with information on both their...
Working Paper
Return International Migration and Geographical Inequality
This paper explores entrepreneurship amongst return migrants, how their business locations and characteristics differ from other businesses, and the implications for rural-urban inequality. First, we examine, amongst returnees, the determinants of...
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship and human development
We provide a formal model of entrepreneurship in human development. The framework is provided by the capabilities approach (CA). Hence we extend not only the conceptualisation of entrepreneurship in development, but the reach of the CA into...
Working Paper
Information Technology and Economic Growth
This paper explores the impacts of information technology investment on economic growth in a cross-section of 39 countries in the period 1980-95 by applying an explicit model of economic growth, the augmented version of the neoclassical (Solow)...
Book Chapter
Capacity Development for Transformation
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
Dimensions of African Inequality
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Working Paper
Investment in Education and Income Inequality
Income inequality has risen in many parts of the world during the past decades. Rising inequality is no longer a problem of only Latin American and Sub-Saharan African countries. Some OECD countries, and recently also East Asian countries, have...
Working Paper
What drives parental investments in early childhood?
This paper investigates the causal impact of a randomized video intervention designed to study the determinants of parental time investments in early childhood among low-income parents. We designed and screened a video that provided information and...