Working Paper
The African Lions
This paper mainly analyses the drivers of economic growth in Kenya and the linkages to the labour market dynamics, with a focus on population growth, its structure, and the prospects of reaping a demographic dividend. This is in recognition that...
Research Brief
Burkina Faso – growth without poverty reduction
Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in West Africa, poor in natural resources, and with low levels of human development. Its economy remains agricultural and focused on food crops and cotton production. Over the last twenty years it has experienced...
Working Paper
Education Policy, Vocational Training, and the Youth in Sub-Saharan Africa
Technical, vocational education, and training has remained an explosive topic because it can create a divided society in terms of education and the benefits associated with it. Internationally, it has always been a complex and controversial topic...
Working Paper
The Prospects for an Imminent Demographic Dividend in Africa
This paper looks at the prospects of a demographic dividend in Africa in the near future. While acknowledging that the fertility declines which change population age structures and thus dependency ratios have been slow to begin and often seem to have...
Working Paper
Informality, Growth, and Development in Africa
The informal sector makes up an overwhelming share of both gross domestic product and total employment in Africa. In this paper, we lay out some of the basic characteristics of the informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa, relevant institutions, and...
Working Paper
Changes in Land Tenure and Agricultural Intensification in Sub-Saharan Africa
Due to increasing population pressure on limited cultivable land in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), farm size has been shrinking, fallow periods have been shortened, and soil fertility has been declining. In accordance with the Boserupian...
Journal Article
Ordinal Welfare Comparisons with Multiple Discrete Indicators
We develop an approach for making welfare comparisons between populations with multidimensional discrete well-being indicators observed at the micro level. The approach is rooted in the concept of multidimensional first order dominance. It assumes...
Working Paper
The Economics Of Complex Humanitarian Emergencies
This paper, a draft from the early stages of an ongoing UNU/WIDER research project, outlines hypotheses for the economic cause of humanitarian disasters. Complex humanitarian emergencies are considered to be man-made crises, in which large numbers of...
Working Paper
Humanitarian Emergencies
This Research in Progress report is divided into two parts. Part I studies the operationalization and indicators of the different elements of complex humanitarian emergencies. It includes discussions of what to try to measure when looking into the...
Working Paper
The Transition's Mortality Crisis in East Germany
Several studies have indicated an increase in men's mortality in East Germany between 1989 and 1991 in the wake of the reunification of 1990. For some age-groups, death rates soared by up to thirty per cent. This study investigates the evolution and...
Working Paper
Towards the Abyss?
Towards the Abyss? The Political Economy of Emergency in Haiti analyzes the various factors that have contributed to create a protracted humanitarian emergency situation in Haiti. The first section deals with the economic causes, the interplay...
Working Paper
Long-Term Growth and Welfare in Transitional Economies
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
Working Paper
Population Ethics and the Value of Life
Public policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to...
Working Paper
Social and Political Indicators of Human Well-being
A plethora of what are loosely described as social and political indicators of well-being exist. Both the range and country coverage of these indicators has increased appreciably in recent years. In this paper we ask what contribution these...
Working Paper
Health Status and Health Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper discusses the main changes in infant, child and maternal mortality which have occurred over 1960-1995 in Sub-Saharan Africa and analyses the main factors responsible for the observed shifts in these health trends. To do so, the paper...
Journal Article
Efficiency frontier and matching process on the labour market
The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of the inefficient functioning of the Tunisian labour market. The study takes advantage of the recent development in the stochastic frontier techniques and estimates, the matching function for...
Working Paper
Short- and Long-Term Determinants of Cardiovascular Mortality
This paper examines the short- and long-term determinants of the mortality due to cardiovascular diseases (CVD) among the working-age population in Russia. Why Russia? Why CVD mortality? Why the working-age population? Russia is the Eastern European...
Book Chapter
The Prospects for an Imminent Demographic Dividend in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
Land Tenure and Agricultural Intensification in Sub-Saharan Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
Informality, Growth and Development in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Working Paper
Does HIV/AIDS matter for economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa?
Estimating the impact of HIV/AIDS epidemic on economic growth is challenging because of endogeneity concerns. In this paper, we use novel data on male circumcision and distance from the first HIV outbreak as instrumental variables for the HIV/AIDS...
Journal Article
Inferring the economic standard of living and health from cohort height
Average adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If...
Book Chapter
Introduction
Introduction Across the globe, today’s youth are often paradoxically considered both ‘agents of change’ who are driven by their aspirations for a better life and ‘a lost gen-eration’ who are trapped by their economic vulnerability. Nowhere is this...
Book Chapter
Conclusions
From the book: African Youth and the Persistence of Marginalization
Working Paper
On the fertility transition in Africa
A consensus among social scientists is that fertility rates in Africa are declining. What determines these declines? I present fresh evidence that shows education, especially for women, is an important determinant of the fertility transition in...
Working Paper
Inferring the economic standard of living and health from cohort height
Average adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If...
Working Paper
On Some Problems of Variable Population Poverty Comparisons
This paper demonstrates that the property of 'replication invariance', generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible...
Working Paper
Globalizing Households and Multi-ethnic Community Building in Japan
The East Asian countries are currently experiencing declining fertility rates and aging of their populations. The demographic transition is beginning to affect various societal functions, and increasing international migrants are becoming one of the...
Working Paper
Passage, Profit, Protection and the Challenge of Participation
Accepting that successful ‘development’ is premised on a population’s participation in a collective undertaking, we must understand urban residents’ interactions and ambitions. In African cities being transformed by geographic and social mobility, it...
Book
The Mortality Crisis in Transitional Economies
In spite of widespread expectations of improvements in living standards and health conditions, in most of the countries of the former Soviet bloc the transition to the market economy was accompanied by a sharp increase in (already high) death rates...