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Publications (30)
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Aid, Social Policy and Development
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Aid Policy and the Macroeconomic Management of Aid
Working Paper
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Understanding chronic poverty and its evolution is complex given the amount of information involved. This paper proposes a new approach to analysing the evolution of chronic poverty in a multivariate setting using a Shapley decomposition of a multidimensional chronic poverty measure proposed by...
Working Paper
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Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper examines...
Position Paper
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This position paper on Aid and the Social Sectors was prepared by UNU-WIDER under the ReCom programme of Research (Re) and Communication (Com) on foreign aid. It aims to provide a coherent up-todate overview and analysis of an extraordinarily important issue in the development field: The contribution of foreign aid to human development.Social sector policy and the services that they provide are recognised for their intrinsic values and instrumental qualities for the functioning of individuals in particular, and the development strategies of countries more general. There is overwhelming...
Research Brief
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While the majority of interventions against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria had positive short-term effects, these were frequently not translated into long-term sustainable results. Cash transfers may have the potential of reducing HIV transmissions but the effect is so far insignificant...
Research Brief
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Microfinance evaluations reveal a positive impact on per capita income, non-land asset value and poverty incidence. Across countries and methodologies, microfinance is most likely to have a short-term positive effect; regionally, the most positive impacts are seen in Africa. Women tend to benefit...
Working Paper
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– Implications for Patron-Client Relationships in the Context of Bangladesh’s Agricultural Reformation
This paper investigates how a development intervention which targets extremely poor households with investment capital influences relationships between those households and the landowning elite. It places this investigation in the context of the ‘agricultural reformation’ of rural Bangladesh...
Research Brief
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There are over 900 million working people who earn less than US$2 a day, while 200 million people are unemployed. Unemployment is a bigger problem in high-income countries, in low-income countries unemployment is rarer as work is essential for survival for the poor. One of the most pressing goals of...
Blog
24 September 2013 Andy Sumner A series of papers since late 2010 has discussed a shift in the location or 'geography' of global poverty. The shift is quite simple: the distribution of global poverty has shifted from countries officially classified by the World Bank as low-income countries towards...
Research Brief
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Three-quarters of the world’s poor (however defined) live in countries classified as middle-income. Donors need not assume their only option is to abandon countries once they cross the arbitrary threshold in per capita income. The thresholds themselves currently used to classify countries as low...
Working Paper
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– Are the Country Classifications Moribund or is Global Poverty in the Process of ‘Nationalizing’?
The majority of the world’s poor, by income poverty and multi-dimensional poverty, now live in countries officially classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries. Of course nothing happens when a country crosses a (somewhat) arbitrary threshold in per capita income but it does matter to...
Working Paper
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– Implementation of the New Aid Effectiveness Agenda in Health and Education in Zambia
There is a growing interest in the debate on aid effectiveness for assessing the impact of aid not only on economic growth and poverty reduction, but also on intermediate outcomes such as health and education. This paper reviews evidence from recent in-depth country work on the impact of government...
Research Brief
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– Crucial for the Spread of Social Protection Programmes
Evaluations of social protection programmes have been much more comprehensive in Latin America than in sub-Saharan Africa. Monitoring and evaluation protocols are crucial to facilitate improvements in government effectiveness. Anti-poverty transfer schemes seem to be subjected to more evaluation...
Working Paper
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– Why Does Aid Not Address Poverty (Much)?
Aid is not generally aimed at the poorest people, though most multilateral or bilateral agencies would like to think they get included. However, donors’ strategies are generally blind to differentiation among the poor, and have not improved in this respect. The special provisions for the least...
Working Paper
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– Better Policies? Better Politics?
The paper provides a comparative analysis of the incidence of evaluation methods in antipoverty transfer programmes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The paper identifies two broad explanations for the incidence of evaluation in antipoverty transfer programmes in developing countries, one...
Displaying 16 of 30 results