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Publications (18)
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.
– High poverty and low trust
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, sub-Saharan African countries faced the dilemma of how to minimize viral transmission without adversely affecting the poor. This study proposes an index of lockdown readiness, taking into account housing conditions and income security, and analyses how this...
Continued lockdown measures are straining the social contract between citizens and governments. As this column explains, in contexts where there are low levels of trust in the state as well as high economic inequality – including some countries in sub-Saharan Africa – this could lead to growing...
Working Paper
pdf
– High poverty and low trust
The primary policy response to suppress the spread of COVID-19 in high-income countries has been to lock down large sections of the population. However, there is growing unease that blindly replicating these policies might inflict irreparable damage to poor households and foment social unrest in...
Working Paper
pdf
– Cash transfers and political attitudes in Pakistan
This paper studies how household-level receipts of cash transfers affect political attitudes in Pakistan. The paper exploits the locally exogenous eligibility cut-off of the flagship Benazir Income Support Programme to estimate causal effects. The main results show evidence of improved satisfaction...
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.
– UNICEF‘s Education Programme in Somalia
Part of Journal Special Issue
Development Assistance for Peacebuilding
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.
– Assessing the Effects of Community-Driven Development in Afghanistan
Part of Journal Special Issue
Development Assistance for Peacebuilding
Research Brief
Fragile and conflict-affected states, like Sierra Leone, can maintain a strong public financial management structure if they are able to find foreign support for administrative capacity and sufficient domestic political and executive support. PFM legal framework, budget planning and scrutiny, still...
Working Paper
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– Public Financial Management Reforms in Sierra Leone
Since the end of the civil war, the Government of Sierra Leone has made substantial progress in strengthening public financial management. Improvements have been achieved across all aspects of the budget cycle and are particularly notable with regard to budget execution functions. The main factors...
Blog
30 October 2013 Roger Williamson The UNU-WIDER meeting held last week in New York on the topic of fragility and aid argued forcefully that you cannot ‘fix’ failed states as you would a broken window. Drawing on over 80 papers from the governance and fragility theme of the ReCom—Research and...
Working Paper
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– a Comparative Analysis of Donor Practice
Forty billion dollars of official development assistance during 1991-2012 reduced Ethiopian absolute poverty while underwriting more efficient but exclusionary public institutions. This aid-institutions paradox reflects a strong interest-alignment between major donors pursuing geostrategic...
Research Brief
pdf
The natural resource sector in Liberia has failed to produce links to other important sectors of the economy, and in particular has failed to create jobs for the large majority of the population. Creating new and productive jobs is key to national reconciliation. The aid community needs to...
Research Brief
– Budget Support, Aid on Delivery or Project Aid?
One persistent concern raised during discussions of whether aid effectively promotes the goals of donors is fungibility, that is; the possibility that aid is used in ways not intended by donors when disbursing the funds. It could be used to lower taxes, to fund projects in a different sector, or...
Research Brief
Foreign aid has been slow to react to the challenge of urbanization, but must do so if it is to be an effective force going forward. In the WIDER Working Paper ‘Improving Donor Support for Urban Poverty Reduction: A focus on South Asia’ Nicola Banks argues that if a donor’s urban poverty reduction...
Working Paper
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The ‘right’ choice of instruments and modalities to provide aid to developing countries in support of poverty reduction and economic development is arguably the most contested issue in the current international debate on aid effectiveness. A particular controversy exists around the provision of aid...
Working Paper
pdf
– Policy Recommendations for Liberia
The experience and lessons of the last two decades have shown that ignoring the key differences between the economics of peace and the economics of development has been a major reason why countries relapse into conflict. This paper briefly analyses such differences and their important implications...
Working Paper
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– Seven Problems of Effectiveness and How to Tackle Them
Most rich countries developed without aid, and this ‘self-development’ has some intrinsic advantages. In today’s massively unequal world, however, such an approach would imply very low levels of human development for several generations for many poor countries. Aid can therefore usefully be thought...
Displaying 16 of 18 results