Growth in much of Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to remain strong, driven by efforts to invest in infrastructure and strong agricultural production. The current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone is exacting a heavy toll, with spillovers to neighboring countries. External threats to the region's overall positive outlook include global financial conditions and a slowdown in emerging market growth.
What are the potential benefits of increasing the taxation of a foreign extractive sector? This paper applies this question to the case of Guinea by using a multi-sector macro-inequality model with heterogeneous agents. We quantify the long-run equilibrium impact of additional taxation when the proceeds are invested in human capital, inclusive infrastructure, and social transfers. Our analysis focuses on the response of GDP, labor formalization, poverty rates, Gini coefficients, rural/urban inequality and sectoral reallocation. The three forms of investment are complementary. Infrastructure investments favor formal production in the urban area while growth and government transfers boost the demand for food. These effects help support the rate of return to education, protecting job formalization through higher wages and prices of informal goods, as the education policy boosts labor supply in rural and urban areas.
This edited volume examines the importance of centering gender in research and policymaking focused on climate change, environmental sustainability, and digital technology. Chapters unpack how the transition to a green and digital future affects various fields and industry sectors including STEM, agriculture, and energy, as well as why gender-transformative approaches—particularly the production and analysis of gender-inclusive disaggregated data—should be included in those transitions. The editors and authors also look at the positive impact of these considerations on economic growth and poverty eradication. Finally, this book presents an ideal/utopian view of what a gender-equal and inclusive world that has transitioned to green industries and embraced digital technologies might look like. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, students and policymakers across the Social Sciences including Sociology, Anthropology, Gender Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Economics.
We investigate the link between gender inequality in financial inclusion and income inequality, with three contributions to the recent literature. First, using a micro-dataset covering 146,000 individuals in over 140 countries, we construct novel, synthetic indices of the intensity of financial inclusion at the individual and country level. Second, we derive the distribution of individual financial access “scores” across countries to document a “Kuznets”-curve in financial inclusion. Third, cross-country regressions confirm that our measure of inequality in financial access is significantly related to income inequality, above and beyond other factors previously highlighted in the literature.
Development Economics: Theory and Practice provides students and practitioners with the perspectives and the tools they need to think analytically and critically about the current major economic development issues in the world. Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet identify seven key dimensions of development; growth, poverty, vulnerability, inequality, basic needs, sustainability, and quality of life, and use them to structure the contents of the text. This book gives a historical perspective on the evolution of thought in development. It uses theory and empirical analysis to present readers with a full picture of how development works, how its successes and failures can be assessed, and h...
This issue of F&D looks at the growing role of emerging markets. Analysis by the IMF's Ayhan Kose and Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University, argues that their economic ascendance will enable emerging markets such as Brazil, China, India, and Russia to play a more significant part in global economic governance and take on more responsibility for economic and financial stability. And Vivek Arora and Athanasios Vamvakidis measure how China's economy is increasingly affecting the rest of the world not just its neighbors and main trading partners. In addition, F&D examines a variety of topics that are particularly relevant as the world struggles to shake off the crisis. Al...
This Technical Assistance Report on Mali discusses automatic pricing mechanism options and identifies issues that need to be addressed for the application of such a mechanism. Mali stands to benefit from moving from the current discretionary approach to fuel product pricing to a transparent and automatic price adjustment mechanism. Although smoothing can help to mitigate the adverse impact of price increases and volatile international fuel prices, additional supporting policies are warranted. In particular, an effective safety net is required to protect the poorest and most vulnerable groups from the adverse impacts of sizeable domestic fuel price increases.
With the right to petition the United Nations, the Ewe and Togoland unification movement enjoyed a privilege unmatched by other dependent peoples. Using language conveying insecurity, the movement seized the international spotlight, ensuring that the topic of unification dominated the UN Trusteeship System for over a decade. Yet, its vociferous securitisations fell silent due to colonial distortion, leaving unification unfulfilled, thus allowing the seeds of secessionist conflict to grow. At the intersection of postcolonial theory and security studies, Julius Heise presents a theory-driven history of Togoland's path to independence, offering a crucial lesson for international statebuilding efforts.
We analyze the medium-term macroeconomic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lock-down measures on low-income countries. We focus on the impact over the medium-run of the degradation of health and human capital caused by the pandemic and its aftermath, exploring the trade-offs between rebuilding human capital and the recovery of livelihoods and macroeconomic sustainability. A dynamic general equilibrium model is calibrated to reflect the structural characteristics of vulnerable low-income countries and to replicate key dimensions of the Covid-19 shock. We show that absent significant and sustained external financing, the persistence of loss-of-learning effects on labor productivity is likely to make the post-Covid recovery more attenuated and more expensive than many contemporary analyses suggest.
There has been a rapid increase in the interest in the study of Islamic finance, resulting in a dramatic rise in financing since the beginning of the century. By the end of 2017 global industry assets had reached $2.4 trillion and were forecasted to reach $3.2 trillion by 2020, despite historic challenges to Islam itself at the same time. This collection of chapters provides key theoretical, empirical, and policy insights into Islamic finance from an overall complex financial and economic systems perspective. Within the complex financial and economic systems framework, this book addresses questions such as how to conceptualize Islamic financial institutions in a nonlinear general equilibrium system, how to promote Islamic Finance in Africa, how “Islamic” is Islamic finance, and how it affects price stability, among other topics. The book provides case studies in Africa and Asia, addresses the subject in a structural financial CGE model, demonstrates the development impact of Islamic finance, and presents an Islamic version of the Iceland Plan for Monetary Reform.