The income gap between the self-employed and wage earners is of interest particular in developing countries. This is because this gap can explain to some extent the observed inequality in income. Literature suggests that in developing countries formal sector workers tend to be wage earners while the self-employed mostly work in the informal sector.
Policy Briefs
Most of the recent literature analysing the adjustments of macroeconomic variables to fiscal policy shocks rely on the inclusion of non-Ricardian households to generate a positive response of consumption to an increase in government spending. This paper examines the dynamic effects of government financing behaviour in a foreign exchange constrained low income economy on key macroeconomic aggregates such as output, consumption, wages and labour supply.
Across the world, efforts by countries to gain international competitiveness and boost export levels has generated renewed interest on the response of trade balances to exchange rate devaluations or depreciations. The trade literature posits that the existence of adjustment lags delays improvements in a country's trade balance following a currency devaluation or depreciation. Instead, such currency devaluations or depreciations tend to worsen trade balance in the short-run before realization of lags cause an improvement in the long-run.
Since the early 1980s, many governments have investigated the possibility of utilising access to microloans, as a pathway to grow economies out of unemployment and thereby improve people’s quality of life. Studies that have previously investigated the impact of microloans, found a positive relationship to quality of life. Unfortunately, these studies mainly measure quality of life using monetary (income) measures rather than assessing the entire multidimensionality of quality of life.
Background
Local communities in Africa benefit from protected areas through a number of activities such as grazing their livestock and revenues gained from touristic activities. These two activities are not independent because the feeding habits of large herbivores such as elephants prevent bush encroachment thus maintaining healthy grasslands.. In addition, the way the local community manages the elephants can substantially influence their reproduction.
This study investigates the impact of order flow on the rand/dollar exchange rate over the short and long term. It uses a hybrid model which combines microeconomic and macroeconomic determinants of the exchange rate in the short and long term. The analysis uses monthly series from January 2004 to December 2016. We find that order flow explains movements in the exchange rate, both in the short and in the long term.
This paper examines gender gaps in entrepreneurship in developing and emerging countries through linking entrepreneurship to skills and productivity.
Under-pricing of electricity is prevalent in nearly 70 percent of all sub-Saharan African countries. Consequently, the electricity sectors are financially unviable and unable to maintain or expand the electricity infrastructure, leading to unendurable power deficits and outages in the region.
The perceptions of indigenous people towards protected areas greatly determine the success of integrated conservation and development projects in most 3rd world countries as their perceptions affect their attitude and behaviour towards conservation. Local communities living adjacent to national parks are now viewed as important stakeholders in wildlife conservation in a new development paradigm that seeks to deal with illegal wildlife harvesting.
Zimbabwe’s community-based conservation model, which brings together peasant farmers in a tourism-focused approach to wildlife management, has enjoyed limited success since its inception during the mid-1980s due to a number of reasons.
Like many developing countries, the achievement gap between rural and urban areas in Zambia remains substantial. For example, the share of students scoring well on the Primary School Leaving Examinations (the Grade 7 Examinations) in rural areas is about half what it is in urban areas, according to data from the Examinations Council of Zambia (ECZ).
African countries (including the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries) have recently considered additional robust means of mobilising tax revenue in order to meet revenue targets and consistently provide for the developmental needs of its citizens. For instance, countries have been considering Domestic Resource Mobilisation (DRM) initiatives (as opposed to External Resource Mobilisation - ERM), via improved management of taxation and reduction of tax leakages, in line with the general agenda of enhanced fiscal policy coordination (African Economic Outlook (AEO) 2013). The argument is that DRM would lead to Africa achieving greater economic development, independence and better mobilisation of revenue. Enhanced mobilisation of revenue entails expanding the tax base in these countries by capturing in the tax net, activities not adequately taxed because of policy or administrative weaknesses. Efficient means of taxation could help improve the governments’ revenue positions, reduce public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR), reduce dependency on aid and increase countries’ ownership of their development agenda (including the UN’s post-2015 development agenda or the Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs).
Households headed by women are generally poorer than those headed by men in South Africa. Moreover, the proportion of households headed by women has generally been on the increase in South Africa. While generally declining over the post-apartheid period, poverty has increased in the recent past. In addition South Africa also has very high unemployment rates. A lot has been written on the trends in female headship as well as the relationship between female headship and poverty in South Africa. However, we do not know much about how gendered employment patterns in the household affect the relationship between female headship and poverty in South Africa.
Despite recent political backlash in Europe and the United States, international migration remains a formidable force with wide-ranging consequences in destination and origin countries. The presence of a migrant family member living in a developed country could have multifaceted implications for the welfare of the left behind. In our recent paper we attempt to examine the impacts of international migration on the education of family members left behind in Nigeria. Specifically, we study the net effects of the presence of a migrant family member living in a foreign country on the educational attainment of family members back at home at both secondary and post-secondary levels. We then examine the role of the prospect of future migration, inspired by the presence of a family member abroad, as a potential channel mediating the effect of emigration on family education. By conducting such analysis for Nigeria, the most populous country on the African continent, we hope to shed light on the human capital implications of migration in one of the poorest regions in the world.
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