World Institute for Development Economics Research

About: World Institute for Development Economics Research is a facility organization based out in Helsinki, Finland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Poverty & Population. The organization has 110 authors who have published 525 publications receiving 17316 citations.

Will Political Liberalization Bring About Financial Development

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of political liberalisation on financial development in two steps. First, the paper examines whether political liberalisation in terms of institutional improvement promotes financial development, using a panel dataset of 90 developed and developing countries over 1960-99. The empirical evidence reveals a positive effect on financial development at least in the short-run, particularly for lower-income countries, ethnically divided countries and French legal origin countries. In the second part of the paper, a before-after event study approach is used to explore the impact of democratic transitions on financial development. It indicates that a democratic transformation is typically followed by an increase in financial development.

Horizontal inequality as an outcome

Abstract: A considerable body of research suggests that horizontal inequality between ethnic groups has major socioeconomic implications, in particular for peace and economic development Much of this work f

Producing Biofuels in Low-Income Countries: An Integrated Environmental and Economic Assessment for Tanzania

Abstract: This paper jointly evaluates the greenhouse gas emissions and economic impacts from producing biofuels in Tanzania. Sequentially-linked models capture natural resource constraints; emissions from land use change; economywide growth linkages; and household poverty. Results indicate that there are economic incentives to convert unused lands to sugarcane-ethanol production, but only grasslands (not forests) have a reasonable carbon payback period. There are also strong socioeconomic reasons to involve smallholders in feedstock production in order to reduce rural poverty, especially since our results indicate that biofuels have little effect on food production. Yet smallholders require more land than large-scale plantations and so face more binding natural resource and emissions constraints. Overall, environmental constraints alter the socioeconomically optimal biofuel strategy for Tanzania by limiting potential poverty reduction. Unlike previous studies, our integrated assessment suggests that a mixed farming system with greater emphasis on large-scale plantations is more appropriate for producing sugarcane-ethanol in Tanzania.

The Measurement of Ethnic and Religious Divisions: Spatial, Temporal, and Categorical Dimensions with Evidence from Mindanao, the Philippines

Abstract: An ever-expanding body of empirical research suggests that ethno-religious divisions adversely impact a host of normatively desirable objectives linked to the quality of life in society, implicitly representing a strong challenge to multiculturalist theory and policies. The appropriate conceptualization and measurement of ethno-religious divisions has consequently become the subject of complex methodological debate. This article unpacks some of this complexity and provides a synthetic critique of how eight key measures each capture the notion of divisions and relate to each other conceptually, theoretically, and empirically within a divided society. It explores simple proportions, fractionalization, polarization, cultural distance, segregation, cross-cuttingness, horizontal inequality, and intermarriage indicators. Furthermore, instead of presenting national-level temporal snapshots of divisions as in much work, it purposely examines how measures also perform at more localized levels of analysis and over time, drawing on individual-level census data from one deeply-divided society, Mindanao, in the Philippines. Analysis underscores four major issues to which researchers should pay more attention: the sensitivity of measures to (1) the underlying causal mechanisms linking divisions with outcomes; (2) the social forces and methodologies shaping the identification and categorization of groups; (3) the passage of time and evolution of divisions; and (4) the level of spatial analysis. The article provides practical guidance and discusses the key implications of these points both for quantitative scholars working with these measures and for qualitatively-inclined empiricists and normative theorists wishing to interpret, evaluate, or otherwise engage the quantitative research on the merits and demerits of diversity.