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.

Investigating Growing Inequality in Mozambique

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the long-term trend of consumption inequality in Mozambique. We show that an imbalanced growth path disproportionally benefited the better-off and caused increasing inequality, especially in more recent years, curbing the necessary reduction in poverty. Using a regression decomposition technique, our results suggest that this trend was strongly associated with the higher attained education of household heads and with changes in the structure of the economy (with less workers in the public and subsistence sectors). The trend was, however, mitigated by the tendency for the higher level of attained education and the smaller public sector to become associated with less inequality over time. These results point to the importance of accelerating the expansion of education and improving the productivity of the large subsistencesector to lower inequality in line with the sustainable development goals.

Agricultural growth, poverty, and nutrition in Tanzania

Abstract: Rapid economic growth has failed to significantly improve poverty and nutrition outcomes in Tanzania. This raises concerns over a decoupling of growth, poverty, and nutrition. We link recent production trends to household incomes using a regionalized, dynamic computable general equilibrium and microsimulation model. Results indicate that the structure of economic growth—not the level—is currently constraining the rate of poverty reduction in Tanzania. Most importantly, agricultural growth trends have been driven by larger-scale farmers and by crops grown in only a few regions of the country. The slow expansion of food crops and livestock also explains the weak relationship between agricultural growth and nutrition outcomes. Additional model simulations find that accelerating agricultural growth, particularly in maize, greatly strengthens the growth–poverty relationship and enhances households' caloric availability. We conclude that low productivity, market constraints (including downstream agroprocessing), and barriers to import substitution for major food crops are among the more binding constraints to reducing poverty and improving nutrition in Tanzania.

First Order Dominance Analysis: Child Wellbeing in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Abstract: This paper performs a multidimensional first order dominance analysis of child wellbeing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This methodology allows the ordinal ranking of the 11 provinces of the DRC in terms of their wellbeing based upon the probability of their domination. This empirical application obviates the need to adopt a weighting scheme for the deprivation indicators or to rely on the signs of other cross-derivatives for comparison. We execute a bootstrap linear programming algorithm on seven deprivation indicators for three age groups of children derived from the DRC 2007 Standard Demographic and Health Survey. The results reveal widespread disparities in child wellbeing in the DRC.