Improving early child development outcomes in low-income settings requires affordable, sustainable, and easily scalable solutions. The 'First Steps' programme in Rwanda has substantial positive effects on child development and offers a blueprint for interventions seeking to improve parental practices.

Parts of Uganda that had centralized political systems before colonial rule are more likely to have higher rates of voluntary tax compliance. Merima Ali and Odd-Helge Fjeldstad look at why that might be the case.

10 January 2024 | Research insights and policy recommendations presented in an in-person workshop organized on 15 November 2023 in Kampala gathered visibility in several Ugandan news outlets. The workshop, organized by the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and UNU-WIDER, presented the findings of research papers taking advantage of the URA firm panel, a dataset constructed from administrative corporate income tax (CIT) returns and firm registration data. The dataset can only be found at the URA secure research lab, launched in 2022 along with a call for papers.

OPEN ACCESS | This publication examines the process of economic development of the last 50 years or so under the neoliberal model in terms of impacts on growth, inflation, income and wealth distribution and structural change. The analysis includes a historical perspective from the nineteenth century to the present and combines economic analysis with a political economy approach.

Journal | World Development

In recent decades, trends in female labour force participation rates have been very heterogeneous across developing countries, despite widespread economic growth, fertility decline, and narrowing gender gaps in education. 

Journal | Development Policy Review

Journal | Journal of African Economies

ARTICLE ON EARLY VIEW | This study examines how formal firms have been impacted by and recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, by drawing on two distinct but complementary data sources. This is the first attempt to use both survey and tax administrative data to measure the impact of the pandemic in a developing country. The findings of three rounds of follow-up surveys to a standard World Bank Enterprise Survey completed immediately before the pandemic are compared to the universe of value-added tax and personal income tax returns filed by firms in Zambia.

Journal | Structural Change and Economic Dynamics

Journal | World Development

Journal | Oxford Economic Papers

We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members’ activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios and assess their influence on consumption, as a measure of welfare.

Journal | Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

In an environment with extensive corruption where much of the population evades paying their full taxes due, we tackle the question of optimal taxation when constituencies with conflicting objectives (the poor and the rich) push tax policy in different directions. We think in terms of a government policy-maker here called the tax administrator (TA) and rent-seeking lobbying efforts by poor and rich constituencies. 

Journal | Economics of Education Review