This paper estimates the distribution of personal wealth in South Africa by combining tax microdata, household surveys, and macroeconomic balance sheet statistics. We systematically compare estimates of the wealth distribution obtained by direct measurement of net worth, rescaling of reported...

The degree of choice households have over their consumption expenditure is critical in deciding their economic class. Applying our measure to Egyptian household budget surveys, we estimate the population size of the middle class in Egypt and assess their well-being in the period 1995-2011. Our...

Poverty declined substantially in Mozambique between 1996/97 and 2014/15. However, the recent economic crisis, characterized by a significant increase in domestic prices, may have dragged several households into poverty. Using consumer price index and 2014/15 household budged survey data, we...

Domestic resource mobilization has rightly been placed at the centre of the 'financing for development' agenda across developing countries. While much is known about the importance of domestic taxes in contributing to this agenda, little is known about the potential importance of domestic...

This paper decomposes differences between the official poverty estimates of Malawi and a set of revised estimates by Pauw et al. (2016, forthcoming) with respect to five methodological differences: (i) the use of a revised set of unit conversion factors; (ii) the specification and use of...

Resource mobilization continues to be an important policy challenge for developing economies, raising questions as to what determines differences in saving behaviour across countries. Using a panel of 47 economies with at least 40 years of continuous time series data, we causally identify, using...

The population structure the world over is going through a demographic shift, and the elderly proportion is projected to increase with population growth. This change is a matter of concern for sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, where the majority of the people are young and the rates of both...

The savings-growth nexus is widely acknowledged, both in policy and in the literature. But Kenya's numerous policy initiatives to encourage savings mobilization are yet to yield the expected outcomes. This paper identifies the key drivers of domestic saving in Kenya, exploiting fintech as an...

This paper examines trends and determinants of gross domestic savings in Tanzania using data for the period 1990-2020. The autoregressive distributed lag approach is employed to empirically analyse the short-run and long-run relationships. There has been a fairly stable increase in the domestic...

This paper examines the national savings behaviour in the process of economic growth through a comparative analysis of countries in developing Asia from a historical perspective. Developing Asia provides an ideal laboratory for the study with considerable differences in the savings behaviour...