This paper first shows that important economic arguments in favor of the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of falling terms of trade of developing countries have implicitly relied on the role of multinational corporations and foreign direct investment. As of yet, the relationship between the latter and...

Two well established stylized facts of economic development are a strong correlation between investment and income, and large differences in investment rates across countries. Construction is the largest component of investment. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in...

This study revisits the effect of aid on the quality of institutions and examines the effects of a major source of instability, namely terms-of-trade instability, on the quality of democracy. We take advantage of previous empirical findings which explain the role of aid in mitigating the adverse...

The current paper demonstrates a dichotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade, employing as case studies the two African countries, Botswana and Nigeria.Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of terms of trade on output is positive and...

Economic data are important in governing the international political economy. Some of the most widely used macro statistics risk being undermined by systematic misalignment in reporting of economic activity due to illicit financial flows, as well as tax-minimizing financial transactions by...

This paper discusses different approaches to the measurement of global interpersonal in equality. Trends in global interpersonal inequality during 1975-2005 are measured using data from UNU-WIDER's World Income Inequality Database. In order to better understand the trends, global interpersonal...

This paper reviews the current problems of national accounting in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the current uneven application of methods and availability of data, any ranking of countries according to gross domestic product levels is misleading. It is increasingly acknowledged that the problems...

This paper, using a new set of social development indices, explores the measurement of social development across Africa, and how this relates to broader development patterns and measurement. Development practitioners worldwide increasingly recognize the importance of informal institutions, such...

Household budget surveys in sub-Saharan Africa are designed to facilitate poverty measurement and may fail to fully capture consumption in wealthy households. As a result, inequality is likely underestimated. We address upper tier consumption underreporting by aligning consumption derived from...

This paper documents a 2015 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Mozambique. The SAM is built using unpublished Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE) industry-level production accounts, commodity-level supply-demand balances and a supply matrix, together with national accounts, National...