This study focuses on the city of São Paulo, Brazil and examines the ways in which irregular and illegal growth have influenced the collective action of social movements of the urban poor. The study describes how São Paulo grew as a socially segregated city during the twentieth century due to...

With a focus on cities in eastern and southern Africa, this paper draws on recent scholarship and my own research in Lusaka, Zambia, to analyse pathways for, and challenges to, greater social mobility for youth against the background of economic, political, and spatial processes that are...

As the world moves towards its so-called urban 'tipping point',urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The association between cities, violence, and disorder is not...

Dar es Salaam is exceptional in East Africa for having a record of relatively little ethnic tension, and remaining tranquil and true to its name, the 'harbour of peace'. This paper explores the interface between ethnic and national identities in Tanzania's capital city, focusing on its ethnic...

This paper aims at understanding the dynamics of sectarian violence in the city of Beirut, by looking at the early phase of violence in the Lebanese civil war (1975-90), and the process of dividing Beirut into various sectarian enclaves controlled by the warring militias. The paper aims to show...

This paper investigates the relationship between taxation and firm performance in developing countries. Taking firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) and tax data from the Government Revenue Dataset (ICTD/UNU-WIDER), our results suggest that tax revenue benefits to firm...

Having a birth certificate is a stepping stone to acquiring an array of rights and benefits, including other documents necessary to navigate in and outside of one's home country. Despite its importance, many children in the developing world never obtain a birth certificate. Whether one does so...

This paper investigates how two effects drive wedges between nominal and real inequality estimates. The effects are caused by (i) differences in the composition of consumption over the income distribution coupled with differential inflation of consumption items; and (ii) quantity discounting...

This paper discusses the recent history of education aid policy. It highlights an important shift in policy thinking in the international aid architecture that has dominated the global education aid agenda since the early 1990s. It argues that Rawlsian principles of social justice, human rights...

This paper offers a critical review of the methods used to estimate the extent of capital flight and illicit financial flows from developing countries. The largest estimates in the literature are based on imperfect methods with a great margin for error. Emerging new studies have built on...