Since the early 1990s, at least 45 initiatives have been mounted to improve the environmental and social performance of the mining industry across the world. Many changes in the formal legal and regulatory systems have also been introduced. However, no systematic approach has been adopted to...

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...

Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal capacity in resourcerich contexts. This paper...

Recent years have seen a proliferation of ‘composite indicators’ or ‘indexes’ of governance. Such measures can be useful tools for analysing governance, making public policy, building scientific knowledge, and even influencing ruling elites, but some are better tools than others and some...

In this paper, we estimate the recent evolution of global interpersonal inequality and examine the effect of omitted top incomes on the level and direction of global inequality. We propose a methodology to estimate the truncation point of household surveys by combining information on income...

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...

This study aims to assess the economic costs of COVID-19 and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique, relying on a social accounting matrix. It produces numerical results that represent the direct effect on (or 'shocks' to) the economy associated with the pandemic. We...

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...

We revisit trends in within-country income inequality using a newly integrated dataset that covers at least 70 per cent of the global population since 1980. We investigate absolute and relative inequality trends across the past four decades, combining the use of Lorenz curves with a set of...