We examine the evolution of educational assistance in Indonesia, following two decades of government decentralization, and its effect on education quality. Using Indonesia Family Life Survey data, we exploit as exogenous rule the variation in the implementation of government decentralization to...

We examine gender differences in ambitions and expectations of jobseekers concerning self-employment, an increasingly proposed option for youth in economies with limited wage employment. Analysing survey data on 2,036 tertiary graduates in Ghana, we find that males have a stronger preference for...

This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men's employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative to pre-pandemic, while their monthly earnings...

Global food price hikes during 2007 and 2008 resulted in a sharp rise in staple food prices in Bangladesh. The poor and marginalized households were particularly vulnerable to such an adverse situation as their real purchasing power eroded. Several studies indicated that the adverse effects of...

Botswana has serious environmental problems which, if not addressed, will undermine the attainment of sustainable economic development. This study attempts to determine what aid flows have actually been doing with regard to the environment in Botswana. The results show that although both the...

The global food price crisis of 2007/08 raised fears about the impacts of higher and more volatile food prices for the poor in Zambia. Like in the past, the implementation of the strategies to deal with the rising food prices, especially for the staple crop maize were delayed due to ineffective...

One key element in the reduction of poverty and (in Latin America) inequality has been the achievement of greater fiscal equity; we analyse one key part of this process, which is the earmarking of portions of tax revenue to be spent on progressive public expenditures such as social protection,...

Using comparable fiscal incidence analysis, this paper examines the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in 25 countries for around 2010. Success in fiscal redistribution is driven primarily by redistributive effort (share of social spending to GDP in each country) and the extent to...

Expansion of social protection reach among workers in the large informal economy represents a persisting and thorny challenge in the development context. In Mainland Tanzania, several domestically led policy reforms have been introduced to increasingly expand social protection for informal...

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...