What is the impact of the highest value export industry in low and middle income countries---the extractive industries (oil, gas and mining)---on gender equality? Resource dependent countries have greater gender inequality, lower education levels and more patriarchal norms after taking GDP per...

Sub-Saharan African economies have experienced accelerated economic growth in the past two decades. In this paper we study the impact of trade-induced structural change on employment and value-added shares in sub-Saharan African economies. We find that sub-Saharan African economies have...

Developing and emerging economies face enormous challenges to reconcile economic development and job creation with decarbonization. An essential aspect of such "early-stage" decoupling of growth and carbon emissions is to develop a skill base that favours the diffusion of green productions and...

African agriculture's importance for sustainable development is well appreciated. Indeed, recent years have seen a thorough reappraisal of the sector. What are less well understood, however, are the drivers that reallocate scarce human and physical resources across occupations and space, and...

Over the past sixty years, most Asian countries have undergone relatively rapid agricultural transformations that helped jumpstart broader economic development. However, the changes have differed markedly in nature and speed across countries of the region. In much of East and Southeast Asia, the...

The Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis (EKC) postulates an inverted u-shaped curve between important pollutants and per capita GDP analogous to the relationship between in-come inequality and income per capita which has been analysed by Kuznets in 1955. The arti-cle focuses on an empirical...

This essay suggests that there is a need for a Catalytic Industrial Policy (CIP) aimed at maximising positive outcomes on three axes at the same time - the green, the digital and the social - in order to speed up their realisation. Respective investments need to be guided in the desired...

In this paper, we evaluate the potential of digitalisation to drive structural transformations toward a sustainable economy. We apply an index decomposition analysis (IDA) to understand the factors influencing energy demand in a panel of 31 high-income countries from 1971 to 2019. The IDA...

Unlike in Asia, the manufacturing sector has not (yet) become a driver of structural change in Africa. One common explanation is that the natural resource-focus of many African economies leads to Dutch disease effects. To test this argument for the case of newly found oil in Ghana we develop a...