This paper analyses changes in income portfolios of rural households and its determinants for the case of Ghana in the 1990s. Our analysis shows that, contrary to common beliefs, rural Ghana has seen major economic transformation, as households increasingly diversify their livelihoods by both...

Employing a unique dataset that covers households from six West African capitals, this paper provides new evidence on the demand for informal sector products and services. We first investigate whether demand linkages exist between formal and informal products and distribution channels, and...

We further refine the Modified-Cash-Deposits-Ratio (MCDR) approach, developed by Pickhardt and Sardà (2011, 2012) with a view to analyze size and causes of the cash using section of the underground economy. Among other things, we address the issue of cash hoarding. Findings include that the...

Motivated by a set of stylised facts based on provincial data for India, this paper investigates the incidence of urban poverty by modelling the impact of technological progress in the formal sectors of the economy on the urban informal wage in a four-sector general equilibrium framework with...

The paper examines the flow of workers between employment states, the role of education in these transitions and the impact of the transitions on earnings. It uses panel data for three waves (2005/06, 2009/10 and 2010/11) of household surveys in Uganda. We estimate transition probability...

In a typical developing country, coverage of the contributory social security system is low. We analyze the aggregate effects of a revenue-neutral fiscal-cum-social policy reform that consists of: 1) the implementation of universal social insurance to replace the system with low coverage; and 2)...

This article investigates the relationship between corruption and firm performance in Greece using firm level data. Corruption is overall negatively associated with firm size and growth at the firm level. We focus on the effect of ‘administrative corruption’, whereby firms engage in corrupt...

Informal jobs offer skill acquisition opportunities that may facilitate a future switch to formal employment for young workers. In this sense, informal training on the job may be a viable alternative to formal schooling in an economy with a large and diverse informal sector. In this paper, I...

This paper proposes a theory of sharecropping and interlinkage on the basis of seasonal variation of price and imperfectly competitive nature of rural product markets. First, a benchmark model is considered to show the optimality of sharecropping in the presence of price variation. This model is...

Institutions play a critical role in the economic development of a country. The correlation between these two variables has been acknowledged in economic literature. However, the causal relationship is still under debate although there is a tendency towards the notion that institutions influence...