"This book focuses on a broad range of reforms capable of driving competitiveness and economic growth in Africa, including trade, fiscal federalism, redistribution, factor endowments, economic resilience and diversification, resources, welfare and innovation capacity."

"Healing the economic and social wounds inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic will take time, but the long road to recovery presents a unique opportunity to build back better. To catalyze change and succeed in the post-pandemic era, economic development policy and practice must see the crisis as an...

Despite its exclusion from the Doha agenda, the issue of trade and labor standards remains an intensely discussed subject among economists, policymakers, international agencies and nongovernmental organizations. In the past few years, both World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Labor...

In recent years, state fragility has gained importance as a result of the perceived links between poverty, conflict, and global terrorism. In this paper, we examine the relationship between state fragility and aid by evaluating the literature and research programs currently extant. We bring...

Purpose – The relationship between globalization – through trade liberalization – and inequality is unclear. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem, which is a standard result in trade theory, does not offer compelling answers as globalized economies with an abundance of unskilled labour have seen...

This paper is part of a the UNRISD project on The Politics of Domestic Resource Mobilization. Its specific contribution is with regards to the interaction between fiscal performance and donor aid allocation in developing countries. While several studies have examined whether aid affects fiscal...

This study is motivated by frequent calls to harmonize labor standards across countries, which result from the fear that economic integration (and the accompanying liberalization of trade flows) will lead to an erosion of working conditions, as countries deliberately try to reduce labor...

This paper is derived from our ongoing research on fragile states funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to help policymakers and analysts make decisions on where and how to allocate aid, especially in fragile state environments. In order for development assistance to...