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Project
Trade facilitation and informal cross border trade
Informal cross border trade (ICBT) – trade activities which are unrecorded in official trade statistics – is pervasive in Africa. Economic theory suggests that the presence of informal trade depends on the relative costs of trading informally and formally (Golub, 2015; Eberhard-Ruiz & Moradi, 2018). Some of the factors spurring informal trade are expensive document...
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Project
Tanzania Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Map
Despite evidence of the contribution of fast-growing micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to private sector growth and economic transformation, academic studies and policymakers have struggled to effectively identify and support these high-growth MSMEs. The reality is that much of our understanding of the MSME sector comes from information drawn from low- or...
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Project
Women’s experiences of agency and mobility in the megacity of Karachi and their labour force participation
Economic growth in South Asia is associated with employment, and improved job quality in particular. However, employment rates in South Asia overtime have remained stubborn and below those in other regions, largely attributed to persistently low female employment and participation rates (Nayar et al. 2012). Female youth labour force participation (LFP) rates in South Asia...
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Project
The political economy of power outages in Ghana: New measures and analysis
Access to energy is crucial for economic growth. While global attention has focused heavily on increasing access, an under-recognised constraint in many countries is poor reliability of electricity supply. This project introduces a new measure of power supply reliability and outages based upon temporal variations in nighttime light output. This work builds upon ongoing...
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Project
Rapid response to Pakistan’s Task Force on Energy Reforms
Pakistan’s power sector is in deep need of reform. The sector suffers from chronic shortages not because of a lack of supply but due to the financial woes of the distribution companies operating throughout Pakistan. Of the electricity sold for use across the country, only 71% is recovered through bills. Such large losses risk collapsing the sector if left...
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Project
Managing agricultural risk in Mozambique
Mozambique is primarily an agricultural economy with 81% of its population engaged in agriculture, which accounts for 32% of its GDP. “There are now 400 extreme weather events every year, four times as many as in 1970” (The Economist, 2017). The direct costs of these extreme events in the form of lost lives, assets, and habitat are evident. For farmers in...
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Project
Search and matching frictions for day labourers
The majority of households living in extreme poverty receive some income from causal day labour, picking up short jobs, typically 1-5 days, in construction, agriculture or manual labour. In South Asia, this is even starker, with 98% of households living below $1 a day engaging in casual labour. This labour market is characterized by low pay, short contracts, fixed wages...
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Project
Property taxation with flat rate systems in Tanzania
The property tax system that the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) inherited has a low proportion of total properties registered and an even smaller proportion valuated. It uses a valuation method that is regressive, expensive and significantly undervalues properties, and the effective tax rates are minuscule once true property value is taken into account. A flat tax...
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Project
Understanding unplanned settlement dynamics in the city of Kigali
Kigali is Rwanda’s main urban centre and accommodates about half the urban population. Rapid urban growth in Kigali has led to the development of unplanned settlements. Unplanned areas, characterised by inferior living conditions such as limited access to infrastructure, limited plot accessibility, and rudimentary housing construction-materials, pose a long-term risk to...
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Project
Informal taxation and revenue mobilisation in Myanmar
Taxation is essential to provide governments with the funds needed to deliver the public goods and services necessary for the social and economic development of a country. However, in Myanmar, the levels of formal taxation are among the lowest in the world, according to the IMF. These low levels are the subject of regularly commentary in the public sphere, often accompanied...
Project
Female politicians and economic growth: Evidence from state elections in India
The project studies close elections between men and women for election to India's state legislative assemblies. It finds significantly higher growth in economic activity in constituencies that elect women. Given average GDP growth in India of about 7% per year (during the study period), the researchers estimate the growth premium for constituencies from having a...