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Project
Recovery from the COVID-19 shock and the informal labour market in urban Uganda
As COVID-19 cases continue to escalate across developing countries, many governments reimposed harsh lockdown policies, reversing months of gradual economic recovery. In Uganda, public transport and non-essential businesses were suspended for 42 days, echoing a prior shutdown through April-June 2020. These restrictions significantly impacted the informal economy, where...
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Project
Investigating FDI linkages in developing countries
Foreign investment into Uganda has been increasing in recent years. However, the extent to which this investment is yielding significant returns for the local economy is uncertain. To date, there is little known about the differential performance and impact of foreign firms in Uganda, and therefore limited evidence from which to design policies to make the most of Foreign...
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Project
Cross-sectoral movements of labour in a low-income country: Evidence from Uganda
In this project we plan to employ a newly sourced matched employer-employee dataset in Uganda to explore the cross-sectoral and cross-firm movement of labour in a low-income country. Using this data, we aim to shed light on: The extent to which workers are able to progress up the job ladder and match with good and productive employers; The relative importance of...
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Project
Vulnerabilities and solutions for Mozambican enterprises in face of the COVID-19 crisis
This study proposes to the National Directorate of Economic Policies and Development of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) of Mozambique to conduct a phone-based enterprise survey through a partnership with IGC and NOVAFRICA. The survey aims to inform MEF's response to the COVID-19 crisis, improving its capacity to offer adequate solutions to challenges posed by the...
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Project
Policy implementation in Uganda
Implementing government policies is essential to recover from the economic ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic and to foster economic growth through evidence-based policies. Anecdotal evidence and broad-based indices (e.g., World Bank Governance Indicators) strongly suggest that policy implementation is lacking in most sub-Saharan African countries. Reasons possibly...
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Project
Technology adoption and market access: On-farm agribusinesses in Rwanda
There are mechanisms and constraints that prevent subsistence farmers in Rwanda's large-scale hillside irrigation sites from transitioning to “farming-as-a-business" — producing high-value, export-oriented crops. Thus, in line with Rwanda's Ministry of Agriculture (MINAGRI), this research study is focused on finding pathways that ensure the sustainability of irrigation...
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Project
Improving tax compliance in Freetown, Sierra Leone
A pre-condition for sustained public service provision is the mobilisation of reliable tax revenues to pay for these public services, often referred to as fiscal capacity. There is extensive literature examining tax mobilisation and compliance in developed countries, where fiscal capacity is already high due to pre-existing norms around compliance. However, it has little to...
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Project
Improving labour market efficiency in Ghana: A field experiment
The labour market in Ghana is largely characterised by informal recruitment practices. While these practices are not inherently bad, the scale at which they occur reduces the information flow and competitiveness in the recruitment process, obstructing the efficiency of the labour market in matching vacancies to more suitable candidates. According to the World Economic...
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Project
Neighbourhoods of opportunity? Moving to public housing in Addis Ababa
Governments all over the world use housing assistance programmes to improve the living standards of the poor. In Ethiopia, like many developing countries today, these programmes take the form of large-scale household estates built in new neighbourhoods by the government and then given away either at subsidised prices or for free. These programmes may directly improve the...
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Project
Tracking multi-sectoral firm performance and responses through the COVID-19 pandemic
COVID-19 is estimated to cut Ghana’s GDP growth by at least 5.3% in 2020 bringing the country’s expected GDP growth to about 1.5%. The Ghanaian economy is highly exposed to global shocks with trade accounting for over 71% of the country’s GDP in 2018. However, very little is known about exactly how the pandemic and the measures to contain the spread of the virus...
Project
Female politicians and economic growth: Evidence from state elections in India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS7YtrR2yjU&feature=emb_logo 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...