All publications and documents

The purpose of the United Nations Challenge Badges is to raise awareness, educate and, most of all, motivate young people to change their behaviour and be active agents of change in their local communities. Challenge Badges are appropriate for use with school classes and youth groups, and are endorsed by WAGGGS and WOSM. They include a wide range of activities and ideas that can easily be…

Recent research shows that the merger of economies increases aggregate stress. This paper shows that there is no income distribution policy which will ensure that the wellbeing of the individuals belonging to merging economies does not fall below their pre-merger level.

We study the impact of gender quotas on the acquisition of human capital. We assume that individuals’ formation of human capital is influenced by the prospect of landing high-pay top positions, and that these positions are regulated by gender-specific quotas. In the absence of quotas, women consider their chances of getting top positions to be lower than men’s. The lure of top positions induces…

The study investigates the impact of smallholder vegetable commercialization through the export and domestic market channels on household income and assets in Kenya. The authors use a survey panel dataset, which allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity across households, and show that the commercialization of vegetables through both market channels contributes positively to welfare, even…

This paper analyzes the transmission from global commodity to domestic food prices for a large set of countries. First, a theoretical model is developed to explain price transmission for different trade regimes. Drawing from the competitive storage model under rational expectations, it is shown that domestic prices can respond instantaneously to global prices even if no trade takes place but…

Land degradation remains a serious impediment to improving livelihoods in the Eastern Africa region. This working paper presents a general overview of the state and extent of land degradation in East Africa, explores its proximate and underlying drivers, identifies the land degradation hotspots in the region, and also discusses the productivity and poverty impacts of land degradation in the…