Working Papers

This paper investigates the role of trade costs in exporter dynamics in Africa. In comparison to exporters from other regions, African exporting firms are fewer, smaller and relatively less diversified in terms of products and destinations. African countries also display the highest rates of entry, exit and turnover of exporting firms, exporting products and export destinations. This suggests that Africa’s exporting activity is volatile and subject to a lot of experimentation, with exporters having difficulties in maintaining trade relationships. The analysis also confirms that trade costs are a crucial factor in explaining exporter performance in Africa vis-à-vis other regions, but also…

Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) have started to audit the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While there is no one single audit model or approach to audit SDG implementation, audits should incorporate a few core methodological features related to the principles of the 2030 Agenda. Four methodological and practical challenges associated with conducting performance audits of SDG implementation, as they differ from traditional audits, are discussed in this paper: 1) problem definition, including the level of investigation in the SDG hierarchy of goals and targets and the audit scope; 2) conceptual challenges inherent in going from the level of individual entities…

As the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development enters its fifth year of implementation, it is opportune to ask how governance is understood and implemented around the world. In fact, one can go further to probe the extent to which governments are cognizant of the principles undergirding effective governance. This paper examines the ways in which governance has been operationalized by countries, major groups and other stakeholders since the first round of Voluntary National Reviews at the High-level Political Forum (HLPF) of 2016. It does this based on the qualitative overview of the Synthesis reports of Voluntary National Reviews (2016–2019), and the quantitative analysis of three SDG…

The potential of data for supporting development is bounded only by the amount and variety of data that can be collected and analyzed, which is to say it is almost infinite. However, if data’s vast benefits are disproportionately captured by few in the society, leaving no one behind – an overarching principle of the Sustainable Development Goals – would be difficult to attain, even when everyone benefits from the use of data. This paper discusses key data properties and dynamics in data economy that create the tendencies for monopolies to emerge, reinforcing unbalanced power between corporates and other actors and generating negative distributional implications. If mismanaged,…

This paper briefly takes stock of two decades of e-participation initiatives based on a limited review of the academic literature. The purpose of the paper is to complement the results of the e-government Survey 2020. As such, the emphasis is on aspects that the e-government survey (based on analysis of e-government portals and on quantitative indicators) does not capture directly. Among those are the challenges faced by e-participation initiatives and key areas of attention for governments. The paper maps the field of e-participation and related activities, as well as its relationships with other governance concepts. Areas of recent development in terms of e-participation applications…