Pardee RAND students have long examined issues of global human progress — notably economic development and developing countries in general — in their research and dissertations. Below is a comprehensive list of Pardee RAND dissertations focused on these topics.
Explores the competitiveness of India's domestic manufacturing across the supply chain; barriers and enablers to developing a domestic industry; and the cost of industrial policy support.
Develops a framework to categorize observable signatures, formulate a judgement on whether long-term deception is taking place, and propose additional areas of collection that may yield evidence of in research and development.
Uses a mix of both quantitative and qualitative methods to help policy makers identify sources of innovation in the knowledge-based economy and to best leverage these sources for regional economic growth.
Explores family welfare and economic development in India.
Explores the link between economic openness and companies' corporate governance practices in developing countries.
Explores the new flows and policy implications of private sector and emerging countries investments of emerging infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Explores the changes water market participants may experience should there be a move to formalize water markets and establish tradable water rights.
Studies data from economic development zones in China and their impact on economic growth, technological innovation, exports, and employment.
Seeks to understand the mechanism of a household's decision on child labor and educational investment by proposing a theoretical framework, examining the empirical evidence, and providing policy evaluation and recommendations.
Explores the role entrepreneurship plays in the lives of the economically disadvantaged in both India and the United States.
Provides evidence that food assistance, livelihood interventions, and antiretroviral therapy all have a role to play in improving the economic and nutritional well-being of people living with HIV in developing countries.
This dissertation covers three topics -- three points of view -- of issues in international migration.
Tests the hypothesis that development and reconstruction actors can feasibly implement sound development and reconstruction across a relatively wide spectrum of conflict, but varying levels and natures of violence can affect its delivery.
Unlike most empirical cross-country analysis of the determinants of innovation, which focus mainly on developed countries, this study analyzes the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.
Evaluates factors including household preferences, resource constraints, and background factors such as risks and economic shocks in determining childhood investments in rural India.
This paper identifies which interventions succeed most in preserving smallholders' household wealth. The livestock intervention is the most cost-effective one, and the employment guarantee scheme provides substantial asset protection.
Examines how to prioritize and sequence political, social, and economic policies in post-conflict countries to sustain peace and reduce the risk of violence reoccurring.
Investigates the design and implementation of General Pervaiz Musharraf's avowed decentralization initiative.
The information revolution (IR) has been uneven, resulting in a “digital divide.” Lagging countries need the means to move ahead if they are to access the benefits that IR offers and not suffer the consequences of being left out. This analysis develops a road map for policymakers in lagging countries and discusses specific tools to understand what drives the information revolution.
Develops guidelines regarding the design and management of policies to mitigate the political and economic risks that often accompany natural resource windfalls in less-developed countries.
Each year donors transfer tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid to developing countries. This dissertation examines the role of donors’ aid allocation policies in ensuring aid effectiveness. The author unravels the critical heterogeneous impacts of governance and different aid categories on development outcomes.
Although it is widely believed that less-developed countries have lower standards of medical care than the developed world, there are few quantifiable measures of quality of clinical care in less-developed countries. The objectives of this dissertati...
Presents an economic framework to view, and a methodology to assess, policymaking in emerging economies by analyzing the political activities of so-called commercial power centers. The framework is applied to the example of Indonesia.
This report sheds new light on the prospects for the French fighter industry.
RAND researchers, working in many of RAND's research units, examine issues of global human progress from a multidisciplinary perspective. Below is a sampling of the latest RAND research on the topic.
This publication is part of a series of four RAND Perspectives (PE) each focusing on different challenges in the Mediterranean region. The focus of this PE is on criminal activities and their implications for regional stability and security.
Investigates the impact of changes in political regimes on industrial concentration.
This publication is part of a series of four RAND Perspectives (PE) each focusing on different challenges in the Mediterranean region. The focus of this PE is on cross-cutting challenges and their implications for regional stability and security.
This article shares learning from the experience of conducting a participatory, real-time, âtheory drivenâ evaluation of the African Institutions Initiative, a Wellcome Trust-funded programme that aimed to build sustainable health research capacity in Africa at institutional and network levels, across seven research consortia.
Develops a novel identification strategy that uses information on the network structure of producer relationships to provide estimates of the size of productivity spillovers.
Our analysis suggests that the removal of small-scale reservations increased overall employment by encouraging the growth of younger, larger establishments—those that are most likely to pay higher wages, create more investment, be more productive, and generate growth in employment.
This publication is part of a series of four RAND Perspectives (PE) each focusing on different challenges in the Mediterranean region. The focus of this PE is on regional foreign policy dynamics and their implications for stability and security
Studies the effects of Indonesia's Integrated Economic Development Zone program which provides substantial tax-breaks for firms that locate in certain districts in the Outer Islands of Indonesia.
Includes the community-facility survey questionnaire used in the Malaysian Indonesia Family Life Survey, wave 5 (IFLS5).
Describes the design and implementation and provides a preview of some key results of the Indonesia Family Life Survey, with an emphasis on wave 5
This paper investigates the impact of exogenous shocks to household income, assets and labour supply on children's school attendance in Madagascar.
Includes the household survey questionnaire used in the Malaysian Indonesia Family Life Survey, wave 5 (IFLS5).
This paper reviews competing theories about the causes of informality in developing countries and uses new data to determine which theory best explains the persistence and scale of Indonesia's informal sector.
To foster economic research on growth in poor and developing countries the Department for International Development in the UK has provided funding to several organisations focused on economic growth research. Of interest for this study were six individual programmes. The aim of this review was to compare the six programmes over time, against each other, and against relevant benchmarks to capture their performance to date.
Describes the design and implementation and provides a preview of some key results of the Indonesia Family Life Survey, with an emphasis on wave 5 (IFLS5).
Compares the impacts of India's command-and-control environmental regulations with the impact of changes in coal prices on establishment-level pollution abatement, coal consumption, and productivity growth.
Explores if policies promoting institutional deliveries in developing countries can actually reduce newborn deaths.
Studies the effect of a ban on informal (traditional) birth attendants imposed by the Malawi government.
The World Bank asked RAND Europe to conduct a stocktaking exercise to map the diversity of employment interventions in South Asia and to review evidence of the impact of interventions through a meta-regression.
This report provides a special focus on the challenges youth face in employment and education in Mongolia, using a new survey developed by the Institute for Labour Studies and RAND. Understanding the constraints to youth job-market success is critical to Mongolia's economic future. The analysis showed relatively high rates of youth not in school or work, and challenges to job-market preparation, but also improvement in job-market outcomes.
This study was commissioned by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) to understand how the organisation contributes to research capacity building activities in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda.
Reforming Policies for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Indonesia investigates constraints that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face and how existing programs do — or do not — help reduce these constraints, and includes recommendations on the importance of credit and on the need to remove information barriers.
This study uses 61 nationally representative household surveys from 25 developing countries between 1985 and 2012 to assess whether returns to education are systematically higher in developing countries.
The low school attainment, early marriage, and low age at first birth of females are major policy concerns in less developed countries. This study jointly estimated the determinants of educational attainment, marriage age, and age at first birth among females aged 12-25 in Madagascar.
The Department for International Development (DfID) commissioned RAND Europe to conduct a Mid Term Review of the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund, run by the World Bank.
