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on Development |
| By: | Nakamura, Shohei; Abanokova, Ksenia; Dang, Hai-Anh H.; Takamatsu, Shinya; Pei, Chunchen; Prospere, Dilou |
| Abstract: | While urbanization has great potential to facilitate poverty reduction, climate shocks represent a looming threat to such upward mobility. This paper empirically analyzes the effects of climatic risks on the function of urban agglomerations to support poor households to escape from poverty. Combining household surveys with climatic datasets, the panel regression analysis for Chile, Colombia, and Indonesia finds that households in large metropolitan areas are more likely to escape from poverty, indicating better access to economic opportunities in those areas. However, the climate shocks offset such benefits of urban agglomerations, as extreme rainfalls and high flood risks significantly reduce the chance of upward mobility. The findings underscore the need to enhance resilience among the urban poor to allow them to fully utilize the benefits of urban agglomerations. |
| Date: | 2023–03–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10383 |
| By: | Portner, Claus C. (Seattle University) |
| Abstract: | Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertility decline has progressed much slower than elsewhere. However, there is still substantial disagreement about why, partly because four leading potential causes—cultural norms, expected offspring mortality, land access, and school quality—are challenging to measure. I use large-scale woman-level data to infer what role each explanation plays in fertility differences between Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America, based on estimations of fertility outcomes by region, cohort, area of residence, and grade level. I show that the differences in fertility between Sub-Saharan Africa and the other regions first increase and then decrease with years of education. For women without education, fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa are comparable to those in Latin America. Similarly, for women with secondary education or higher, fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa align with those in South and East Asia. There are substantial and statistically significant differences for women with some primary education for all three comparison regions. The differences are more pronounced for children ever born than for surviving children. Overall, the results suggest that offspring mortality and the lower quality of primary schooling are the dominant reasons why fertility decline in Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind other regions. |
| Date: | 2023–08–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:jf9um_v1 |
| By: | Nikiema, Pouirkèta Rita; Kponou, Monsoi Kenneth Colombiano |
| Abstract: | Across developing countries, women play an important role both as producers of major food crops and in improving household nutrition. This research paper aims to assess the effect of improving women's empowerment on the nutritional status of children in rural Burkina Faso. Based on data from the 2014 Multisectoral Continuous Survey, the paper uses variables such as income control, access to land, autonomy in production decisions, access to credit, and social group membership to compute a composite index of women’s empowerment. Accounting for potential endogeneity of empowerment, the study adopts a dual-estimation approach that, first, uses average empowerment by stratum and, second, applies an instrumental variable. The results show a low baseline level of women’s empowerment in rural areas, but an improvement in empowerment has a relatively high and positive correlation with children’s nutritional outcomes. The study suggests that improving women’s empowerment components will translate into significant gains in children’s nutritional outcomes in rural households. |
| Date: | 2023–09–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10560 |
| By: | Brudevold-Newman, Andrew Peter; Donald, Aletheia Amalia; Rouanet, Lea Marie |
| Abstract: | Mechanization has the potential to boost agricultural production and reduce poverty in rural economies, but its impacts remain poorly understood. This paper randomizes the subsidized provision of a pair of traction oxen among 2, 546 farmers in Côte d’Ivoire through a matching grant. The analysis finds positive impacts on households’ agricultural production during the agricultural season overlapping with oxen delivery, and additional increases in total land holdings and use of complementary inputs in the subsequent season. The intervention affected household members in different ways, with wives and daughters substantially reducing their work on the farm—especially in districts with more stringent gender norms around handling oxen. In these districts, introducing traction oxen resulted in women shifting to off-farm work. The intervention also improved girls’ health and reduced school dropout among boys. The results provide novel evidence on the human development effects of mechanization, while highlighting how social prescriptions mediate the impacts of technology within the household. |
| Date: | 2023–06–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10516 |
| By: | Ahsan, Md. Nazmul; Emran, M. Shahe; Shilpi, Forhad J. |
| Abstract: | From 1965 to 1985, the number of schools doubled in developing countries, but little is known about their impacts on intergenerational educational mobility. This paper studies the effects of 61, 000 public primary schools constructed in the 1970s in Indonesia on intergenerational educational mobility, using full-count census data and a difference-in-differences design. The educational mobility curve is concave in most cases, and school expansion reduced the degree of concavity. Evidence on primary completion suggests contrasting effects across the distribution: relative mobility improved irrespective of gender in the uneducated households, but it worsened in the highly educated households. For completed years of schooling, there are striking gender differences, with strong effects on sons, but no significant effects on girls. This surprising finding reflects an unintended bottleneck at the secondary schooling level which created fierce competition among the Inpres primary graduates. The girls suffered an 8.5 percentage points decline in the probability of completing senior secondary schooling, while the boys reaped a 7.7 percentage points gain. The gender-based crowding out occurred across the board, suggesting mechanisms unrelated to family background such as low labor market returns for girls and gender norms in a patrilineal society. Available evidence on returns to education of girls rejects a labor market-based explanation. The authors test and find evidence consistent with gender norms as a mechanism by exploiting data from the “Matrilineal island” West Sumatra. In West Sumatra, girls are not crowded out at the secondary level; instead, boys face significant crowding out. |
| Date: | 2023–04–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10418 |
| By: | Malin Niemi; Nicklas Nordfors; Anna Tompsett |
| Abstract: | What happens to pollution when developing countries open their borders to trade? Theoretical predictions are ambiguous, and empirical evidence remains limited. We study the effects of the 1991 Indian trade liberalization reform on water pollution. The reform abruptly and unexpectedly lowered import tariffs, increasing exposure to trade. Larger tariff reductions are associated with relative increases in water pollution. The estimated effects imply a 0.12 standard deviation increase in water pollution for the median district exposed to the tariff reform. |
| Date: | 2025–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2502.09289 |
| By: | Demombynes, Gabriel |
| Abstract: | This paper extends the concept of learning poverty to provide local-level estimates of the share of children at age 10 who can read and understand a simple text in Colombia. The learning poverty indicator combines the share of children who are out of school and thus schooling deprived with the share of those in school who are learning deprived based on reading tests. Local-level estimates illustrate the immense gaps in learning poverty across municipalities in Colombia in a readily interpretable form. Learning poverty rates in some Colombian municipalities are below 20 percent—the average among high-income countries—while in others, rates exceed 90 percent—the average in Sub-Saharan Africa. High learning poverty rates at the local level are associated with high levels of multidimensional poverty, a large population share of ethnic minorities, and a history of conflict. The paper also shows that the rate of learning deprivation is 60 percent is public schools versus 30 percent in private schools and that reports from school principals identify large gaps between public and private schools in educational inputs. These results highlight the need to enhance foundational skills in public schools in Colombia. |
| Date: | 2023–06–26 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10498 |
| By: | Cunningham, Wendy; Tchuisseu, Feraud; Viollaz, Mariana; Edochie, Ifeanyi Nzegwu; Newhouse, David Locke; Ricaldi, Federica |
| Abstract: | While the impact of COVID-19 on Sub-Saharan African labor markets is well documented, there is suggestive evidence that urban households may have fared particularly poorly. This paper uses data from high-frequency phone surveys in 27 Sub-Saharan African countries to investigate which kinds of urban household enterprises were most affected, what coping strategies were utilized, and heterogeneity by sociodemographic characteristics in the short and medium run. Using linear probability models, the paper finds that households that relied on income from non-farm enterprises were hit particularly hard during the early stage of the crisis, with 20-26 percent reporting income declines, and women experiencing even greater losses. Few coping strategies were utilized in the short run to counterbalance the loss of enterprise income. As the crisis progressed, wage employment recovered more quickly than self-employment, with faster gains for non-farm household enterprises, less poor households, and those headed by males and adults. Women, adults, and non-poor self-employed household heads were more successful at leveraging external sources of support early in the pandemic, but these supports largely dropped off by August 2020. These results demonstrate the vulnerability of non-farm household enterprises in urban Sub-Saharan Africa to the COVID-19 shock and highlight the need to expand publicly and privately financed coping mechanisms, particularly for women, youth, and poor household heads who are self-employed. |
| Date: | 2023–03–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10360 |
| By: | Tabe-Ojong, Martin Paul; Rukundo, Emmanuel Nshakira |
| Abstract: | We study the productive and psychological effects of LEAP 1000, a program integrating cash transfer and health insurance in Ghana. We assess impacts on livestock ownership and commercialisation, household investments (including savings) and time preferences as a measure of behavioural changes. Using a two-wave panel and applying difference-in-differences estimations, we find that the program significantly increased livestock ownership, especially small ruminant animals, and commercialisation. There are positive effects on households' investments in durable goods, starting businesses and reduction of food expenditure as a share of household budgets. Further examination of potential mechanisms reveals improvements in patience, increased future orientation, sense of happiness and social support. Additional triple difference regressions confirm that these behavioural changes contribute to program effectiveness. |
| Abstract: | Wir untersuchen die produktiven und psychologischen Auswirkungen von LEAP 1000, einem Programm, das Geldtransfer und Krankenversicherung in Ghana kombiniert. Wir bewerten die Auswirkungen auf den Viehbesitz und die Kommerzialisierung, die Investitionen der Haushalte (einschließlich Ersparnisse) und die Zeitpräferenzen als Maß für Verhaltensänderungen. Unter Verwendung eines Zwei-Wellen-Panels und unter Anwendung von Differenz-im-Differenzen-Schätzungen stellen wir fest, dass das Programm den Viehbesitz, insbesondere von kleinen Wiederkäuern, und die Kommerzialisierung deutlich erhöht hat. Es gibt positive Auswirkungen auf die Investitionen der Haushalte in langlebige Güter, die Gründung von Unternehmen und die Verringerung des Anteils der Lebensmittelausgaben an den Haushaltsbudgets. Eine weitere Untersuchung der potenziellen Mechanismen zeigt Verbesserungen bei der Geduld, der Zukunftsorientierung, dem Glücksgefühl und der sozialen Unterstützung. Zusätzliche dreifache Differenzregressionen bestätigen, dass diese Verhaltensänderungen zur Wirksamkeit des Programms beitragen. |
| Keywords: | Cash transfers, health insurance, household investments, future orientations, Ghana |
| JEL: | I13 I15 I18 J01 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:rwirep:311186 |
| By: | Valera, Harold Glenn; Antonio, Ronald Jeremy; Habib, Muhammad Ashraful; Puskur, Ranjitha; Pede, Valerien; Yamano, Takashi |
| Abstract: | This paper aims to examine the effect of nutrition training on the adoption of high-zinc rice among female farmers with young children in Bangladesh. The authors first conducted a randomized control trial by providing female farmers with micronutrient training in randomly selected villages in May-June 2017, followed by a phone-based survey on high-zinc rice seeds among farmer trainees and counterparts in control villages. We conducted a three-visit panel survey in 2018–2020 to measure the effect of nutrition training on high-zinc rice adoption. We found that the adoption of high-zinc rice in the Aman or rainy season during July-August declined from 59% in 2018 to 8% in 2020 among treated farmers and from 13% to 2% among control farmers. The regression analysis indicated that nutrition training had a significant but diminishing effect on the adoption of high-zinc rice. Unavailability of seeds and low yields were cited as the major reasons for not using high-zinc rice, while lack of knowledge about high-zinc rice was the dominant reason among the control farmers. The results have shown that continuous training, public messaging, and improving seed systems are required to sustain zinc rice adoption. The trainings should tackle the nutritional advantages of biofortified crops to ensure knowledge retention and farm practices and management techniques to achieve optimal production. |
| Keywords: | Biofortification, Zinc-enhanced rice, Adoption, Bangladesh |
| JEL: | I12 O33 Q16 |
| Date: | 2024–05–23 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:123643 |
| By: | Bharti, Nitin Kumar; Li, Yang |
| Abstract: | We construct a novel dataset of human capital accumulation in China and India from 1900 to 2020 by combining historical records and educational reports to analyze the role of education in economic divergence. Three key findings emerge. First, China pursued a bottom-up strategy, first expanding primary education, followed by secondary and tertiary levels. India, in contrast, adopted a top-down approach, gradually expanding its educational system but prioritizing secondary and higher education before primary. Second, China prioritized quantity over quality, whereas India's expansion attempted to balance quality through teachers' emoluments. Third, China's system features more diversified secondary and tertiary education, with a strong emphasis on vocational education and engineering than India. We highlight the role of educational policies in shaping these trajectories. Our findings on differences in the human capital accumulation in India and China have significant economic implications: education inequality (gini) is not only higher in India but also accounts for a larger share of wage inequality in India (25%), compared with less than 12% in China. Despite a larger share of tertiary-educated graduates, India also struggles with high illiteracy, possibly impeding structural transformation by confining many to the low-productivity agricultural sector. In contrast, China's approach created a larger share of primary, secondary, and vocational graduates combined with more tertiary-educated engineers, generating human capital that is more suitable for the manufacturing sector. India's focus on humanities and accounting in tertiary education fueled service sector growth. Overall, our findings illustrate the importance of human capital composition in shaping long-run economic development. |
| Keywords: | human capital accumulation, education, long run development, inequality, China, India |
| JEL: | D31 E02 E24 H52 I2 N30 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:312196 |
| By: | Bedoya, Juan; De Hoyos Navarro, Rafael E.; Estrada, Ricardo |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the effect of a civil service reform on the skills profile of new teachers in Mexico. The reform mandated the use of rule-based recruitment over discretionary hiring. The results show that the reform led to hiring teachers with higher cognitive skills. The paper also shows that an improvement in the bottom of the skills distribution of new hires drove this change. Two channels explain these effects. First, the reform decreased the prevalence of discretionary hires, who tended to be drawn from the bottom of the skills distribution. Second, the reform improved the screening efficiency of rule-based hiring, making cognitive skills more important determinants of hiring outcomes. |
| Date: | 2023–08–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10540 |
| By: | Behrer, Arnold Patrick |
| Abstract: | This paper uses an exogenous shock to wages from the world’s largest anti-poverty program to show that higher wages can lead to increased air pollution, likely by inducing farmers to shift into a labor-saving and mechanized production process. Using a difference-in-differences approach on the staggered roll-out of India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), combined with data on nearly 1 million fires, the paper shows that the frequency of agricultural fires increases by 21 percent after the shock. The increase in fires is concentrated in districts that appear more likely to mechanize the harvest. MNREGA did not lead to changes in area planted or tonnage produced in fire intensive crops. The estimates show that nationally, the shock increased the rate of particulate emissions from biomass burning by 30 to 50 percent. The results suggest that absent policies to correct for environmental externalities of mechanization at all stages of development, labor market shocks may lead to inefficient levels of mechanization. |
| Date: | 2023–03–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10376 |
| By: | Arora, Abhishek; George, Siddharth; Rao, Vijayendra; Sharan, MR |
| Abstract: | Governments across the world have increasingly devolved powers to locally elected leaders. This paper studies the consequences of local democracy, exploiting a natural experiment in Karnataka, India. Local elections were postponed in 2020, resulting in appointed administrators taking over governance in villages whose elected leaders completed their terms that year. This created quasi-random variation in the governance regime across villages. The paper brings together a rich set of administrative datasets—budgetary allocations from the universe of 6, 000 villages, more than a million public works projects, local bureaucratic attendance, welfare benefits, and a primary survey of more than 11, 810 households—to estimate the impacts of local democracy. The findings show that local democracy aligns spending more closely with citizen preferences, but these gains accrue more to men, upper castes, and other advantaged social groups. Elected leaders are more responsive to citizen needs and cause local bureaucrats to exert more effort. However, appointed administrators perform better on aspects of governance that are aligned with their specialized skills. Local democracy improves governance in some domains, but it has no overall impact on economic outcomes or effectiveness of COVID-19 management. |
| Date: | 2023–08–25 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10555 |
| By: | Jedwab, Remi Camille; Haslop, Federico; Zarate Vasquez, Roman David; Rodriguez Castelan, Carlos |
| Abstract: | Empirical studies of the economic effects of climate change largely rely on climate anomalies for causal identification purposes. Slow and permanent changes in climate-driven geographical conditions, that is, climate change as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have been relatively less studied, especially in Africa, which remains the most vulnerable continent to climate change. This paper focuses on Lake Chad, which used to be the 11th largest lake in the world. Lake Chad, which is the size of El Salvador, Israel, or Massachusetts, slowly shrank by 90 percent for exogenous reasons between 1963 and 1990. While the water supply decreased, the land supply increased, generating a priori ambiguous effects. These effects make the increasing global disappearance of lakes a critical trend to study. For Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger—25 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population— the paper constructs a novel data set tracking population patterns at a fine spatial level from the 1940s to the 2010s. Difference-in-differences show much slower growth in the proximity of the lake, but only after the lake started shrinking. These effects persist two decades after the lake stopped shrinking, implying limited adaptation. Additionally, the negative water supply effects on fishing, farming, and herding outweighed the growth of land supply and other positive effects. A quantitative spatial model used to rationalize these results and estimate aggregate welfare losses, which accounts for adaptation, shows overall losses of about 6 percent. The model also allows studying the aggregate and spatial effects of policies related to migration, land use, trade, roads, and cities. |
| Date: | 2023–09–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10561 |
| By: | Behrer, Arnold Patrick; Choudhary, Rishabh; Sharma, Dhruv |
| Abstract: | Exposure to fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) increases mortality and morbidity and reduces human capital formation and worker productivity. As a consequence, high levels of particulate pollution may adversely affect economic activity. Using a novel dataset of changes in the annual gross domestic product of Indian districts, this paper investigates the impact of changes in the level of ambient PM2.5 on district-level gross domestic product. Using daily temperature inversions as an instrument for pollution exposure, this paper finds that higher levels of particulate pollution reduce gross domestic product. The effect is non-trivial—the median annual increase in the level of PM2.5 reduces year-to-year changes in gross domestic product by 0.56 percentage points. |
| Date: | 2023–06–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10515 |
| By: | Newhouse, David Locke |
| Abstract: | This paper offers a nontechnical review of selected applications that combine survey and geospatial data to generate small area estimates of wealth or poverty. Publicly available data from satellites and phones predicts poverty and wealth accurately across space, when evaluated against census data, and their use in model-based estimates improve the accuracy and efficiency of direct survey estimates. Although the evidence is scant, models based on interpretable features appear to predict at least as well as estimates derived from Convolutional Neural Networks. Estimates for sampled areas are significantly more accurate than those for non-sampled areas due to informative sampling. In general, estimates benefit from using geospatial data at the most disaggregated level possible. Tree-based machine learning methods appear to generate more accurate estimates than linear mixed models. Small area estimates using geospatial data can improve the design of social assistance programs, particularly when the existing targeting system is poorly designed. |
| Date: | 2023–06–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10512 |
| By: | Antonio, Ronald Jeremy; Valera, Harold Glenn; Durant-Morat, Alvaro; Hoang, Hoa; Diagne, Mandiaye; Malakhail, Fazal; Pede, Valerien |
| Abstract: | This Handbook aims to provide a global coverage of policy instruments used by governments to realize objectives related to rice production and supply, rice markets, and trade. The handbook covers major rice markets in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. There are similarities in policies in general and within regions. Given the importance of food security to all countries, policies are designed to increase and supplement farm income to sustain domestic production while ensuring access to and availability of affordable rice for consumers. Rice trade is still regulated mainly through import tariffs to protect domestic producers. Import tariffs are implemented in several countries in Southeast and South Asia and Africa, and in all countries reviewed in East Asia and the Americas. Based on the summary tables below, we can also see that two-tier tariffs are most common in East Asia, with them being implemented in all four of the countries reviewed. Several Asian countries procure rice through state-owned enterprises (SOEs). These countries provide significant control to SOEs to ensure stable domestic prices and control of foreign trade. From the recent developments brought about by the export restrictions imposed by India, state trading as well as government-to-government procurement have both been used to ensure that domestic supplies remain adequate. Asian importers such as Indonesia and Bangladesh have set up government-to-government trade agreements with major Asian exporters such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar to ensure domestic food availability. India has also secured several exemptions to its trade restrictions for some of its trade partners, most of which are for African countries to provide them with access to lower-priced rice while allowing India to remain as the top rice exporter in the world. Subsidies also remain prevalent, especially in South and Southeast Asia, as well as in some African countries. These subsidies are aimed toward raising farmer income and providing aid for farmers to produce efficiently and continuously. Recent subsidies have been implemented to help farmers navigate increases in fertilizer prices. Aside from providing incentive and aid to farmers, ensuring consistent production also leads to higher domestic supply, less reliance on imports, and lower consumer prices. † Published by the International Rice Research Institute. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14799014. To protect domestic farmers, several countries in Asia and the Americas also implement minimum support prices. Similar to subsidies, minimum support prices are used to encourage domestic production for both rice-importing and -exporting countries. Major exporting countries such as Thailand and India implement them to ensure their place in the world market while importers such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Laos, Nepal, and Sri Lanka implement them to secure food availability in their domestic markets. Lastly, measures such as temporary export bans and price controls are implemented in several African countries. Such measures are usually implemented to control volatile domestic prices and ensure domestic food access. |
| Keywords: | Rice policies, global rice economy, export and import restrictions, subsidies |
| JEL: | F13 Q11 Q17 Q18 |
| Date: | 2024–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:123642 |