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on Central and Western Asia |
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Issue of 2023‒01‒02
seven papers chosen by |
| By: | Serebryakova, Evgeniya |
| Abstract: | The role of ICTs for women’s empowerment in the development context is increasingly being discussed in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). Studies have been conducted investigating the empowering potential of ICTs. Yet research on the Central Asian region is lacking, in particular regarding the most vulnerable group of people in the region: rural women. This paper aims to shed light on this gap by conducting an exploratory analysis using an adapted version of Kleine’s Choice Framework, which is based on Amartya Sen’s capability approach, using secondary data sources. Through a focus on the countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, the adapted version of the Choice Framework is used as a mapping tool to identify the barriers and opportunities that ICTs can have for rural women’s empowerment in the region. The findings show that a lack of access and infrastructure of ICTs remains the biggest barrier in the region, with the exception of Kazakhstan. Where ICTs are being used, this is likely to take place through mobile phones, reflecting a common tendency throughout developing countries. Additionally, the local context regarding traditional gender roles, and social norms constrains women’s agency, in combination with an increasingly oppressive political environment. This combination of factors means that ICTs do not currently appear to present an empowering tool for rural women in the region. |
| Date: | 2022–11–18 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:v72xw&r= |
| By: | Isabelle Chort (TREE - Transitions Energétiques et Environnementales - UPPA - Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, IUF - Institut Universitaire de France - M.E.N.E.S.R. - Ministère de l'Education nationale, de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche, IZA - Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit - Institute of Labor Economics); Rozenn Hotte; Karine Marazyan |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the impact of income shocks and bride price on early marriage in Turkey. Weather shocks provide an exogenous source of variation of household income through agricultural production. A decrease in rainfall observed over the 9 months period corresponding to the growing season is found to negatively affect both agricultural production and returns for the majority of crops and vegetables. Data on weather shocks are merged with individual and household level data from the Turkish Demographic and Health Surveys 1998 to 2013. The practice of bride-price, still vivid in many regions of the country, may provide incentives for parents to marry their daughter earlier, when faced with a negative income shock. In addition, marriages precipitated by negative income shocks may present specific features (endogamy, age and education difference between spouses). To study the role of payments to the bride's parents, we interact our measure of shocks with a province-level indicator of a high prevalence of bride-price. We find that girls living in provinces with a high practice of bride-price and exposed to a negative income shocks when aged 12-14 (resp. 12-17) have a 28% (resp. 20%) higher probability to be married before the age of 15 (resp. 18). Such women are also more likely to give birth to their first child before 18 and for those who married religiously first, the civil ceremony is delayed by 2 months on average. Our results suggest that girl marriage still participates to household strategies aimed at mitigating negative income shocks in contemporary Turkey. |
| Keywords: | Child marriage,Income shocks,Bride price,Weather shocks,Turkey |
| Date: | 2021–10–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wptree:hal-03258215&r= |
| By: | Azad, Shirzad (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran) |
| Abstract: | On July 14, 2015, when Iran and the 5+1 group (the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany) ultimately agreed over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Republic of Korea (ROK) was practically one of the top three trade partners of the Persian Gulf country. In early May 2016 and only a few months after the nuclear deal was carried through, the then Korean President, Park Geun-hye, made an official visit to Iran where the two countries vowed to ratchet up their economic relations from roughly $6 billion to more than $18 billion in the years to come. Accompanied by “the largest business delegation in the history of Korean presidential trips,” Park’s high-profile trip to Iran persuaded many interested experts and observers to believe that the East Asian country was really determined to shore up its economic weight in Iran by drawing certain policies relevant to the long-term presence of Korean businesses in the Middle Eastern country (Choi 2016). Despite all those upbeat expectations about the ROK’s future economic and technological role in Iran, however, various data and statistics coming out indicate that over the past several years nearly all well-known Korean brands and products have increasingly lost their market share in the Mideast country to brands and goods supplied by other competitors. As a matter of fact, in the late 1990s and early 2000s the East Asian nation emerged as one of the Persian Gulf country’s top trading partners in the world, outstripping a number of Tehran’s traditional trading partners from the West. And while Korea managed to even expand its economic presence in Iran in the heydays of sundry international sanctions levied against the Middle Eastern country over its contentious nuclear program a couple of years before the JCPOA was eventually agreed in 2015, the ROK has been doing relatively poor in Iran during the past years (Azad 2018). Such lackadaisical performance, epitomized by abandoning the long-established pattern of significant trade in energy with Iran, has critically influenced a sharp decline in the total volume of two-way commerce between the two countries. |
| Keywords: | during the Biden Presidency; Koreas Economic Presence in Iran |
| Date: | 2022–10–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:kiepwe:2022_039&r= |
| By: | Ahmet Faruk Aysan; Dilek Demirbaş (Istanbul University); José Luis Alberto Delgado |
| Abstract: | This paper analyses the fiscal performance of Turkey and Argentina during the period 2000-2021, when both countries faced rapid economic growth with the consequent impact on social welfare. This work explored two different systems: Centralization in Turkey and Federalism in Argentina and, in general, studied the decentralization impact of both systems on social welfare. This study intended to create new social welfare indexes in other to analyze the resource allocation in different regions of these countries. As a first step, we built a regional Human Development Index (HDI) for each region. This attempt is considered a new contribution to the literature and intended to fill the gap in this field. Afterward, this index was compared with the fiscal resources allocation (FRA), used as a proxy of fiscal decentralization in an econometric panel data model. By using this method, we concluded that the social welfare indexes have a positive relationship with the fiscal resource allocation in the Federal system, such as in Argentina, but not in the centralized system such as in Turkey during the period analyzed from 2000 to 2020. |
| Keywords: | Fiscal Centralization,Decentralization,HDI Index,Argentina,Turkey. |
| Date: | 2022–11–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03866662&r= |
| By: | Sylvain Bellefontaine |
| Abstract: | Relatively sound macroeconomic fundamentals, coupled with government measures and financial support from donors, have allowed Uzbekistan to withstand the shock of the health crisis. Despite a marked deterioration in the regional situation for the last year, the country shows internal political stability. At the same time, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s “New Uzbekistan Strategy” is continuing the post-Soviet economic transition formally initiated in 2017. However, the uncertainties generated by the international environment seems to hamper the implementation of reforms and the transformation from a planned economy to a market economy. The objective of this publication is to present the major macroeconomic trends in the country. |
| Keywords: | Ouzbékistan |
| JEL: | E |
| Date: | 2022–11–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:avg:wpaper:en14771&r= |
| By: | Oeindrila Dube; Joshua Blumenstock; Michael Callen |
| Abstract: | Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can shed light on the nature of religious adherence in Islamic societies. Exploiting random variation in climate, we find that as economic conditions in Afghanistan worsen, people become more religiously observant. The effects are most pronounced in areas where droughts have the biggest economic consequences, such as croplands without access to irrigation. |
| JEL: | O13 Q1 Q15 Q54 Z10 Z12 |
| Date: | 2022–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30694&r= |
| By: | Olivier Chanel (AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Stéphanie Vincent Lyk-Jensen (Danish Centre for Social Science Research); Jean-Christophe Vergnaud (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates how affective forecasting errors (A.F.E.s), the difference between anticipated emotion and the emotion actually experienced, may induce changes in preferences on time, risk and occupation after combat. Building on psychological theories incorporating the role of emotion in decision-making, we designed a before-and-after-mission survey for Danish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. Our hypothesis of an effect from A.F.E.s is tested by controlling for other mechanisms that may also change preferences: immediate emotion, trauma effect – proxied by post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) – and changes in wealth and risk perception. At the aggregate level, results show stable preferences before and after mission. We find positive A.F.E.s for all three emotions studied (fear, anxiety and excitement), with anticipated emotions stronger than those actually experienced. We provide evidence that positive A.F.E.s regarding fear significantly increase risk tolerance and impatience, while positive A.F.E.s regarding excitement strengthen the will to stay in the military. Trauma has no impact on these preferences. |
| Keywords: | Risk preferences,time preferences,affective forecasting errors,P.T.S.D.,Afghanistan,combat |
| Date: | 2022–03–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-03620348&r= |