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on Development |
| By: | Sèna Kimm Gnangnon (CERDI - Centre d'études et de recherches sur le developpement international - CNRS : UMR6587 - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we employ the discrete-time duration model to examine whether expansion and contraction phases of government revenue exhibit duration dependence. We hence use an unbalanced panel data of public revenue on 68 developing countries over the period 1980-2009. The analysis also covers the sub-samples of sub-Saharan African and Non sub-Saharan African countries. Our findings suggest that once controlling for frailty and economic variables, the likelihood of public revenue expansion and contraction ending appears to be positively affected by their actual age: government revenue expansion and contraction exhibit in developing countries positive duration dependence. |
| Keywords: | Government Revenue; Discrete-time model; Duration dependence |
| Date: | 2012–07–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00722083&r=dev |
| By: | Bhagowalia, Priya; Menon, Purnima; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Soundararajan, Vidhya |
| Keywords: | child malnutrition, Stunting, Gender, domestic violence, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1192&r=dev |
| By: | Bräutigam, Deborah; Tang, Xiaoyang |
| Abstract: | The recent expansion of Chinese economic engagement in Africa is often poorly documented and not well understood. This paper is the first in an International Food Policy Research Institute-sponsored effort to better understand Chinese engagement in Africa's agricultural sector. A clearer picture of Chinese activities in agriculture is important as a foundation for Africans and their development partners to more fruitfully engage with an increasingly important actor. This overview paper explores China's engagement in rural Ethiopia in historical perspective, focusing on foreign aid, other official engagements, and investment by Chinese firms between 1970 and 2011. We find that Chinese engagement in agriculture and rural development in Ethiopia is longstanding, but at present, Chinese farming investment is far smaller than generally believed. Changes in this engagement reflect the changes in China's engagement in Africa more generally. |
| Keywords: | Foreign aid, Agribusiness, Agriculture, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1185&r=dev |
| By: | Takeshima, Hiroyuki |
| Abstract: | Onset risk, the uncertainty in the onset of rainy season, is an important element of weather risk for African farmers with little access to formal insurance who engage in traditional rainfed farming. A knowledge gap still exists empirically on how onset risk may affect the investment decisions of these farmers. In particular, farm productivity in Africa still depends on substantial labor inputs at the onset of the rainy season, sometimes involving seasonal migration to rural areas. With credit and insurance market failure, poor access to weather-related information, and high labor mobility costs, high and increasing onset risk may affect farmers' demand for farm mechanization. We test this hypothesis by investigating the effect of onset risk on farmers' investment in draft animals in northern and central Nigeria. We use the example of a public project providing farmers with financial support for the acquisition of productive assets. We calculate the onset of the rainy season using daily rainfall data in various locations across Nigeria and identify locations that have experienced increasing, decreasing, or constant onset risk in the past few decades. We then exploit the panel structure of our dataset and employ stratified propensity score matching to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated, differentiated by the onset risk and its change. The results support our hypothesis. Farmers in areas with higher, increasing, or constant onset risk were more likely to invest in draft animals, and such effects are clearer among larger-scale farmers. Linkages are also clearer with onset risk compared to annual rainfall risk. |
| Keywords: | livestock, rainfall, onset risk, Agricultural productivity, Agricultural inputs, Agricultural Investment, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1198&r=dev |
| By: | Swaminathan, Hema; Lahoti, Rahul; Suchita, J. Y. |
| Keywords: | Gender, Property rights, Decision-making, decisionmaking, Mobility, autonomy, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1188&r=dev |
| By: | Gillespie, Stuart; Harris, Jody; Kadiyala, Suneetha |
| Keywords: | Agriculture, malnutrition, economic growth, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1187&r=dev |
| By: | De Luca, Giacomo; Maystadt, Jean-François; Sekeris, Petros G.; Ulimwengu, John M.; Folledo, Renato |
| Keywords: | Natural resources, Conflict, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1193&r=dev |
| By: | Bhagowalia, Priya; Headey, Derek D.; Kadiyala, Suneetha |
| Keywords: | Malnutrition in children, nutrition, Linkages, Household income, Agricultural production, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1195&r=dev |
| By: | de Brauw, Alan; Mu, Ren |
| Keywords: | Migration, Children, rural areas, undernourishment, Undernutrition, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1191&r=dev |
| By: | Bernard, Tanguy; Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum |
| Keywords: | Poverty, Surveys Methodology, Sampling, microeconomic analysis, microeconomic behavior, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1190&r=dev |
| By: | Josué Mbonigaba |
| Abstract: | The cost-effectiveness of intervening with a set of HIV/AIDS interventions in low HIV prevalence areas (LPA) and high HIV prevalence areas (HPA) in South Africa is analysed. The rationale for this analysis is to assess the suspected effect of interaction between the intervention and area of implementation, on cost-effectiveness. The paper used the Markov model, which tracked a cohort of patients over their lifetime in each area. Data on costs and health outcomes were collected from the literature, but the distribution of patients in health states at baseline and over time, were based on the patterns observed in the Actuarial Society of South Africa AIDS model (ASSA2008) projections, to depict these interaction dynamics. The effects of recent changes in guidelines of some interventions under consideration were assessed separately outside of modelling and sensitivity analysis conducted on all model parameters. In terms of efficiency, the study found it more cost-effective to intervene in LPA. However, to align efficiency with equity and ethical principles underlying HIV response, more than proportional resources should go into non-ARV based interventions in LPA, while more than proportional resources should go into non-ARV interventions in HPA. |
| Keywords: | cost-effectiveness, LPA, HPA health outcomes, simulation, HIV/AIDS, interventions, Markov, prevalence, low, high, South Africa. |
| JEL: | I18 |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rza:wpaper:304&r=dev |
| By: | Chance Mwabutwa; Manoel Bittencourt; Nicola Viegi |
| Abstract: | The purpose of the study is to examine whether financial reforms implemented in the 1980's and 1990's altered the pattern of aggregate consumption behaviour in Malawi. More specifically, the study questions whether financial reforms affected consumption behaviour by reducing the excess sensitivity of changes in consumption to changes in current income using the Permanent income hypothesis (PIH) framework. If it happens that excess sensitivity does not reduce, the paper explores further whether the failure is due to liquidity constraints or myopia. This study is unique from the rest in the sense that new constructed time series of financial reform indices are used in the estimation of the consumption function. The study finds that PIH of aggregate consumption behaviour does not exist in Malawi. Most of the consumers follow the "rule-of-thumb" of consuming their current income partly due to liquidity constraints. Although, we demonstrate that the effects of financial reforms on consumption behaviour are due to both liquidity constraints and myopia, the increase in consumption in Malawi can be explained along other factors than financial liberalisation. The excess sensitivities obtained are larger than what has been obtained in developed countries as well as other less developed countries. Liberalisation was implemented on the background of weak institutions and unstable macroeconomic environment. |
| Keywords: | Financial Liberalisation, Permanent Income Hypothesis, Linear Spline Function, Principal Component Analysis, Rule-of-Thumb. |
| JEL: | C49 D12 D91 E21 E44 |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rza:wpaper:306&r=dev |
| By: | Emiliano Magrini (Sapienza University); Pierluigi Montalbano (University of Sussex and Sapienza University) |
| Abstract: | Following on from the existing poverty assessments of trade liberalisation in Vietnam under "doi moi", the aim of this paper is to provide a parallel assessment of vulnerability from trade. Taking advantage of the existence of extensive household data from two different sets of Vietnamese household surveys (VLSS and VHLSS) covering the entire period 1992-2008, it applies a new vulnerability measure to assess empirically the presence of robust heterogeneity in the vulnerability of Vietnamese households according to their relative position in trade related activities. The contribution of this paper is twofold: it sheds light on the timely debate on vulnerability to poverty from trade openness focusing on micro linkages between trade liberalisation and household consumption over a longer time span than is usually covered by current literature; it proposes a new vulnerability measure capable of assessing, besides the non-stochastic poverty determinants and the observed impact of shocks on households, the net welfare effect of risk-induced "ex-ante" changing behaviour, using cross-sectional data. The main results of this paper are the following: it highlights the presence of a growing phenomenon of vulnerability induced by risk exposure alongside the reduction of poverty rates in Vietnam; it demonstrates the presence of a negative welfare effect of "ex ante" changing behaviour induced by risk exposure. On the top of that, it assesses robust heterogeneity in vulnerability according to households' relative position in trade related activities. Our empirical results are relevant for policymaking. They highlight that the so-called “economic stabilisation policies” should receive more consideration even in absence of downside shocks. |
| Keywords: | trade openness, vulnerability, poverty, Vietnam |
| JEL: | F14 O12 D12 C31 |
| Date: | 2012–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sus:susewp:3512&r=dev |
| By: | Serneels, Pieter (University of East Anglia); Verpoorten, Marijke (K.U.Leuven) |
| Abstract: | Important gaps remain in the understanding of the economic consequences of civil war. Focusing on the conflict in Rwanda in the early 90s, and using micro data to carry out econometric analysis, this paper finds that households and localities that experienced more intense conflict are lagging behind in terms of consumption six years after the conflict, a finding that is robust to taking into account the endogeneity of violence. Significantly different returns to land and labour are observed between zones that experienced low and high intensity conflict which is consistent with on-going recovery. Distinguishing between civil war and genocide, the findings also provide evidence that these returns, and by implication the process of recovery, depend on the form of violence. |
| Keywords: | civil war, economic growth, Rwanda, human capital, genocide |
| JEL: | O0 E2 O5 |
| Date: | 2012–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6737&r=dev |
| By: | Anna De Paoli (University of Milan Bicocca); Mariapia Mendola (University of Milan Bicocca and Centro Studi Luca d\'Agliano) |
| Abstract: | Global international migration may influence child labor through a labor market effect. We empirically investigate this issue by using an original cross-country survey dataset, which combines information on international emigration flows with detailed individual-level data on child labor at age 5-15 in a wide range of developing countries. By using variation in the emigration supply shocks across labor market units de.ned on the basis of both geography and skill, we estimate a set of child labor equations where the variable of interest is the interactive effect between parental skill and country-level emigration shocks. We measure the latter through different indicators including a direct measure of the relative skill composition of emigrants relative to the resident population in the country of origin. Overall, after controlling for a large set of individual-level characteristics, remittances, and country fixed effects, our findings are consistent with predictions and show that international out-migration may significantly reduce child labor in disadvantaged households through changes in the local labor market. |
| Keywords: | International Migration, Child Labor, Factor Mobility, Cross-country Survey Data |
| JEL: | F22 F1 J61 |
| Date: | 2012–07–16 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csl:devewp:339&r=dev |
| By: | Kuper, Gerard H.; Jacobs, Jan P.A.M.; Boonman, Tjeerd M. (Groningen University) |
| Abstract: | The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has aected many regions including Latin America. This paper focuses on currency crises in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. We estimate an Early Warning System, consisting of a dynamic factor model and an ordered logit model, with monthly data for 1990-2007. Ex ante forecasts for 2008-2009 do not produce currency crises in the fall of 2008, in sharp contrast with reality. Our model only predicts an increased probability of a currency crisis for Argentina in 2009. |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:rugsom:12005-eef&r=dev |
| By: | Jose Rosero (University of Amsterdam) |
| Abstract: | Although the literature on the effectiveness of child care centers in developing countries is thin, most of the studies have concluded that the provision of these services are beneficial to enhance the development of poor children at early ages. Using different matching techniques, the results in this paper contrast with that conclusion as it finds no support of a positive effect of a large scale child care program in Ecuador on any of the dimensions considered of cognitive development. This paper also provides evidence that the program increased mother's labor force participation and family income but reduced health outcomes of children. The results are in line with the ones found in (Rosero and Oosterbeek, 2011) and support the existence of a trade-off between children development and labor market participation that should be considered at the moment of designing and implementing social policies. |
| Keywords: | Early childhood development; child care centers; propensity score matching; developing country; Ecuador |
| JEL: | J13 I28 H40 O12 |
| Date: | 2012–07–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20120075&r=dev |
| By: | Ban, Radu (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation); Jha, Saumitra (Stanford University); Rao, Vijayendra (World Bank) |
| Abstract: | The role of deliberation among citizens to determine and forge agreement on policy is often seen as a crucial feature of democratic government. This paper provides the first large-N empirical evidence on the credibility of voice in a deliberative democracy in an non-laboratory setting, using a unique dataset collected from transcripts of deliberation that occurred between January and September 2003 in 127 functioning village parliaments (gram sabhas) in Southern India. We exploit a natural experiment in the arrangement of India's state borders across ethno-linguistic lines that led exogenously to increased caste fragmentation and a reduced degree of consensus on public goods priorities. We then examine the patterns of deliberation. We reject the presence of pure cheap talk in both heterogeneous and homogeneous villages. Instead, we show that in caste- fragmented South Indian villages, where there is less village-wide agreement on the relative importance of different public goods, the probability of an individual's highest priority being discussed increases as the household become more credible: its preferences approach the pivotal agent in a pure representative democracy, the median household. These effects are lower in ethnically homogeneous villages where there is greater consensus on the prioritization of public goods. Taken together, our results suggest that India's village parliaments, rather than being mere talking shops or being entirely captured by elites, seem instead to be both democratically representative and to be assigning roles to credible agents in their deliberative processes. |
| Date: | 2012–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecl:stabus:2103&r=dev |
| By: | Robert M. Townsend; Petia Topalova; Shawn Cole; Xavier Gine; Jeremy Tobacman; James Ian Vickery |
| Abstract: | Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is significantly price sensitive, but widespread take-up would not be achieved even if the product offered a payout ratio comparable to U.S. insurance contracts. We present evidence suggesting that lack of trust, liquidity constraints and limited salience are significant non-price frictions that constrain demand. We suggest contract design improvements to mitigate these frictions. |
| Keywords: | Demand , Household credit , Insurance , Risk management , |
| Date: | 2012–07–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:12/195&r=dev |
| By: | Rodrigo, Maria F. |
| Keywords: | Poverty trap, Cooperatives, Ethiopia, Agricultural and Food Policy, |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea12:130545&r=dev |
| By: | Harttgen, Kenneth; Klasen, Stephan; Vollmer, Sebastian |
| Abstract: | Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We do this by pooling all DHS surveys for African countries, control for other correlates of undernutrition, and add country-level GDP per capita. We find that increases in GDP per capita are associated with lower individual probabilities of being underweight of about 2.5 percent per one hundred dollars. This association becomes insignificant when time fixed effects are added to the regression. Other explanatory variables such as mother’s education, socioeconomic status, and poor mother’s nutritional status are quantitatively more important than economic growth suggesting that other intervention to affect these correlates of undernutrition are likely to be more promising than relying on improved economic conditions. |
| Keywords: | economic growth, child undernutrition, Africa, economic development, wasting, stunting, underweight, Food Security and Poverty, International Development, I15, O10, |
| Date: | 2012–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:gagfdp:130164&r=dev |
| By: | O’Brien, Thomas; Gelb, Alan; Fiszbein, Ariel; Kanbur, Ravi; Newman, John |
| Keywords: | Agricultural Finance, International Development, |
| Date: | 2012–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:cudawp:128796&r=dev |
| By: | Chau, Nancy H.; Kanbur, Ravi; Qin, Yu |
| Keywords: | Community/Rural/Urban Development, Labor and Human Capital, |
| Date: | 2012–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:cudawp:128799&r=dev |
| By: | Sèna Kimm GNANGNON |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we employ the discrete-time duration model to examine whether expansion and contraction phases of government revenue exhibit duration dependence. We hence use an unbalanced panel data of public revenue on 68 developing countries over the period 1980-2009. The analysis also covers the sub-samples of sub-Saharan African and Non sub-Saharan African countries. Our findings suggest that once controlling for frailty and economic variables, the likelihood of public revenue expansion and contraction ending appears to be positively affected by their actual age: government revenue expansion and contraction exhibit in developing countries positive duration dependence. |
| Keywords: | Government Revenue; Discrete-time model; Duration dependence |
| JEL: | E6 H3 C41 H1 |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdi:wpaper:1377&r=dev |
| By: | Catherine SIMONET (Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Développement International); Stéphanie BRUNELIN; Catherine ARAUJO BONJEAN (Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Développement International) |
| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of weather related income shocks on child health in rural Burkina Faso where rain fed agriculture is the dominant production system. We combine health data originating from the 2008 household survey with meteorological data to define shocks at the child level. We first estimate the marginal effect of rainfall at various ages on the child's health in order to identify the critical period during which deprivation has the most severe consequences. Then we look for a different impact of shocks on girls and boys that would reflect a gender bias in intra household resource allocation. We also assess the household ability to smooth consumption by testing for an asymmetric effect of rainfall shocks according to their size and by testing the impact of shocks according to household endowments. Results evidence a strong relationship between rainfall shocks during the prenatal period and child health. Households are not able to dampen small but negative rainfall shocks. Unexpectedly, girls are less severely affected by shocks than boys. The robustness of results is tested by using the sibling and difference-in-differences estimators as well as placebo regressions. |
| Keywords: | Child health, rainfall shock, burkina faso, sibling estimator, treatment-effect model |
| JEL: | C31 Q54 O15 I10 |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdi:wpaper:1380&r=dev |
| By: | Peter Nunnenkamp, Hannes Öhler, Maximiliano Sosa Andrés |
| Abstract: | The targeting of foreign aid within recipient countries is largely unexplored territory. We help close this gap in empirical research on aid allocation by employing Poisson estimations on the determinants of the World Bank’s choice of project locations at the district level in India. The evidence of needs-based location choices is very weak, even though World Bank activities tend to concentrate in relatively remote districts. Spatial lags prove to be significant and positive pointing to regional clustering. Institutional conditions matter insofar as project locations cluster in districts belonging to states with greater openness to trade. We do not find any evidence that location choices are affected by political patronage at the state or district level. However, the World Bank prefers districts where foreign direct investors may benefit from projects related to infrastructure |
| Keywords: | aid allocation, World Bank, Indian districts, political constituency |
| JEL: | F35 F53 |
| Date: | 2012–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kie:kieliw:1783&r=dev |
| By: | Das, Debasish Kumar; Dutta, Champa Bati |
| Abstract: | This paper evaluates whether the exogenous component of the global financial crisis affects OECD-DAC EU donor countries ODA disbursements to the LDCs and how it impacts on LDCs economic prosperity. Using both static and dynamic panel techniques, we find that global financial crisis in OECD-EU donor countries are causes for the significant downside of ODA flows to the LDCs. Consequently it adversely affects through the various transmission channels (e.g. ODA disbursements, remittances, bilateral financial flows, export growth) to the LDCs economic growth. Our results also explore that due to countercyclical role of ODA flows from the donors’ largely affect to the LDCs economic development process negatively. The robustness checks using alternative estimation technique supports our original estimation results in every context. |
| Keywords: | : Financial crisis; ODA; economic growth; OECD-EU donors; LDCs |
| JEL: | O11 F35 O5 F39 |
| Date: | 2012–03–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:40281&r=dev |
| By: | David G. Atkin |
| Abstract: | This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms, the years 1986-2000, altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across municipalities to show that school dropout increased with local expansions in export manufacturing. The magnitudes I find suggest that for every twenty jobs created, one student dropped out of school at grade 9 rather than continuing through to grade 12. These effects are driven by the least-skilled export-manufacturing jobs which raised the opportunity cost of schooling for students at the margin. |
| JEL: | F16 J24 O12 O14 O19 |
| Date: | 2012–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18266&r=dev |
| By: | Tom Vogl |
| Abstract: | Taller workers are paid higher wages. A prominent explanation for this pattern is that physical growth and cognitive development share childhood inputs, inducing a correlation between adult height and two productive skills: strength and intelligence. This paper explores the relative roles of strength and intelligence in explaining the labor market height premium in Mexico. While cognitive test scores account for a limited share of the height premium, roughly half of the premium can be attributed to the educational and occupational choices of taller workers. Taller workers obtain more education and sort into occupations with greater intelligence requirements and lower strength requirements, suggesting that the height premium partly reflects a return to cognitive skill. |
| JEL: | I15 J24 O15 |
| Date: | 2012–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18318&r=dev |
| By: | Tom Vogl |
| Abstract: | Using data from South Asia, this paper examines how arranged marriage cultivates rivalry among sisters. During marriage search, parents with multiple daughters reduce the reservation quality for an older daughter's groom, rushing her marriage to allow sufficient time to marry off her younger sisters. Relative to younger brothers, younger sisters increase a girl’s marriage risk; relative to younger singleton sisters, younger twin sisters have the same effect. These effects intensify in marriage markets with lower sex ratios or greater parental involvement in marriage arrangements. In contrast, older sisters delay a girl’s marriage. Because girls leave school when they marry and face limited earnings opportunities when they reach adulthood, the number of sisters has well-being consequences over the lifecycle. Younger sisters cause earlier school-leaving, lower literacy, a match to a husband with less education and a less-skilled occupation, and (marginally) lower adult economic status. Data from a broader set of countries indicate that these cross-sister pressures on marriage age are common throughout the developing world, although the schooling costs vary by setting. |
| JEL: | I25 J12 O12 |
| Date: | 2012–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18319&r=dev |