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on Development |
| By: | Achyuta Adhvaryu; James Fenske |
| Abstract: | We test whether early-life war exposure influences later-life political engagement in Africa. We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1945 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries. Exposure from ages 0 to 14 has a very small (standardized) impact on later attitudes and behaviors. Our results are robust to migration, and hold across several definitions, specifications, and sources of data. Our results are consistent with recent studies demonstrating that, on average, individuals and localities recover quickly from the destructive effects of conflict, though those most exposed experience large and prolonged effects. |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csa:wpaper:2013-08&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:2012075&r=dev |
| By: | Roberto Bonfatti (University of Nottingham); Steven Poelhekke (VU University Amsterdam, and De Nederlandsche Bank) |
| Abstract: | Mine-related transport infrastructure specializes in connecting mines to the coast, and not so much to neighboring countries. This is most clearly seen in developing countries, whose transport infrastructure was originally designed to facilitate the export of natural resources in colonial times. We provide first econometric evidence that mine-to-coast transport infrastructure matters for the pattern of trade of developing countries, and can help explaining their low level of regional integration. The main idea is that, to the extent that it can be used not just to export natural resources but also to trade other commodities, this infrastructure may bias a country's structure of transport costs in favor of overseas trade, and to the detriment of regional trade. We investigate this potential bias in the context of a gravity model of trade. Our main findings are that coastal countries with more mines import less than average from their neighbors, and this effect is s tronger when the mines are located in such a way that the related infrastructure has a stronger potential to affect trade costs. Consistently with the idea that this effect is due to mine-to-coast infrastructure, landlocked countries with more mines import less than average from their non-transit neighbors, but more then average from their transit neighbors. Furthermore, this effect is specific to mines and not to oil and gas fields, arguably because pipelines cannot possibly be used to trade other commodities. We discuss the potential welfare implications of our results, and relate these to the debate on the economic legacy of colonialism for developing countries. |
| Keywords: | Mineral Resources, Transport Infrastructure, Regional Trade Integration, Gravity Model, Economic Legacy of Colonialism |
| JEL: | F14 F54 Q32 R4 |
| Date: | 2013–03–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:uvatin:2013042&r=dev |
| By: | Brück, Tilman (SIPRI); Workneh Kebede, Sindu (DIW Berlin) |
| Abstract: | This study aims to explore poverty measures, its dynamics and determinants using Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and consumption poverty. Our results show that the two measures assign similar poverty status to about 52 percent of households and that both approaches confirm poverty is mainly transient in rural Ethiopia. However, we find that the trend in adjusted head count poverty is different when using these two poverty measures. In terms of determinants of poverty dynamics, we find that household size matters in consumption poverty while we do not find significant effects on multidimensional poverty. Amongst the shocks, drought shock is found to affect consumption poverty but not multidimensional poverty. This implies that short-term shocks are more reflected in consumption poverty while the effect of simultaneous shocks is exhibited significantly on multidimensional poverty. Overall, our result provides empirical evidence on the importance of using both measures as complementary to get a full picture of poverty measure, dynamics and determinants. |
| Keywords: | poverty dynamics, consumption, multidimensional poverty index, rural Ethiopia |
| JEL: | I32 O12 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7364&r=dev |
| By: | Bandiera, Oriana (London School of Economics); Burgess, Robin (London School of Economics); Das, Narayan (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)); Gulesci, Selim (Bocconi University); Rasul, Imran (University College London); Sulaiman, Munshi (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)) |
| Abstract: | The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of agricultural labor and into running small businesses. This shift, which persists and strengthens after assistance is withdrawn, leads to a 38% increase in earnings. Inculcating basic entrepreneurship, where severely disadvantaged women take on occupations which were the preserve of non-poor women, is shown to be a powerful means of transforming the economic lives of the poor. |
| Keywords: | asset transfers, capital constraints, vocational training, occupational choice, structural change, poverty |
| JEL: | O12 I30 D50 |
| Date: | 2013–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7386&r=dev |
| By: | Greif, Avner (Stanford University); Iyigun, Murat (University of Colorado, Boulder) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the evolving effects of England's Old Poor Law (1601-1834). It establishes that poor relief reduced social unrest from around the late-17th century through the turn of the 19th century, at which point it began to spur population growth and its social stability effects dissipated. These conclusions are based on a new dataset encompassing 39 English counties from 1650 to 1815. It includes observations on the amount of poor relief offered, occurrences of food riots and other types of social unrest, population growth and a host of other variables. The paper first documents that county-level variations in poor relief had a statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful non-monotonic impact on population growth. Aid to the poor reduced population growth through the 1780s or 1820s when it began to exert significantly positive effects. Moreover, the Old Poor Law reduced food riots in the late-17th century and through most of the 18th century, but this effect dissipated in the early 19th century when poor relief began to generate population growth. Our analyses, thus, establish that the Old Poor Law fostered social order and stability for more than a century after which the Malthusian income effects dominated. |
| Keywords: | social institutions, Malthus, social stability, economic development |
| JEL: | N0 N33 O10 |
| Date: | 2013–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7398&r=dev |
| By: | Marcus Böhme |
| Abstract: | The effect of remittances on capital accumulation remains a contested topic. This paper uses a panel data set from rural Mexico to investigate the impact of remittances on agriculture and livestock investments. After controlling for the endogeneity of migration through an instrumental variable estimation our empirical results show that international migration has a significantly positive effect on the accumulated agricultural assets but not on livestock capital. This suggests that households use the capital obtained from international migration only to overcome liquidity constraints for subsistence production whereas migration itself seems to be the superior investment option compared to other productive activities such as livestock husbandry |
| Keywords: | migration, investment, Mexico, agriculture |
| JEL: | D1 J6 O1 |
| Date: | 2013–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kie:kieliw:1840&r=dev |
| By: | Liangshu Qi; Xiao-Yuan Dong |
| Abstract: | This paper provides the first estimates of the effects of housework burdens on the earnings of men and women in China, using data from the country’s time use survey in 2008. The analysis shows that working women in China not only spend many more hours on housework than their male co-workers but are also more likely to experience interference with their market work by housework activities. Three indicators are introduced to measure the degree to which market work is intertwined with housework. The estimates show that both housework time and its interference with market work have negative effects on the earnings of men and women. Quantitatively, the gender differences in housework-related indicators account for 27 to 28 percent of the gender earnings gap. This result supports the feminist contention that gender inequality at home is a major contributor to the weaker position of women in the labor market. |
| Date: | 2013–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:win:winwop:2013-01&r=dev |