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on Development |
| By: | Ali, Daniel Ayalew; Deininger, Klaus; Duponchel, Marguerite |
| Abstract: | Although the potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for Africa remains limited. This study uses a direct elicitation approach for a national sample of Rwandan rural households to assess empirically the extent and nature of credit rationing in the semi-formal sector and its impact using an endogenous sample separation between credit-constrained and unconstrained households. Being credit constrained reduces the likelihood of participating in off-farm self-employment activities by about 6.3 percent while making participation in low-return farm wage labor more likely. Even within agriculture, elimination of all types of credit constraints in the semi-formal sector could increase output by some 17 percent. Two suggestions for policy emerge from the findings. First, the estimates suggest that access to information (education, listening to the radio, and membership in a farm cooperative) has a major impact on reducing the incidence of credit constraints in the semi-formal credit sector. Expanding access to information in rural areas thus seems to be one of the most promising strategies to improve credit access in the short term. Second, making it easy to identify land owners and transfer land could also significantly reduce transaction costs associated with credit access. |
| Keywords: | Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Debt Markets,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress,Financial Intermediation |
| Date: | 2014–02–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6769&r=dev |
| By: | Bénédicte H. Apouey (EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Économie de Paris, PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - CNRS : UMR8545 - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - École des Ponts ParisTech (ENPC) - École normale supérieure [ENS] - Paris - Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA)); Gabriel Picone (Department of Economics - University of South Florida) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the existence of social interactions in malaria preventive behaviors in Sub-Saharan Africa, i.e. whether an individual's social environment has an influence on the individual's preventive behaviors. We focus on the two population groups which are the most vulnerable to malaria (children under 5 and pregnant women) and on two preventive behaviors (sleeping under a bednet and taking intermittent preventive treatment during pregnancy). We define the social environment of the individual as people living in the same region. To detect social interactions, we calculate the size of the social multiplier by comparing the effects of an exogenous variable at the individual level and at the regional level. Our data come from 92 surveys for 29 Sub-Saharan countries between 1999 and 2012, and they cover approximately 660,000 children and 95,000 women. Our results indicate that social interactions are important in malaria preventive behaviors, since the social multipliers for women's education and household wealth are greater than one - which means that education and wealth generates larger effects on preventive behaviors in the long run than we would expect from the individual-level specifications, once we account for social interactions. |
| Keywords: | Social interactions ; Social multiplier ; Malaria preventive behavior |
| Date: | 2014–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-00940084&r=dev |
| By: | Emla Fitzsimons (Institute for Fiscal Studies and Institute of Education, University of London); Bansi Malde (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Alice Mesnard (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Marcos Vera-Hernandez (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London) |
| Abstract: | Incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices, and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health. This paper studies the effects of a randomised intervention in rural Malawi which, over a six-month period, provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition without supplying any monetary or in-kind resources. A simple model first investigates theoretically how nutrition and other household choices including labour supply may change in response to the improved nutrition knowledge observed in the intervention areas. We then show empirically that, in line with this model, the intervention improved child nutrition, household consumption and consequently health. These increases are funded by an increase in male labor supply. We consider and rule out alternative explanations behind these findings. This paper is the first to establish that non-health choices, particularly parental labor supply, are affected by parents’ knowledge of the child health production function. |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:14/02&r=dev |
| By: | Aguilar, Arturo; Carranza, Eliana; Goldstein, Markus; Kilic, Talip; Oseni, Gbemisola |
| Abstract: | This paper employs decomposition methods to analyze differences in agricultural productivity between male and female land managers in Ethiopia. It employs data from the 2011-2012 Ethiopian Rural Socioeconomic Survey. An overall 23.4 percent gender differential in agricultural productivity is estimated at the mean in favor of male land managers, of which 10.1 percentage points are explained by differences in land manager characteristics, land attributes, and unequal access to resources (the endowment effect). The remaining 13.4 percentage points are explained by unequal returns to productive components, but cannot be easily tied to specific covariates. These results are mainly driven by non-married female managers (mainly single and divorced). Married female managers do not display such disadvantages. Further analysis along the productivity distribution reveals that gender differentials are more pronounced at mid-levels of productivity and that the share of the gender gap explained by the endowment effect declines as productivity increases. Detailed decomposition of estimates at selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution provides valuable information for policy intervention purposes. |
| Keywords: | Rural Development Knowledge&Information Systems,Gender and Development,Housing&Human Habitats,Labor Policies,Gender and Health |
| Date: | 2014–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6764&r=dev |
| By: | Ali, Daniel Ayalew; Deininger, Klaus |
| Abstract: | Whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. This paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in Rwanda, where policy makers consider land fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for the growth of the agricultural sector. Nationwide plot-level data from Rwanda point toward a constant returns to scale crop production function and a strong negative relationship between farm size and output per hectare as well as intensity of labor use that is robust across specifications. The inverse relationship continues to hold if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used, but disappears if family labor is rather valued at village-level market wage rates. These findings imply that, in Rwanda, labor market imperfections, rather than other unobserved factors, seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship. |
| Keywords: | Wetlands,Labor Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Climate Change and Agriculture,Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems |
| Date: | 2014–02–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6770&r=dev |
| By: | Avdeenko, Alexandra; Gilligan, Michael J. |
| Abstract: | Over the past decade the international community, especially the World Bank, has conducted programs to increase local public service delivery in developing countries by improving local governing institutions and creating social capital. This paper evaluates one such program in Sudan to answer the question: Can the international community change the grassroots civic culture of developing countries to increase social capital? The paper oers three contributions. First, it uses lab-in-the-eld measures to focus on the eects of the program on pro-social preferences without the confounding in uence of any program- induced changes on local governing institutions. Second, it tests whether the program led to denser social networks in recipient communities. Based on these two measures, the eect of the program was a precisely estimated zero. However, in a retrospective survey, respondents from program communities characterized their behavior as being more pro-social and their communities more socially cohesive. This leads to a third contribution of the paper: it provides evidence for the hypothesis, stated by several scholars in the literature, that retrospective survey measures of social capital oer biased evidence of a positive eect of these programs. Regardless of one's faith in retrospective self-reported survey measures, the results clearly point to zero impact of the program on pro-social preferences and social network density. Therefore, if the increase in self-reported behaviors is accurate, it must be because of social sanctions that enforce compliance with pro-social norms through mechanisms other than the social networks that were measured. |
| Keywords: | Social Capital,Community Development and Empowerment,Housing&Human Habitats,Social Cohesion,Governance Indicators |
| Date: | 2014–02–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6772&r=dev |
| By: | Schady,, Norbert; Behrman, Jere; Araujo, Maria Caridad; Azuero,, Rodrigo; Bernal, Raquel; Bravo, David; Lopez-Boo, Florencia; Macours, Karen; Marshall, Daniela; Paxson, Christina; Vakis, Renos |
| Abstract: | Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries. To help with comparability, the paper uses the same measure of receptive language ability for all five countries. It finds important differences in development in early childhood across countries, and steep socioeconomic gradients within every country. For the three countries where panel data to follow children over time exists, there are few substantive changes in scores once children enter school. These results are robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status, to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to selective non-response on the measure of cognitive development. |
| Keywords: | Youth and Governance,Educational Sciences,Street Children,Primary Education,Population Policies |
| Date: | 2014–02–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6779&r=dev |
| By: | Rulof P. Burger (Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch); Francis J. Teal (Centre for Studies of African Economics, University of Oxford) |
| Abstract: | Schooling is typically found to be highly correlated with individual earnings in African countries. However, African firm or sector level studies have failed to identify a similarly strong effect for average worker schooling levels on productivity. This has been interpreted as evidence that schooling does not increase productivity levels, but may also indicate that the schooling effect cannot be identified when using a schooling measure with limited variation. Using a novel South African industry-level dataset that spans a longer period than typical firm-level panels, this paper identifies a large and significant schooling effect. This result is highly robust across different estimators that allow for correlated industry effects, measurement error, heterogeneous production technologies and cross-sectional dependence. |
| Keywords: | Returns to schooling, human capital, labour demand, panel data econometrics, South Africa |
| JEL: | J24 D24 C23 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers209&r=dev |