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on Development |
| By: | Burchi, Francesco; Strupat, Christoph |
| Abstract: | Social protection schemes, such as cash transfers are effective in improving the ability of beneficiaries to meet their basic needs: however, the evidence available shows that they are unlikely to move beneficiaries sustainably out of extreme poverty. While alternative anti-poverty programmes, such as the BRAC graduation scheme in Bangladesh, seem to contribute to this outcome, they are costly and it is unclear which component of these multi-sectorial interventions really makes the difference. The present study assesses the impacts of an innovative pilot project called the Tingathe Economic Empowerment Project (EEP) in Malawi, designed by GIZ. The project targets ultra-poor and labour-constrained households. Designed as a cluster-randomised-control-trial , it provides to different village clusters a) a lump-sum transfer; b) financial and business training; or, c) both a lump-sum transfer and training. Furthermore, the project incorporated the feature that beneficiaries were allowed to appoint someone to carry out project-related activities on their behalf (the proxy ), which could be of particular relevance to labour-constrained households. The main goal of the project was to position beneficiaries on a “graduation pathway”, that is, to provide them with the necessary resources with which to improve their well-being significantly and to lay the foundation for escaping poverty and their dependence on social assistance. Our study has three main objectives: 1) to investigate the impacts of the overall project and of each of the three project components on several outcomes; 2) to verify whether project impacts differ significantly between households that satisfy all the criteria to be defined as “labour-constrained” and those that do not; 3) to assess the impacts of the proxy , and whether labour-constrained households benefited from this option in particular. In order to reach these objectives, we relied on the cluster-randomised-control-trial design and collected longitudinal information for 786 households (nearly 85 in each project component and 530 in the control group) before and after the implementation of the EEP. Our results show that the project had substantial positive impacts, in particular on financial literacy, savings, loans, livestock wealth, agricultural production, and drought resilience. Impacts on the first three outcomes are entirely driven by the financial and business training. The lump-sum played a fundamental role in increasing livestock wealth and drought resilience, while the training in combination with the lump-sum were responsible for improving agricultural production. A key finding was that the training systematically increased the productive use of the transfer. However, longer-term impact assessments are needed to verify whether these improvements will translate into the beneficiaries’ graduation out of poverty. Regarding the second objective, we find that results do not differ between labour-constrained and non-labour-constrained households. This finding provides initial evidence that poor and labour-constrained households can indeed benefit from an economic empowerment project and casts some doubt on the common view that labour-constrained households will always need to depend on social assistance. Regarding the third objective, our findings point to the crucial role that active proxies play in enabling most of the project impacts. In particular, we find that an active proxy is a powerful enabler for productive activities. The larger benefits accrue to labour-constrained households. This highlights that proxies can be an important part of more inclusive economic empowerment programmes that also can include labour-constrained households. |
| Keywords: | Armut und Ungleichheit,Soziale Sicherung und Inklusion |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:diedps:322018&r=all |
| By: | Dincecco, Mark (University of Michigan); Fenske, James (University of Warwick); Menon, Anil (University of Michigan); Mukherjee, Shivaji (University of Toronto) |
| Abstract: | We analyze the relationship between pre-colonial warfare and long-run development patterns in India. We construct a new, geocoded database of historical conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, from which we compute measures of local exposure to pre-colonial warfare. We document a positive and significant relationship between pre-colonial conflict exposure and local economic development across India today. The main results are robust to numerous checks, including controls for geographic endowments, initial state capacity, colonial-era institutions, ethnic fractionalization, and colonial and post-colonial conflict, and an instrumental variables strategy that exploits variation in pre-colonial conflict exposure driven by the cost distance to the Khyber Pass. Using rich archival and secondary data, we show that early state-making and fiscal development, greater political stability, and basic public goods investments are channels through which pre-colonial warfare has influenced local economic development. |
| Keywords: | JEL Classification: |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:426&r=all |
| By: | Burchi, Francesco; Malerba, Daniele; Rippin, Nicole; Montenegro, Claudio E. |
| Abstract: | The 2030 Agenda has provided new impetus to two facets of the struggle for poverty alleviation, which is a central goal of the international development community. First, poverty is no longer viewed strictly in monetary terms, but rather as a multidimensional phenomenon. Second, the need to reduce poverty for different social groups and not just at the aggregate, national level is explicitly recognised. Against this background, this paper has three objectives: (1) to analyse the trends in multidimensional poverty in low- and middle-income countries, (2) to explore rural-urban differences in poverty over time, and (3) to assess the validity of the claim that there has been a feminisation of poverty. The analysis relies on a new indicator of multidimensional poverty, the Global Correlation Sensitive Poverty Index (G-CSPI), that incorporates three key components: education, employment and health. The G-CSPI has several methodological advantages over existing measures, including that it is an individual rather than a household-level measure of poverty, which is crucial for gender-disaggregated analysis. Regarding aggregate trends, this paper shows that both income poverty and multidimensional poverty fell between 2000 and 2012. However, the decline in (extreme) income poverty in percentage terms was twice as large as the decline in multidimensional poverty. There is significant heterogeneity in the results across regions. Multidimensional poverty declined the most in Asia, converging towards the relatively low levels of Latin America and Europe, while sub-Saharan Africa’s slow progress further distanced it from other regions. These findings point to the existence of poverty traps and indicate that more efforts are needed to eradicate poverty. Regarding the urban-rural comparison, our analysis shows that poverty is predominantly a rural phenomenon: the rural G-CSPI was more than four times the urban G-CSPI. This difference remained nearly constant over time. As for the third objective, we find no gender bias in 2000 at the global level. This contrasts with the claim made in 1995 in Beijing that 70 per cent of the poor were women. However, we find that multidimensional poverty declined more among men (-18.5 per cent from 2000) than women (-15 per cent), indicating a process of feminisation of poverty. This was triggered by the decline in employment poverty, which was much slower among women. As most existing studies conclude that there was no evidence of the feminisation of poverty, this finding is new to the literature. |
| Keywords: | Armut und Ungleichheit,Gender |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:diedps:22019&r=all |
| By: | Salvucci Vincenzo; Santos Ricardo; Mambo Félix; Basso Maren |
| Abstract: | The level of educational attainment in Mozambique is one of the lowest in the world and primary school completion rate is also very low, not reaching 40 per cent.Using data from the Mozambican Household Budget Survey 2014/15, we study (1) the determinants of school dropout; (2) the variables that are associated with school dropout in the year of the survey, exploiting its panel structure; and (3) infrastructural or social protection interventions in rural villages that can influence dropout, using a propensity score matching analysis.We find that age, child labour, household head’s gender and education, and access to services are particularly associated with the probability of dropout, and that early marriage and teen pregnancy are consistently associated with higher dropout rates. Our results also suggest that building or renovating a school or a water facility, or setting up a social protection programme can reduce the probability of dropout. This can be of support to the redesign of the country’s education, infrastructural, and social protection policies, especially in rural areas. |
| Keywords: | Mozambique,Panel regression,Propensity score matching,School dropout determinants |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2019-49&r=all |
| By: | Ogunleye, A.S.; Akinola, A.A.; Bamire, A.S.; Alia, D.; Adeyeye, O.; Abdoulaye, T.; Reed, H. |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the farm size and productivity relationship using data from Nigeria. The household data used has been drawn from a baseline survey conducted in Nigeria and financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations (BMGF).The relationship between farm size and productivity has long been a topic of debate in development economics. Using a cross sectional baseline data, we aimed at examining the relationship between maize yield and farm size across the selected agro-ecological zones. Specifically, it aimed at investigating the farm size–productivity relationship and its underlying determinants for maize producers in Nigeria. Findings from this study indicate that productivity measures are consistently highest among farms small farms, next highest among medium, and lowest among large farms. Gross profit per hectare and net profit per hectare on small farms are over 15% higher and 40% respectively higher than medium and large farms. The study further reveal a strong negative relationship between the value of output per hectare and own cultivated area with a doubling in cultivated area associated with a 35% or 98% decrease in the value of crop output per unit of cultivated land at the holding- or plot-level, respectively. We therefore recommended that farm size– productivity relationship and its determinants in developing countries like Nigeria should continue to be of interest to policy makers seeking to resolve the small-sized farm issue. |
| Keywords: | Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Productivity Analysis |
| Date: | 2019–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea19:291798&r=all |
| By: | Salvucci Vincenzo; Santos Ricardo |
| Abstract: | Mozambique is among the most disaster-prone countries in the world. A bigger than usual, and mostly unexpected, flood occurred in the central-northern region of the country in the first few months of 2015, causing huge damage to infrastructures.In this paper, we use a nationally representative household budget survey that was being carried out in the field during those months to assess the short-term impact of the 2015 flood on household consumption and poverty levels. Applying a difference-in-difference approach, we find that, for those exposed to the flood, consumption reduced significantly in the short term, in the range of 11–17 per cent, depending on the specification.Poor households and households living in rural areas were affected significantly more. Poverty levels also increased due to the flood, by about 6 percentage points.These results are relevant for policy planning, natural disaster management, and for ex ante vulnerability assessment in Mozambique and other risk-prone developing countries with similar characteristics. |
| Keywords: | Mozambique,Welfare impact,Difference-in-difference,Flood |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2019-51&r=all |
| By: | Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner (Department of Economics, University of Surrey & IZA Bonn); Jesse Matheson (Department of Economics, University of Sheffield) |
| Abstract: | This article investigates whether increasing secondary education opportunities influences childbearing among young women in Brazil. We examine a novel dataset reflecting the vast expansion of secondary education in Brazil between 1997 and 2009 and exploit variation in the introduction of schools across 4,884 municipalities to instrument for school enrolment. Our most conservative estimate suggests that for every 9.7 students enrolled there is one fewer teenage births. These findings are robust to a number of specifications and sensitivity tests. Our estimates imply that Brazil’s secondary school expansion accounts for 34% of the substantial decline in teenage childbearing observed over the same period. We further look at heterogeneous effects across a number of municipal characteristics and discuss what these results suggest about the mechanisms underlying the school-childbearing relationship. |
| Keywords: | Secondary education, teenage childbearing, Brazil |
| JEL: | I20 J13 |
| Date: | 2019–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:shf:wpaper:2019016&r=all |
| By: | David Evans (Center for Global Development); Fei Yuan (Center for Global Development) |
| Abstract: | Despite dramatic global gains in access to education, 130 million girls of school age remain out of school. Among those who do enter, too many do not gain the essential skills to succeed after they complete their schooling. Previous efforts to synthesize evidence on how to improve educational outcomes for girls have tended to focus on interventions that are principally targeted to girls, such as girls' latrines or girls' scholarships. But if general, non-targeted interventions—those that benefit both girls and boys—significantly improve girls' education, then focusing only on girl-targeted interventions may miss some of the best investments for improving educational opportunities for girls in absolute terms. This review brings together evidence from 270 educational interventions from 177 studies in 54 low- and middle-income countries and identifies their impacts on girls, regardless of whether the interventions specifically target girls. The review finds that to improve access and learning, general interventions deliver gains for girls that are comparable to girl-targeted interventions. At the same time, many more general interventions have been tested, providing a broader menu of options for policy makers. General interventions have similar impacts for girls as for boys. Many of the most effective interventions to improve access for girls are household-based (such as cash transfer programs), and many of the most effective interventions to improve learning for girls involve improving the pedagogy of teachers. Girl-targeted interventions may make the most sense when addressing constraints that are unique to girls. |
| Date: | 2019–07–18 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cgd:wpaper:513&r=all |
| By: | Vargas, Juan F.; Prem, Mounu; Namen, Olga |
| Abstract: | A large body of literature has documented negative effects of civil conflict on the educational outcomes of affected children across different countries and historical periods. The opposite is however not obvious. Because conflict can damage educational infrastructure, and violence reductions attract economic activity and thus increase the opportunity cost of schooling, it may take a long time for conflict-affected societies to offset the loss in human capital after violence is over. In this paper we study the effect of Colombia’s recent efforts to end the conflict with the FARC insurgency on short-term school dropout rates. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we find that the permanent ceasefire declared by FARC during peace negotiations with the government induced a large differential reduction on school dropout rates in the areas most affected by FARC violence prior to the ceasefire, relative to other areas. We show that these results are mainly not driven by the recruitment of children during conflict. Rather, our evidence suggests that most the reduction in school dropout is incentivized by a decrease in the overall victimization in areas that experienced FARC violence. Moreover, the effect of the ceasefire on dropout rates is attenuated by the contemporaneous increase in coca growing in former FARC-affected regions. |
| Keywords: | Education, School dropout, Peace process, Armed conflict |
| JEL: | D74 I21 J24 |
| Date: | 2019–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rie:riecdt:13&r=all |
| By: | Kartik Misra (Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst) |
| Abstract: | The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) provides 100 days of employment in a year to every rural household at the legal minimum wage. At the national level this programme has been highly successful in providing an income safety-net to small peasants and landless workers. However, in the poorer states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand the provision of public employment under NREGA has been inadequate. Using evidence from field research in the Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh, this paper aims to study how awareness among programme beneficiaries about their legal entitlements and at various levels of government determines the provision of NREGA employment in one of the poorest regions of the country. Further, we discuss the impact of NREGA on agricultural productivity and wage bargaining by landless workers who are the intended beneficiaries of NREGA. Our findings suggest that patron-client exchanges between the local elite and NREGA beneficiaries determines the provision of public employment and generates rents for the local elite. Therefore, there is urgent need for increasing transparency in NREGA provision and creating mechanisms to hold elected representatives and government functionaries accountable to NREGA beneficiaries. |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ums:papers:2019-13&r=all |
| By: | Palmisano Flaviana; Lo Bue Maria |
| Abstract: | The canonical approach to analysing the poverty impact of growth is based on the comparison of poverty before and after growth. Measurement tools that endorse this approach fail to capture the different experiences of poverty dynamics in the population: there can be groups of the population made poorer or non-poor made poor by growth.We propose an approach that allows measuring this individual poverty incidence of growth, and show how it relates to existing models. We apply our framework to evaluate the dynamics of the poverty impact of growth in Indonesia, by comparing the 1993–2000, 2000–07, and 2007–14 growth periods. |
| Keywords: | Poverty Dynamics,Pro-poor,Social mobility,Growth,income mobility |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2019-41&r=all |
| By: | Andre Gbato (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - Clermont Auvergne - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Falapalaki Lemou (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - Clermont Auvergne - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Jean-François Brun (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - Clermont Auvergne - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | We study effect of semi-autonomous revenue administration reform on tax revenues in sub-Saharan Africa. From a set of data collected on 40 countries between 1980 and 2010, we find a diversified effect on total non-resource tax revenue. In medium term, semi-autonomous revenue authorities don't collect more revenue than traditional administrations and their efficiency diminishes over time. The main conclusion is that semi-autonomous revenue administrations are not a panacea for improving revenue mobilization in Sub-Saharan African countries. |
| Abstract: | Nous étudions l'effet de la réforme des administrations de recettes semi-autonomes sur les recettes fiscales en Afrique subsaharienne. A partir d'un ensemble de données collectées sur 40 pays entre 1980 et 2010, nous constatons un effet diversifié sur le total des recettes fiscales hors ressources naturelles. A moyen terme, les administrations de recettes semi-autonomes ne mobilisent pas plus de recettes que les administrations traditionnelles et leur efficacité s'amenuise avec le temps. La principale conclusion est que les administrations de recettes semi-autonomes ne sont pas une panacée pour améliorer la mobilisation des recettes dans les pays africains. |
| Keywords: | Tax reforms,Africa,Revenue mobilization,Synthetic control,Réformes fiscales,Afrique,Mobilisation des recettes,Contrôle synthétique |
| Date: | 2019–06–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-02174952&r=all |
| By: | Tripathi, Shruti |
| Abstract: | This study examines the factors that influence patient's choice of a hospital when health-care is financed by government funded health insurance scheme. The model is estimated using a multinomial logit applied to about 0.3 million cases of inpatient treatment from one of the state health insurance scheme in India in 2015. This is the first attempt to identify and quantify the impact of individual and hospital specific factors on patient choice for tertiary care under an insurance scheme in India. The results show that in absence of price constraint patients prefer to choose providers believed to be of higher quality in our case private and big public hospitals, bypassing the smaller public hospitals. |
| Keywords: | health insurance, patient's choice, public and private, health care financing, government policy |
| JEL: | I13 I18 |
| Date: | 2018–05–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:87159&r=all |