|
on Development |
| By: | Kai Gehring (University of Zurich); Sarah Langlotz (Heidelberg University); Stefan Kienberger (University of Salzburg) |
| Abstract: | We provide evidence about the mechanisms linking resource-related income shocks to conflict. To do so, we combine temporal variation in international drug prices with new data on spatial variation in opium suitability. We find a conflict-reducing effect of higher drug prices over the 2002-2014 period, both in a reduced-form setting and using instrumental variables. There are two main mechanisms. First, we highlight the role of opportunity costs by showing that opium profitability positively affects household living standards. Second, by using data on the drug production process, ethnic homelands, and Taliban versus pro-government influence, we show that, on average, opportunity cost effects dominate contest effects. Contest effects depend on the degree of group competition over valuable resources. The conflict-reducing effect of higher prices is higher in areas that are more plausibly dominated by one group. |
| Keywords: | Resources, resource curse, conflict, drugs, illicit economy, illegality, geography of conflict, Afghanistan, Taliban JEL Classification: D74, K4, O53, Q1 |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:286&r=all |
| By: | Garcia Mandico,Silvia; Reichert,Arndt Rudiger; Strupat,Christoph |
| Abstract: | This paper uses the roll-out of the national health insurance in Ghana to assess the cushioning effect of coverage on the financial consequences of health shocks and resulting changes in coping behaviors. The analysis finds a strong reduction in medical expenditures, preventing households from cutting non-food consumption and causing a decrease in the volume of received remittances as well as the labor supply of healthy adult household members. Moreover, the paper presents evidence that the insurance scheme reduced the likelihood that households experiencing a health shock pulled their children out of school to put them to work. Avoidance of such costly coping mechanisms is potentially an important part of the social value of formal health insurance. |
| Keywords: | Health Care Services Industry,Health Insurance,Health Economics&Finance,Child Labor Law,Labor Standards,Child Labor,Labor Markets,Rural Labor Markets,Pharmaceuticals&Pharmacoeconomics,Pharmaceuticals Industry |
| Date: | 2019–09–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9004&r=all |
| By: | Bertelli, Olivia; Kurdi, Sikandra; Mahmoud, Mai; Al-Maweri, Mohamad; Al Bass, Tareq |
| Abstract: | This paper evaluates the impacts on the participants of the Yemen Social Fund for Development’s youth employment and training program called Rural and Urban Advocates Working for Development (RUAWFD). The evaluation used both traditional surveys and an innovative experimental game methodology to show that the employment program, in addition to aiding youth individually, has important benefits for the country as a whole by contributing to stronger social capital. The survey analysis finds for the program participants significant increases between the baseline and follow-up surveys in self-reported trust in local government institutions and officials, political parties, and tribes. In reflecting on the level of cooperativeness in their own communities, participants reported increased awareness of the presence of marginalized groups and increased perception of cooperativeness in surrounding communities. There was also a significant increase in self-reported trust in people generally, especially for trust in other young people and in people from other areas of Yemen. The experimental game methodology uses a common pool game from the experimental economics literature incentivized by cash payments to measure trust levels between pairs of RUAWFD participants from different geographic regions. This approach confirms the findings from the survey analysis while avoiding possible self-reporting bias. The game results show that trust was lowest at baseline for partners in which one of the partners was from one of the Northern governorates and the other was from one of the Southern governorates. After the intervention, however, not only were average trust levels higher, but Northern-Southern pairs of RUAWFD participants had trust levels closer to those for pairs from the same regions. These findings are consistent with the literature on inter-group contact theory suggesting that community interventions can increase trust in individuals and institutions. This research contributes to a growing literature on trust and social capital as important development indicators, particularly in relation to conflict. The main results suggest that reinforcing social ties across regions in Yemen is an important benefit of the Social Fund for Development’s role as a national development agency and an achievable objective to consider in planning development interventions to contribute to future post-conflict reconstruction. |
| Keywords: | EGYPT, ARAB COUNTRIES, MIDDLE EAST, NORTH AFRICA, AFRICA,YEMEN, ARAB COUNTRIES, MIDDLE EAST, SOUTHWESTERN ASIA, ASIA, social capital, youth, youth employment, rural employment, urban population, development programmes, |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:menawp:24&r=all |
| By: | Ecker, Olivier; Maystadt, Jean-François; Guo, Zhe |
| Abstract: | Hunger and acute child malnutrition are increasingly concentrated in fragile countries and civil conflict zones. According to the United Nations, Yemen’s civil war has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in recent history. We use high-frequency panel data and district fixed-effects and household fixed-effects models to estimate the impact of civil conflict on child nutrition. Our results indicate that an increase by one standard deviation in civil conflict intensity translates into an increase in the prevalence of acute child malnutrition by at least 0.7 percentage points if measured by weight-for-height z-scores and by at least 1.7 percentage points if measured by mid-upper arm circumference z-scores. In mid-December 2018, Yemen’s main warring parties agreed to a ceasefire for the contested port city of Hodeida and to allow humanitarian aid to be shipped in and distributed through protected corridors. While the recent agreements are an important, first step to tackle the humanitarian crisis, the road to a sustainable peace agreement will certainly be long and bumpy. Relative stability could soon open a window of opportunity for targeted interventions to support recovery in Yemen. Against this background, our analysis suggests that unconditional cash transfers can be an effective tool in situations of complex emergencies. Our estimation results show that cash transfers can mitigate the detrimental impact of lingering civil conflict on child nutritional status in Yemen on a large scale. Our results also reveal that the regularity of transfer payments influence the magnitude of the mitigation effect, as regular assistance allows beneficiary households to smoothen their food consumption and other demands influencing child nutrition outcomes. |
| Keywords: | EGYPT, ARAB COUNTRIES, MIDDLE EAST, NORTH AFRICA, AFRICA,YEMEN, ARAB COUNTRIES, MIDDLE EAST, SOUTHWESTERN ASIA, ASIA, malnutrition, children, conflicts, cash transfers, unconditional cash transfers, |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:menawp:17&r=all |
| By: | Anand,Paul; Saxena,Swati; Gonzalez,Rolando; Dang,Hai-Anh H. |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates a women's self-help group program with more than 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural areas of Northern India. The program has four streams of activity in micro-savings, agricultural enterprise training, health and nutrition education, and political participation. The paper considers whether there is any evidence that program membership is associated with quality of life improvement. Using new data on a variety of self-reported capability indicators from members and non-members, the paper estimates propensity score matching models and reports evidence of differences in some dimensions as well as significant benefits to those from the most disadvantaged groups?scheduled castes and tribes. The paper considers robustness and concludes that for some dimensions, there is evidence that the program has contributed to sustainable development through improvements in the quality of life. |
| Date: | 2019–09–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9011&r=all |
| By: | George Naufal (Texas A&M University); Michael Malcom (West Chester University); Vidya Diwakar (Overseas Development Institute) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the relationship between armed conflict intensity and child labor using household level data from Iraq and taking advantage of a quasi-experimental setup. Armed conflict intensity is measured as the number of deaths related to conflict and child labor is separated by type of work: economic and household. After controlling for individual and household characteristics that determine child labor, we find that armed conflict intensity is associated with a higher likelihood of economic child labor, but is not associated with changes in household labor. These results provide further evidence of the long-term costs of war on households. |
| Keywords: | Armed conflict, child labor, school attendance, MENA, Iraq JEL Classification: D74; J13; N35 |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:282&r=all |
| By: | Joseph Flavian Gomes (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)) |
| Abstract: | This paper shows that children of mothers who are ethnically more distant from their neighbours have worse health outcomes. I combine individual-level micro data from DHS surveys for 14 sub-Saharan African countries with a novel high-resolution dataset on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups at the 1 km 1 km level. I measure ethnic distance using linguistic distance and construct the spatial distribution of ethnic groups using an iterative proportional fitting algorithm. Using a time-varying ethnicity fixed effects framework to curb unobserved heterogeneity across ethnic groups, I show that children whose mothers are linguistically more distant from their neighbours face higher mortality rates and are shorter in stature. The pernicious effects of linguistic distance are more pronounced in areas where malaria is endemic. I argue that higher linguistic distance impedes the transmission of information. Consistent with this interpretation, mothers who are linguistically more distant from their neighbours are less likely to receive health-related information. Linguistic distances driven by splits that occurred thousands of years ago are more relevant than more recent splits. |
| Keywords: | ethnic distance, ethnic diversity, ethnic networks, child mortality, African development |
| JEL: | I14 O10 O15 Z10 Z13 |
| Date: | 2020–01–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctl:louvir:2020005&r=all |
| By: | Tillman Hönig (London School of Economics & Political Science) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the consequences of peace – or conversely, conflict – on four outcomes of fundamental economic relevance: Education, health, self- employment income and household expenditures. While the empirical literature on the consequences of conflict involving cross-country regression studies may deliver suggestive big picture evidence on links between conflict and eco- nomic outcomes, establishing causation remains problematic. By contrast, my study builds on the rather recent micro-empirical literature and exploits a natural experiment in Nigeria to evaluate the consequences of a reduction of conflict. The amnesty policy implemented by the Nigerian government in the Niger Delta Region in 2009 is used as a policy shock to assess the effect of a conflict reduction on the outcomes of interest. My first finding is that this policy indeed established a period of peace. To evaluate the benefits of this peace, I then construct a synthetic control region from the states that are not part of the Niger Delta region and therefore unaffected by the policy as a within-country counterfactual to the Niger Delta region. I find that peace through the amnesty policy generated an increase in education by 0.5 years of schooling, a 67% increase in self- employment income and a 19% increase in household expenditures four years later. I do not find an effect on health. |
| Keywords: | JEL Classification: 12, D74, I15, I25, J31, O12 |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:293&r=all |
| By: | Tomomi Tanakam (World Bank); Kazushi Takahashi (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan); Keijiro Otsuka (Kobe University) |
| Abstract: | Despite progress toward gender equality in education in Bangladesh, its female labor force participation (FLFP) rate has been stagnant relative to that of men, especially in marginal rural areas. To identify the overall benefit of schooling investment in women in rural Bangladesh, we examine the impact of female educational attainment on not only FLFP but also gains from marriage and household welfare. Applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design where plausibly exogenous variation in school enrollment is created by the nationwide stipend program for women, we find moderate impacts of female education on FLFP, while it has positive and significant effects on the husband’s schooling and household income, particularly from non-farm activities. The results also show the significantly positive impacts of women's education on sanitation control and children's health. These findings indicate that female schooling enhances women's role and well-being through marriage and household activities rather than their labor market activities. |
| Date: | 2020–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ngi:dpaper:19-34&r=all |
| By: | Thiemo Fetzer (University of Warwick); Stephan Kyburz (Center for Global Development) |
| Abstract: | Can institutionalized transfers of resource rents be a source of civil conflict? Are cohesive institutions better in managing distributive conflicts? We study these questions exploiting exogenous variation in revenue disbursements to local governments together with new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria. We make three contributions. First, we document the existence of a strong link between rents and conflict far away from the location of the actual resource. Second, we show that distributive conflict is highly organized involving political militias and concentrated in the extent to which local governments are non-cohesive. Third, we show that democratic practice in form having elected local governments significantly weakens the causal link between rents and political violence. We document that elections (vis-a-vis appointments), by producing more cohesive institutions, vastly limit the extent to which distributional conflict between groups breaks out following shocks to the available rents. Throughout, we confirm these findings using individual level survey data. |
| Keywords: | conflict, ethnicity, natural resources, political economy, commodity prices JEL Classification: Q33, O13, N52, R11, L71 |
| Date: | 2018–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:271&r=all |
| By: | Tilman Brück (ISDC - International Security and Development Center and Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops); Marco d’Errico (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations); Rebecca Pietrelli (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how conflict affects household resilience capacity and food security, drawing on panel data collected from households in Palestine before and after the 2014 Gaza conflict. During this escalation of violence, the majority of the damages in the Gaza Strip were concentrated close to the Israeli border. Using the distance to the Israeli border to identify the effect of the conflict at the household level through an instrumental variable approach, we find that the food security of households in the Gaza Strip was not directly affected by the conflict. However, household resilience capacity that is necessary to resist food insecurity declined among Gazan households as a result of the conflict. This was mainly due to a reduction of adaptive capacity, driven by the deterioration of income stability and income diversification. However, the conflict actually increased the use of social safety nets (expressed in the form of cash, in-kind or other transfers that were received by the households) and access to basic services (mainly access to sanitation) for the households exposed to the conflict. This finding may be related to the support provided to households in the Gaza Strip by national and international organizations after the end of the conflict. From a policy perspective, the case of the conflict in the Gaza Strip demonstrates that immediate and significant support to victims of conflict can indeed help restore resilience capacity. |
| Keywords: | resilience, food security, conflict, Gaza Strip JEL Classification: D12 - D80 - I12 - I32 |
| Date: | 2018–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:269&r=all |
| By: | Beatriz Manotas-Hidalgo (INARBE Institute and Department of Economics, Universidad PuÌ blica de Navarra. Campus de ArrosadiÌ a, 31006 Pamplona, Spain); Fidel PeÌ rez SebastiaÌ n (Department of Fundamental of Economic Analysis, Universidad de Alicante. Campus San Vicente Raspeig); Miguel AÌ ngel Campo-BescoÌ s (IS-FOOD Institute and Department of Engineering, Universidad PuÌ blica de Navarra. Campus de ArrosadiÌ a, 31006 Pamplona, Spain) |
| Abstract: | This paper reexamines the effect of exogenous income shocks and ethnic diversity on social conflict in Africa. Unlike previous literature, we jointly consider geolocalized information on three types of shocks (agricultural, mineral, and oil and gas price changes) and four measures of ethnic diversity (fragmentation, polarization, and both monopoly and excluded power of polity groups). With this approach, we can give a more complete vision of the determinants of violence. We find that the impact of income shocks is heterogeneous across conflict definitions and ethnic diversity measures. In particular, positive agricultural and mineral price shocks increase the probability of social conflict, riots, and violence across civilians in general, but decrease the incidence of armed conflict. Oil and gas price shocks, on the other hand, do not show significant direct effects. In addition, cells in which monopoly or excluded ethnicity are present tend to produce higher levels of violence. We also look at the interaction between income shocks and ethnic diversity; the results imply that the existence of extreme cases of political-power differences among ethnic groups reduce the positive impact of income shocks on the probability of conflict, whereas ethnic fractionalization always raises it. Comparing to the prevailing theories in the literature, our findings suggest that the direct effect of price shocks on armed conflict and general conflict are driven by opportunity costs and by the desire of political change, respectively, whereas their interacted effects with ethnic diversity depend on state capacity. |
| Keywords: | conflict, income shocks, food security, natural resources JEL Classification: |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:285&r=all |
| By: | Bluffstone,Randall; LaFave,Daniel; Mekonnen,Alemu; Dissanayake,Sahan; Beyene,Abebe Damte; Gebreegziabher,Zenebe; Toman,Michael A. |
| Abstract: | Improved biomass cookstoves have been promoted as important intermediate technologies to reduce fuelwood consumption and possibly cut household air pollution in low-income countries. This study uses a randomized controlled trial to examine household air pollution reductions from an improved biomass cookstove promoted in rural Ethiopia, the Mirt improved cookstove. This stove is used to bake injera, which is very energy intensive and has a very particular cooking profile. In the overall sample, the Mirt improved cookstove leads to only minor reductions in mean household air pollution (10 percent on average). However, for those who bake injera in their main living areas, the Mirt improved cookstove reduces average mean household air pollution by 64 percent and median household air pollution by 78 percent -- although the resulting household air pollution levels are still many times greater than the World Health Organization's guideline. These large percentage reductions may reflect decreased emissions due to less use of fuelwood, given Mirt's energy-efficient design, and the likelihood that higher-emissions three-stone cooking is moved outside the main living area once a Mirt improved cookstove is installed. Households in the subsample who experience a greater decline in household air pollution tend to be less wealthy and more remotely located and burn less-preferred biomass fuels, like agricultural waste and animal dung, than households that cook in a separate area. |
| Keywords: | Health Care Services Industry,Energy Demand,Energy and Mining,Energy and Environment,Pollution Management&Control,Air Quality&Clean Air,Brown Issues and Health,Global Environment,Disease Control&Prevention |
| Date: | 2019–06–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8930&r=all |
| By: | Erman,Alvina Elisabeth; Tariverdi,Mersedeh; Obolensky,Marguerite Anne Beatrice; Chen,Xiaomeng; Vincent,Rose Camille; Malgioglio,Silvia; Maruyama Rentschler,Jun Erik; Hallegatte,Stephane; Yoshida,Nobuo |
| Abstract: | Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of assets or property) and indirect (losses involving health, infrastructure, labor, and education) impacts using household survey data. Poorer households are more likely to be affected by floods; directly affected households are more likely female-headed and have more insecure tenure arrangements; and indirectly affected households tend to have access to poorer quality infrastructure. Focusing on the floods of April 2018, affected households suffered losses of 23 percent of annual income on average. Surprisingly, poorer households are not over-represented among the households that lost the most - even in relation to their income, possibly because 77 percent of total losses were due to asset losses, with richer households having more valuable assets. Although indirect losses were relatively small, they had significant well-being effects for the affected households. It is estimated that households? losses due to the April 2018 flood reached more than US$100 million, representing between 2-4 percent of the gross domestic product of Dar es Salaam. Furthermore, poorer households were less likely to recover from flood exposure. The report finds that access to finance play an important role in recovery for households. |
| Keywords: | Natural Disasters,Inequality,Hydrology,Climate Change and Agriculture,Water and Food Supply |
| Date: | 2019–08–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8976&r=all |
| By: | Michele Di Maio (DISAE, University of Naples Parthenope, Naples, Italy); Roberto Nisticò (Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Naples Federico II and CSEF, Naples, Italy) |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of parental job loss on child school dropout in developing countries. We focus on Palestinian households living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and having the household head employed in Israel during the Second Intifada (2000-2006). We exploit quarterly variation in conflict intensity across districts in the OPT to instrument for Palestinian workers’ job loss in Israel. Our 2SLS results show that parental job loss increases child school dropout probability by 9 percentage points. The effect varies with child and household characteristics. We provide evidence that the effect operates through the job loss-induced reduction in household income. |
| Keywords: | Job loss, school dropout, conflict, Second Intifada, Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel JEL Classification: H56, I20, J63 |
| Date: | 2019–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:295&r=all |
| By: | Federico Barra (Social, Urban, Rural & Resilience Global Practice, World Bank); Claudia Berg (Research Department, Development Macro Unit, International Monetary Fund); Philip Verwimp (ECARES and Centre Emile Bernheim at Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management) |
| Abstract: | The nexus of conflict, transportation costs, and poverty is one which has received scant attention in the literature. This paper explores the effect of conflict on poverty in Nigeria, taking accessibility into account. The analysis relies on household data from the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) and on conflict data from Armed Conflict Location Events Dataset (ACLED). To account for methodological challenges in the conflict data, we implement a ‘hot spot’ strategy whereby incidents within a limited geographic area over time are grouped. To address the potential endogeneity of conflict, we use past incidences of violence to instrument for more recent conflict. Transport costs are instrumented using the natural path, the time it takes to reach the market absent any roads. We find that decreasing transportation costs decreases multidimensional poverty and that its impact is stronger in areas of low conflict. We also find suggestive evidence that conflict and poverty are negatively correlated in Nigeria. |
| Keywords: | Multi-dimensional poverty, conflict, Nigeria, geospatial JEL Classification: O1, I3, L9 |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:278&r=all |
| By: | Angel-Urdinola,Diego; Burgos Davila,Sebastian Francisco |
| Abstract: | The development of pertinent and effective in-service teacher training remains a policy challenge for many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ecuador stands out as a country in the region that has made significant investments in teacher training in the past decade. However, most in-service training provision has been designed without enough elements to properly address teachers'skills gaps. This paper proposes a roadmap for improving the design of in-service teacher training in Ecuador using available data from student and teacher assessments. Although countries in the region have made important efforts to carry out periodic evaluations of student and teacher performance, the data resulting from these evaluations are rarely used to guide teacher development programs. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that doing so has the potential to raise program pertinence while allowing the prioritization of investments in teachers and students with the greatest needs. |
| Keywords: | Educational Sciences,Educational Institutions&Facilities,Effective Schools and Teachers,Skills Development and Labor Force Training |
| Date: | 2019–08–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8970&r=all |
| By: | d’Errico, Marco; Ngesa, Oscar; Pietrelli, Rebecca |
| Abstract: | People living in context prone to or affected by conflict suffer from many forms of deprivation. The international community plays a crucial role in strengthening the wellbeing of affected populations, including their food security. Unfortunately, quite often people exposed to conflict are not reached by national or international assistance because of targeting, accessibility, and marginalization. This can ultimately translate into a further deterioration of their food security status. This paper combines a geo-referenced household dataset collected in South Sudan in 2017 with the Armed Conflict Location and Events Data (ACLED), including information on conflict events. The collection of a very detailed household questionnaire in areas extensively affected by violence allows the analysis in a country generally unexplored by the empirical literature. We analyze the variation in conflict exposure across different households that live in the same district and we test the link between conflict exposure and humanitarian assistance. We find that those who live in the higher-intensity conflict areas, received less assistance than those less exposed to the conflict. The association is stronger with in kind provision of inputs for agriculture and livestock rather than for direct food assistance. We suggest the presence of social elites and marginalization as a possible explanation. We discuss the advantages of using cash transfers through mobile phones to normatively decided beneficiaries; evidence also supports interventions combining input distribution and markets’ rehabilitation. More evidence is needed on the modalities of delivery of humanitarian assistance in different food crises contexts. Cite this content as: d’Errico, M., Ngesa, O. & Pietrelli, R. 2020. Assistance in chronic conflict areas: evidence from South Sudan. FAO Agricultural Development Economics Working Paper 20-01. Rome, FAO. |
| Keywords: | Food Security and Poverty, Risk and Uncertainty |
| Date: | 2020–02–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:faoaes:302118&r=all |