nep-dev New Economics Papers
on Development
Issue of 2022‒07‒11
nine papers chosen by
Jacob A. Jordaan
Universiteit Utrecht

  1. How Specific Resilience Pillars Mitigate the Impact of Drought on Food Security: Evidence from Uganda By Sunday, Nathan; Kahunde, Rehema; Atwine, Blessing; Adelaja, Adesoji; Kappiaruparampil, Justin
  2. Wealth in Latin America By Gandelman, Néstor; Lluberas, Rodrigo
  3. Size, Position and Length in Value Chains in Latin America By Lalanne, Ã lvaro
  4. Female Political Representation and Violence Against Women: Evidence from Brazil By Magdalena Delaporte; Francisco Pino
  5. CLIMATE SHOCKS AND RESILIENCE: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL ETHIOPIA By Tesfahun, Birhan S.; Kasie, A.; Upton, Joanna B.; Blom, Sylvia A.
  6. The Labor Market Consequences of Appropriate Technology By de Souza, Gustavo
  7. How to promote agricultural technologies that generate positive environmental effects? Evidence on tree planting in Indonesia By Brenneis, Karina; Irawan, Bambang; Wollni, Meike
  8. Composite effects of human, natural and social capitals on sustainable food-crop farming in Sub-Saharan Africa By Tuan Nguyen-Anh; Chinh Hoang-Duc; Tuyen Tiet; Phu Nguyen-Van; Nguyen To-The
  9. Surnames and Social Rank: Long-term Traits of Social Mobility in Colombia and Chile By Jaramillo-Echeverri, Juliana; Ã lvarez, Andrés; Bro, Naim

  1. By: Sunday, Nathan; Kahunde, Rehema; Atwine, Blessing; Adelaja, Adesoji; Kappiaruparampil, Justin
    Abstract: Uganda continues to be prone to climate shocks especially drought which has adverse impact on food security. This paper studies household resilience capacities with special focus on how different resilience capacities mitigate the impact of drought on food security. The study follows the TANGO framework and two-step factor analysis to construct resilience capacity indexes. It employs a panel data from the Uganda National Panel Surveys (UNPS) undertaken between 2010/11 and 2018/19, spanning five waves. To minimize the bias arising from subjective self-reported drought shock, we introduce an objective measure of drought from the global SPEI database into the UNPS data. We also control for attrition bias by controlling for attrition hazard estimated from the attrition function. Our analysis reveals that households in Uganda exhibit significantly low and nearly static resilience capacities. This implies majority of households in Uganda remain highly susceptible food insecurity in the event of severe drought. The study shows that building resilience capacities is an effective way of protecting households from such devastating situation. In this regard, adaptive capacity is found to be the most effective in mitigating the effect of drought on food security. Transformative capacity and absorptive capacities possess limited mitigating power. Based on significant components from each of the capacities, we recommend investing in early warning systems and wide dissemination of climate related information to enhance preparedness adaptation, encouraging and supporting formation and sustainability of informal institutions at local levels, enhancing access to communal resources, improved infrastructure and agriculture extension services by the most vulnerable groups.
    Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Food Security and Poverty
    Date: 2021–08–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:miprrp:321058&r=
  2. By: Gandelman, Néstor; Lluberas, Rodrigo
    Abstract: This paper presents harmonized indicators for household wealth, its components, and its determinants (including intergenerational mobility) in four Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay), using Spain as a comparison benchmark. It is based on recently-available microdata from financial surveys. The paper analyzes the relationship between wealth indicators and sociodemographic characteristics of household heads (age, education, gender, marital status).
    Keywords: Desarrollo, Economía, Familia, Investigación socioeconómica, Políticas públicas,
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dbl:dblwop:1904&r=
  3. By: Lalanne, Ã lvaro
    Abstract: In this article, I develop a framework that divides global value chains into regional and extra-regional and studies the participation of Latin American countries in international fragmentation of production along 25 years of globalization. Measures of depth, position, and length are developed for each kind of value chain. Between 1990 and 2015 the engagement in activities related to international trade increased in every country in Latin America and the prevalent way of integration is in Extra-Regional Value Chains. While South America engages mostly in value chains as a source of value added transformed by others, Central America participates more as end of chains and Mexico switched its position to a net forward position in regional value chains. Finally, the article examines the relationship between participation and length of domestic segment of chains, finding that a deeper participation in Extra-regional Value Chains is associated with shortening of chains, but this relationship does not hold for Regional.
    Keywords: Aduanas, Comercio internacional, Competitividad, Integración, Investigación socioeconómica, Políticas públicas, Puertos,
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dbl:dblwop:1888&r=
  4. By: Magdalena Delaporte; Francisco Pino
    Abstract: This paper studies the effect of female political representation on violence against women. Using a Regression Discontinuity design for close mayoral elections between female and male candidates in Brazil, we find that electing female mayors leads to a reduction in episodes of gender violence. The effect is particularly strong when focusing on incidents of domestic violence, when the aggressor is the ex-husband/boyfriend, and when victims experienced sexual violence. The evidence suggests that female mayors might implement different policies from male mayors and therefore contribute to reduce gender violence.
    Date: 2022–05
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:udc:wpaper:wp534&r=
  5. By: Tesfahun, Birhan S.; Kasie, A.; Upton, Joanna B.; Blom, Sylvia A.
    Abstract: Climate shock, specifically drought causes serious adverse effects on household welfare in rural Ethiopia. As a direct response to such shocks, resilience and related activities become the country’s key development agenda. In this context, we examine the relationship between climate shock and household consumption and then assess how household resilience influences this relationship. By combining historical observations of climate extremes and Ethiopian Socioeconomic survey datasets, we find that both short-term and long-term droughts are significantly associated with reduced consumption, and this relationship is moderated by resilience. We look at the resilience indicators that possibly mediate the effects of drought on either realized or probabilistic measures of consumption to understand what is associated with the ability to withstand or recover quickly from drought. We reframe the resilience as capacity approach and resilience as a normative condition approach that reflect two distinct ways of inferring resilience. In the resilience as capacity approach, we model realized consumption as a dependent variable and interaction terms between drought and hypothesized resilience indicators as joint explanatory variables. From our hypothesized resilience indicators, we find some indicators that are associated with attenuating the adverse effects of drought shock on realized household consumption. These include wealth index, informal transfer, and formal transfer indicators. In the resilience as a normative condition approach, we model probabilistic household consumption as a dependent variable and same interaction terms and find income diversification, livestock diversification, and agricultural asset indicators. This study has important implications for both research and policy. The adverse effects of droughts on consumption inform the investment need and policy design around resilience. The resilience indicators associated with attenuating the adverse effects of drought shock on realized and probabilistic consumption has also important implications. First, the nexus between drought and consumption via specific resilience indicators associated with attenuating the adverse effect of drought on consumption informs policy design around these indicators. Second, our interest variable framing to identify the specific resilience indicators associated with attenuating the adverse effects of drought on both realized and probabilistic household consumption provides insight to bridge the resilience as capacity and resilience as a normative condition approaches classic debate with the question of whether resilience is a right-hand or left-hand side variable
    Keywords: Consumer/Household Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy
    Date: 2021–10–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:miprrp:321060&r=
  6. By: de Souza, Gustavo
    Abstract: Developing countries rely on technology created by developed countries. This paper demonstrates that such reliance increases wage inequality but leads to greater production in developing countries. I study a Brazilian innovation program that taxed the leasing of international technology to subsidize national innovation. By exploiting heterogeneous exposure, I show that the program led firms to replace technology licensed from developed countries with in-house innovations, which led to a decline in both employment and the share of high-skilled workers. I explain these findings using a model of directed technological change and cross-country technology transactions. Firms in a developing country can either innovate or lease technology from a developed country, and these two technologies differ endogenously regarding productivity and skill bias due to factor supply disparities in the two countries. I show that the difference in skill bias and productivity can be identified using closed-form solutions by the effect of the innovation program on firms’ expenditure share with lowskilled workers and employ- ment. By calibrating the model to reproduce these effects, I find that increasing the share of firms that patent in Brazil by 1 p.p. decreases the skilled wage premium by 0.02% and production by 0.2%.
    Keywords: labor market, technology, wages
    Date: 2022–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpm:docweb:2208&r=
  7. By: Brenneis, Karina; Irawan, Bambang; Wollni, Meike
    Abstract: Agricultural technologies frequently have been introduced via subsidies to accelerate diffusion and spur adoption in the presence of market inefficiencies or missing information. Yet, for agricultural technologies that mainly generate positive environmental effects, it is not clear how to encourage adoption, maintenance, and additional investments most effectively. This study addresses this gap by introducing two policy interventions to foster tree planting in an oil palm hotspot in Indonesia. In the first treatment, oil palm farmers receive information about native tree planting and three different native tree seedlings for free (subsidy treatment). In the second treatment, oil palm farmers receive the same information and the opportunity to buy three different native tree seedlings through an auction (price treatment). Results from negative binomial regressions reveal that a full subsidy leads to higher tree planting at first, but the results from a double hurdle model show that conditional on being planted there is no significant difference in survival rates between the two treatments. Our results further show that conditional on tree planting farmers in the price treatment apply a higher number of maintenance practices than farmers in the subsidy treatment. Finally, the subsidy treatment has a significantly negative effect on additional planting efforts.
    Keywords: technology adoption,policy analysis,auction,subsidies,negative binomial estimation
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:crc990:34&r=
  8. By: Tuan Nguyen-Anh; Chinh Hoang-Duc; Tuyen Tiet; Phu Nguyen-Van; Nguyen To-The
    Abstract: This study analyzes the spontaneous impact of human, social and natural capital on food crop technical efficiency (TE) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Our study contributes to the literature by adopting the meta-analysis method to investigate the relationship between TE and the three groups of capitals to better shed light on the TE in SSA regions. Our results highlight that social capital is the most critical factor among the three groups of capitals in promoting farming productivity. In particular, agriculture efficiency benefits from increasing people’s trust in institutions and the frequency of extension visits. Natural capital like temperature and elevation is essential in determining the farming TE in SSA regions. Outstandingly, our results also indicate that calorie intake, a proxy of labor quality, should be improved to achieve better productivity.
    Keywords: Farming technical efficiency; Human capital; Meta-analysis; Natural capital; Social capital; Sub-Saharan Africa
    JEL: D91 Q12 Q18
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:drm:wpaper:2022-13&r=
  9. By: Jaramillo-Echeverri, Juliana; Ã lvarez, Andrés; Bro, Naim
    Abstract: In the last two years, Colombia and Chile have witnessed strong social protests, characterized by slogans against inequality and the lack of social mobility. In this study we propose a comparative study on social mobility and the persistence of structural social inequalities in both countries. We collect evidence on the level of social immobility and test if it is rooted in historical forms of social segregation in both countries. We base our analysis in surname based methods. We conclude that there are clear indications of a significant persistence of upward immobility of the groups that were originally segregated during the colonial period: Afro-descendants (Colombia) and indigenous people (in both). Furthermore, we find that the downward social immobility of the elites shows an important persistence in both countries. However, in Chile the colonial elites (encomenderos and landowners) present greater persistence in their privileged status, while in Colombia those early elites seem to have converged more quickly to the mean. In both countries, there is a clear persistence of the elites of the second half of the 19th century in todays highest position of the social ladder.
    Keywords: Desarrollo, Desarrollo social, Economía, Investigación socioeconómica, Políticas públicas,
    Date: 2021
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dbl:dblwop:1848&r=

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