|
on Development |
| By: | Crick Lund; Kate Orkin; Marc Witte; John Walker; Thandi Davies; Johannes Haushofer; Sarah Murray; Judy Bass; Laura Murray; Wietse Tol; Vikra, Patel |
| Abstract: | Mental health conditions are prevalent but rarely treated in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Little is known about how these conditions affect economic participation. This paper shows that treating mental health conditions substantially improves recipients’ capacity to work in these contexts. First, we perform a systematic review and meta-analysis of all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) ever conducted that evaluate treatments for mental ill-health and measure economic outcomes in LMICs. On average, treating common mental disorders like depression with psychotherapy improves an aggregate of labor market outcomes made up of employment, time spent working, capacity to work and job search by 0.16 standard deviations. Treating severe mental disorders, like schizophrenia, improves the aggregate by 0.30 standard deviations, but effects are noisily estimated. Second, we build a new dataset, pooling all available microdata from RCTs using the most common trial design: studies of psychotherapy in LMICs that treated depression and measured days participants were unable to work in the past month. We observe comparable treatment effects on mental health and work outcomes in this sub-sample of highly similar studies. We also show evidence consistent with mental health being the mechanism through which psychotherapy improves work outcomes. |
| Keywords: | Labour; Development; Human capital; mental health; psychotherapy |
| JEL: | D90 I14 O10 J24 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csa:wpaper:2024-03 |
| By: | Arth Mishra |
| Abstract: | The widening financing gaps for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Green Energy Transition in developing countries have established an impetus to mobilise foreign private resources for infrastructure. By developing a novel theoretical framework and leveraging a large dataset of infrastructure projects in developing countries from 1989-2022, this analysis investigates the role of Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) in indirectly mobilising private finance. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that DFI participation in a particular country-sector can catalyse private finance by specifically reducing the perceived risks of financing. Empirical analysis assessing the presence and magnitude of mobilisation effects at the extensive margin is consistent with theory on mobilisation. DFI participation is strongly correlated with an increase in the number of commercial foreign banks, total project activity, and the number of projects with at least one commercial foreign bank. Evidence suggests that this effect is amplified by DFI participation induced private financing acting as an independent signal for further private financing. However, the mobilisation effect does not seem to spill over across countries and sectors and does not extend to projects that are entirely financed by commercial foreign financiers. These findings suggest that DFI capital should target infrastructure segments with high growth potential, through project structures that resemble the conditions for private financing and contribute towards creating a pipeline of investable projects in those country-sectors. Immediate policy implications include improving data reporting on current and future projects to bolster demonstration effects and facilitate research on intensive margin mobilisation effects. |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csa:wpaper:2023-13 |
| By: | Dang, Hai-Anh H (World Bank); Deininger, Klaus (World Bank); Nguyen, Cuong Viet (National Economics University Vietnam) |
| Abstract: | We investigate the impact of a large-scale poverty alleviation program targeted at 62 poorest districts in Vietnam, analyzing multiple datasets spanning the past 20 years with a regression discontinuity design with district fixed effects. While we do not find significant program effects on household welfare (as measured by per capita income and poverty) and local economic development (as measured by nighttime light intensity and establishment of new firms), we find that the program facilitates a shift from farm to nonfarm employment and significantly increases the share of nonfarm income for rural households. One possible explanation for the positive effects on nonfarm employment is the improved access to credit that the program provides to participating households. We also find that the program increases household access to electricity, public transfer, educational subsidies for students residing in the program districts, and healthcare utilization, possibly through improving availability of commune healthcare centers. |
| Keywords: | poverty, targeting, household surveys, Vietnam |
| JEL: | C15 D31 I31 O10 O57 |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17445 |
| By: | Nandwani, Bharti; Roychowdhury, Punarjit |
| Abstract: | This paper examines whether granting property inheritance rights to women improves their participation in politics as election candidates in India. In patriarchal societies like India, conservative gender norms often discourage women from active political engagement, reinforced by social sanctions for non-compliance. Additionally, political involvement demands significant time and financial resources, making it particularly challenging for women. Enhancing property rights has the potential to financially empower women, alleviating both social and economic constraints. Using state-level variation in legal changes to women's property rights and leveraging large-scale administrative data on elections in India, we find that improved property rights lead to a rise in female candidacy and an increased likelihood of electoral success for women. We also observe that regional parties field more female candidates, and there is a notable increase in the entry of 'new' female candidates post-reform. Furthermore, using extensive household survey data, we show that this rise in political participation is driven by improvements in women's financial autonomy, education, and economic awareness following the inheritance reforms. Our analysis confirms that these results are not confounded by pre-existing trends and are robust to treatment effect heterogeneity. |
| Keywords: | Gender, India, Female Political Participation, Property Rights |
| JEL: | J16 D72 K11 O12 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1517 |
| By: | Shagnik Chakravarty |
| Abstract: | How does income risk affect education investment decisions in India? Theoretically, the relationship is ambiguous: Higher income risk may induce parents to accumulate greater precautionary savings, reducing schooling investment. On the other hand, forward-looking households may choose to increase schooling investment so children can diversify from agriculture and earn higher, less risky incomes in the longer run. Empirical studies so far have yielded mixed results. I provide new evidence on this question by exploiting fluctuations in mean-preserving temperature variability to identify the effects of income risk on short-run education choices. Using a two-way fixed effects framework, I find that greater income risk is associated with increases in primary and middle school enrolment in the village. On the intensive margin, I observe improvements in education achievement due to greater income uncertainty, though these effects are driven entirely by improvements in outcomes for boys. This is suggestive of a pattern of son-preference observed in the literature before. Broadly, results are most consistent with the income diversification channel being dominant in this context, although in the poorest villages I observe a net negative impact of income risk on schooling outcomes. As such, alternative mechanisms do not seem to be driving the results. Evidence from this paper indicates a need for better insurance mechanisms to protect vulnerable groups from the adverse effects of income risk on human capital accumulation. |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csa:wpaper:2024-04 |
| By: | Zubin Deyal |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the impact of natural disasters on remittances in developing countries, which are particularly vulnerable to the immediate and long-term effects of such events. In addition to damaging economic capacity, natural disasters are large exogenous shocks which result in capital flight that exacerbates the immediate deficit that developing countries face in their aftermath. Though remittances have proven vital in addressing financing gaps for these countries, their immediate response to natural disasters has not been thoroughly studied. This paper expands the literature by offering a comprehensive analysis of the influence of natural disasters on monthly remittances across 30 developing countries for the 30-year period of 1993 to 2022. In utilising a dynamic fixed effects model on data sourced from respective Central Banks, I find an immediate rise in remittances post-disasters, notably in Asia, Central America, and South America, and specifically in response to hydrological and meteorological disasters. The rise in remittances is typically highest in the month after the disaster, with more intense disasters eliciting a larger increase in remittances. I also find evidence of remittance smoothing, as migrants seem to adjust allocations intertemporally. I further establish a countercyclical relationship between remittances and GDP growth, with inflation, nominal exchange rate depreciations, net migration, and disaster aid negatively impacting remittances. The finding that remittances increase after disasters is robust to different specifications, including System GMM, different periods, dependent variables, and monthly, yearly, and regional fixed effects.Creation-Date: 2023 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csa:wpaper:2024-01 |
| By: | Maina, Kevin W.; Parlasca, Martin C.; Rao, Elizaphan J.O. |
| Abstract: | Strategies for sustainable intensification of livestock are becoming increasingly important in designing interventions to develop the sector. In dairying systems, herd health management is among such strategies. While adoption patterns and productivity gains have been analyzed in previous studies, the social implications are still not well understood. This paper provides insights into the relationship between herd health management and intra-household labor demand as well as women empowerment. We test the hypotheses that the adoption of herd health management practices (HHPs) increases intra-household labor demand among male and female household members and, thereby, affects women empowerment. We use primary data from smallholder dairy farmers in Kenya on time use, women's participation in decision-making and livestock asset ownership, adoption status of important HHPs, as well as household demographic characteristics and apply censored regression and multinomial logit regression models to test our hypotheses. The results show that adopting HHPs is associated with more labor demand in dairy production for both men and women. The magnitude of the change differs across production systems but is always higher for men. Additionally, herd health management practices are negatively associated with different aspects of women empowerment including women’s livestock asset ownership and control over income from dairy. The study underscores the importance for gender-sensitivity in the sustainable intensification of livestock production in the Global South. |
| Keywords: | Agricultural and Food Policy, Dairy Farming |
| Date: | 2024–11–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:ubzefd:348015 |
| By: | Bhattacharya, Titir (University of Warwick); Chakraborty, Tanika (Indian Institute of Management Calcutta); Mukherjee, Anirban (University of Calcutta) |
| Abstract: | In response to a remarkably high out of pocket (OOP) health expenditure in India, various state and the national governments in India, tried to introduce public health insurance programs. Despite being free, the take up and utilization of these programs remain low. In this paper, we seek to explain this puzzle by studying the role of informal networks in explaining insurance-adoption behavior in the context of the Arogyasri health insurance program introduced in the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh between 2007 and 2008. We use household panel data from the Young Lives Survey (YLS) to empirically study how the adoption of Arogyasri among poor households respond to their membership in informal networks. In this context, we differentiate between two types of network – financial network and information network. We find that adoption and utilization are significantly higher for households with access to informal financial networks. However, adoption and utilization increases much more for households outside informal networks, after they experience health shocks. Information sharing role of informal networks do not seem to affect the decision to adopt insurance. We also provide a simple theoretical framework to discuss the potential mechanisms underlying our empirical results. |
| Date: | 2024–10–29 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:2mq5v |
| By: | Motta Café, Renata |
| Abstract: | Limited access to credit has been identified as a major constraint to sustainable municipal development, but empirical evidence on the effectiveness of credit operations remains inconclusive. This paper evaluates the impact of federal government guaranteed loans on public expenditures. Using data from Brazilian municipalities and a regression discontinuity design that leverages a discontinuity in the eligibility criteria for federal government guarantees, I show that the loans have a positive impact on the quality of local expenditure and social outcome indicators. This impact is characterized by a significant increase in investment while keeping personnel expenditures stable. |
| Keywords: | State capacity;Access to credit;public expenditure;municipal development |
| JEL: | H71 H75 R51 |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:idb:brikps:13819 |
| By: | Squarcina, Margherita; Hänsch, Juliane; Montoya Cepeda, Florena M.; Pallauf, Magdalena; Paz, Bruno; Stehl, Jonas; Wehner, Jasmin; Wollni, Meike |
| Abstract: | Existing measures of resilience focus on specific food system components, neglecting the complexity of the whole system. We propose a measure of resilience that encompasses three dimensions of a food system: economic profitability, environmental sustainability, and adequate nutrition. To empirically estimate the proposed model, we combine longitudinal household-level data from Malawi, Tanzania, and Nigeria with GIS data and macro-level indicators.We define resilience as a normative condition using a probabilistic moment-based approach following Cissé and Barrett (2018). To aggregate the probabilities across different dimensions into a single index of resilience, we employ and compare two different methods. Our findings indicate an overall increase in resilience of farming households over time, with improvements in Nigeria and Tanzania. Clear trade-offs are evident across the various domains of the food system. Both proposed resilience indexes demonstrate strong performance. They are correlated with improvements in income, vegetation, and dietary diversity, and they partially mitigate the effects of various shocks. The comparison between the two methods indicates a preference for the simpler PCA-based approach to measuring farmers’ resilience using a food system approach. Our findings underline the need to broaden our focus beyond individual aspects of resilience to achieve sustainable food systems. |
| Keywords: | Agricultural and Food Policy, Farm Management, Food Security and Poverty, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:gausfs:348143 |
| By: | Rosa Abraham; Nishat Anjum; Rahul Lahoti; Hema Swaminathan |
| Abstract: | Drawing from two labour market experiments in rural India, we offer insights on the influence of survey design on the measurement of employment. The first experiment contrasts self-reported estimates of employment with proxy-reported estimates from spouses. We find that employment estimates based on reports by men underestimate women's employment by six percentage points compared to estimates from women themselves. There are significant differences in the types of employment activities reported by self and proxy. |
| Keywords: | Survey, Gender, Labour force participation, India, Household survey, Survey data |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2024-64 |
| By: | Dabalen, Andrew (World Bank); Paul, Saumik (University of Manchester) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines if ownership control - the share of largest owner in the firm - explains the difference in the adoption of management best practices between Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and rest-of-the-world (ROW). Using a sample of 156, 833 firms from 130 countries, of which 25, 005 are in SSA, we estimate the average management practices score in SSA and ROW as -0.096 and 0.023, respectively. The average treatment effect on management practices scores of going from less than 50 percent ownership control to full ownership control is negative, and it is comparable between SSA (-0.136) and ROW (-0.147). However, the share of sole proprietorships characterized by full ownership control is 52 percent in SSA compared to only 30 percent in ROW. A lower average of management practices score in SSA compared to ROW is largely driven by preponderance of sole proprietorship, in addition to lack of awareness about management best practices in SSA. |
| Keywords: | business practices, productivity, management, Sub-Saharan Africa |
| JEL: | D24 E25 G31 L11 O30 O47 |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17433 |
| By: | Beri, Parfait; Cochrane, Logan |
| Abstract: | The literature on the empirical link between public spending and school outcomes has yielded mixed and largely debated results. Given the current education landscape, where enrolment has improved considerably, it is crucial to reexamine how public spending impacts school performance across different quantiles. To this end, this study employed panel data from low- and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) from 1990 to 2021 to investigate how public education spending impacts the relationship. It finds that public spending significantly affects enrolment at the median and higher quantiles at pre-primary schools but has an insignificant relationship in low-enrolling countries. The study also finds that spending positively and substantially influences primary school enrolment across all quantiles. Still, it negatively impacts dropout rates, with significant coefficients only in the 50th and higher quantiles. The relationship, however, was statistically insignificant in countries with the lowest dropout rates. While the ineffectiveness of public spending in further reducing school dropout rates in countries with the lowest out-of-school children is obvious, investigating why spending is ineffective during early childhood in low-enrolling countries is an important area for future research. |
| Keywords: | Public spending, School performance, School enrolment, out-of-school children, Child mortality, Quantile regression |
| JEL: | I21 I22 I25 I28 |
| Date: | 2024–08–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:122559 |
| By: | Beri, Parfait; Cochrane, Logan; Syed Fazlullah, Sarah |
| Abstract: | This paper delves into the effects of public investment on primary school enrollment in low- and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) over three decades, from 1990 to 2020. Autoregressive distributed lag models are employed to evaluate the long-term influence of public spending on enrollment for the whole sample and four distinct sub-samples, while also probing the potential non-linear nature of this relationship. Findings reveal that public expenditure has a significant, positive impact on enrollment across LMICs, including low-income countries (LICs), lower-middle-income countries (LMCs), and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the long run. These effects persist under non-linear model specifications. This research provides fresh empirical insights by adopting a long-term viewpoint on the nexus between educational funding and enrollment trends in LMICs. These findings highlight the critical role of sustained and efficient funding for achieving enrollment goals, a cornerstone for the advancement of sustainable development. |
| Keywords: | Public spending, government expenditure, school enrolment, education, SDG4. |
| JEL: | I21 I22 I24 I28 |
| Date: | 2024–04–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:122561 |