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on Development |
| By: | Leight, Jessica |
| Abstract: | Although primary school enrollment has steadily increased in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years, enrollment in secondary school remains generally low in comparison with other regions (Evans and Mendez Acosta 2021). In Ethiopia, enrollment in lower secondary school roughly doubled over the past decade to reach an estimated 46 percent in 2021–2022, but substantial heterogeneity exists across rural and urban areas and across poorer and richer households (Tiruneh and Molla 2024). In rural areas, long distances from home to school often pose a substantial barrier to secondary school enrollment, especially for poor households. In addition to the real or perceived risks of insecurity linked to attendance – encountering insecure conditions along the route, or risks for youth who reside away from home to attend – these lengthy distances imply substantial out-of-pocket costs for transportation or accommodation, and households may struggle to manage these costs (Leight et al. 2022). Limited post-primary educational attainment can have substantial adverse effects for youth, limiting their opportunities for future employment and income generation and increasing the likelihood of early marriage for girls (Giacobino et al. 2024). This project note reports the main findings from a randomized trial conducted in rural Ethiopia, which assessed the effects of a scholarship for lower secondary school students (ninth and tenth grade) targeting extremely poor youth. We find that the provision of a scholarship led to a 12-percentage-point increase in the probability of secondary school enrollment two years later compared to youth who did not receive a scholarship, an effect that was greatest among students who received early notification about the scholarship (one year before eligibility). There was no change in attendance or academic performance, suggesting that students in the treatment arm performed as well as those in the control arm. Some evidence also indicated a small decline in the likelihood of child marriage and an enhancement in youth well-being. Overall, the findings suggest that the scholarship may be a valuable intervention to increase secondary school attainment, particularly if announced earlier; however, a third of youth who passed the primary school exam and were offered a scholarship still did not enroll. This suggests there are other important barriers to secondary school progression in this sample. |
| Keywords: | scholarship; secondary education; randomized controlled trials; rural areas; poverty; education; youth; Ethiopia; Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Eastern Africa |
| Date: | 2025–11–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:poshrs:178139 |
| By: | Kramer, Berber; Cecchi, Francesco; Levine, Madison; Waithaka, Lilian |
| Abstract: | Insurance has great potential to increase productive investments, but agricultural insurance markets remain thin, in part because asymmetric information limits the viability of indemnity-based contracts. This paper evaluates a digital innovation—picture-based insurance (PBI)—that uses smartphone images of insured crops to indemnify crop damage. Through a cluster randomized trial in seven counties in Kenya, we compare subsidized PBI to subsidized weather index-based insurance (WBI) and to a control group offered unsubsidized WBI. We find that moving from index-based to indemnity-based insurance substantially increases take-up, particularly among women and farmers in drought-prone areas, indicating that innovations in contract design can broaden coverage in inclusive ways. Insurance coverage significantly increases fertilizer use in both treatments, confirming that uninsured risk constrains agricultural investment. However, despite higher take-up, PBI increases total fertilizer use as much as WBI. Using a Heckman selection model to correct for endogenous adoption, we show that this is not only due to incentive effects but also to multidimensional selection: PBI attracts farmers who, in the absence of insurance, would have invested less in fertilizer. After adjusting for this compositional change, differences in fertilizer use per farmer enrolled in WBI and PBI are not statistically significant. We conclude that higher take-up rates of digital indemnity-based insurance may not automatically translate into proportionally larger farm investments, but since increased coverage is concentrated among the relatively more vulnerable, it may contribute to complementary objectives such as inclusivity, equity, and resilience. Contract design and targeting, therefore, remain central to effective insurance product development. |
| Keywords: | digital innovation; crop insurance; agricultural insurance; insurance; technology adoption; risk; information; Kenya; Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Eastern Africa |
| Date: | 2025–12–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:gsspwp:179846 |
| By: | Mahzab, Moogdho; Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab; Mattsson, Martin; Anowar, Md Sadat |
| Abstract: | Agriculture remains central to Bangladesh’s economy and food security, yet it is increasingly threatened by the rapid expansion of informal brick manufacturing that extracts fertile topsoil from cropland and generates heavy local pollution. This paper provides national-scale causal evidence on how brick kiln expansion affects vegetation health and agricultural productivity by combining long-run satellite observations with geolocated kiln data. We construct a spatiotemporal panel of unions and municipalities using annual the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer normalized difference vegetation index (MODIS NDVI) from 2002–2024 and a high-resolution inventory of 9, 187 brick kilns detected through satellite imagery and machine learning. Using a continuous and staggered difference-in-differences design, we find no evidence of differential pre-trends, but we do find a clear and persistent deterioration in vegetation health following kiln establishment. The magnitude is economically meaningful: a marginal increase in kiln presence is associated with roughly a 1 percent annual decline in local vegetation productivity, with effects that persist and accumulate over time. These results are consistent with long-run soil degradation and chronic environmental exposure around kiln sites, and they imply substantial hidden costs of informal industrial growth in densely cultivated landscapes. The findings highlight the urgency of stronger enforcement of siting rules, of incentives for cleaner production technologies, and of land-use planning that protects high-productivity agricultural zones. |
| Keywords: | agricultural productivity; food security; plant health; remote sensing; drying kilns; Bangladesh; Southern Asia |
| Date: | 2025–12–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:180697 |
| By: | Nigus, Halefom Yigzaw; Abushama, Hala; Rakhy, Tarig; Mohamed, Shima; Siddig, Khalid; Kirui, Oliver K. |
| Abstract: | This report presents evidence from the Sudan Rural Household Survey of 2023 and 2024, a two-wave panel survey that assesses how rural households are navigating prolonged conflict. By tracking the same households over time, the survey provides longitudinal insights into livelihoods, food security, access to markets and productive resources, and exposure to shocks across an insecure and rapidly evolving context. The findings from the survey data analysis point to an uneven pattern of economic adjustment by households rather than sustained recovery. Rural households are actively adapting through changes in livelihood strategies, income diversification, and increased participation of household members in income-generating activities. Compared to 2023, fewer households reported in 2024 having no employment. Engagement in salaried work and agriculture also rose. Despite these shifts, income losses remain widespread. Only a small share of households reported improved earnings in 2024, indicating that adaptation is largely driven by necessity rather than durable recovery. Food consumption outcomes improved markedly between survey waves, with substantial declines in the share of households in 2024 reporting poor or borderline diets. At the same time, experience-based measures show that food insecurity remains pervasive, with more than half of rural households facing moderate or severe food insecurity. There has been little change in the prevalence of severe food insecurity. The continuing food insecurity challenges underscore the fragility of recent gains and the continued vulnerability of many households. |
| Keywords: | food security; conflicts; livelihoods; households; surveys; Sudan; Africa; Northern Africa |
| Date: | 2025–12–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:resain:179368 |
| By: | Oscar Claveria (AQR-IREA, University of Barcelona); Claudia Puig (University of Barcelona) |
| Abstract: | This study examines the relationship between income inequality and net migration in Africa over the past two decades. Inequality is gauged by the share of income accruing to the top decile of the income distribution. Net migration rates from 54 countries between 2001 and 2021 are matched to inequality, controlling for origin country unemployment, income per capita, as well as foreign direct investment and economic uncertainty in a fixed-effects panel model. Overall, the results suggest that greater inequality is associated with higher migration rates, as opposed to foreign investment and uncertainty, which are found to be negatively associated with net migration. When replicating the experiment for the different regions—East, Middle, North, South and West Africa—, these results hold in all cases except in West Africa, where the coefficients are not found to be statistically significant. Increases in origin country income per capita are also found to be significantly and positively associated with net migration in North and South Africa, as opposed to country-level unemployment which shows a negatively association with net migration rates. As a robustness check, we replicate both analyses using the Gini coefficient as a measure of aggregate income inequality, obtaining very similar results. Overall, the analysis suggests that increasingly unequal distributions of income may lead to a greater number of people coming in than leaving, somehow contributing to the overall level of population growth in African countries. On the other hand, economic uncertainty, foreign direct investment and unemployment tend to have the opposite effect in most African regions. |
| Keywords: | migration; income inequality; unemployment; foreign direct investment; economic growth; economic uncertainty JEL classification: C50; D31; E62; H50; J11 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aqr:wpaper:202603 |
| By: | Kumar, Anjani; Bathla, Seema; Singh, Dhiraj K. |
| Abstract: | This study examines gendered patterns of time use in rural India using nationally representative time use surveys from 2019 and 2024, capturing shifts in labor force participation amid significant socioeconomic changes, including the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis reveals a notable rise in rural women’s labor force participation—from 32 percent to 35.9 percent in agriculture—with a 38 percent increase in their paid agricultural work time. However, this progress coexists alongside entrenched gender disparities in unpaid domestic work, where women continue to spend nearly five hours daily, limiting their engagement in nonagricultural employment, which remains male-dominated and stagnant for women. Using multivariate regression and Gelbach decomposition, the study identifies gender, landholding, education, income, and caste as significant determinants of time allocation. Yet, much of the increase in women’s work time is driven by unobserved factors, likely linked to post-pandemic livelihood adjustments and structural constraints. The findings underscore that recent gains in women’s participation reflect genuine shifts rather than statistical artefacts but caution that without addressing time poverty, gender norms, and access to diversified livelihoods, these gains may not translate into sustainable empowerment. The paper calls for integrated policy measures, including gender-responsive agricultural support, public care infrastructure, skill development, and behavioral interventions to rebalance domestic responsibilities and facilitate women’s transition to higher productivity sectors. |
| Keywords: | gender; labour; multivariate analysis; rural areas; unpaid work; surveys; time study; India; Southern Asia; Asia |
| Date: | 2026–02–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:181545 |
| By: | Kikuta, Kyosuke (Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization); Kurosawa, Hiroki |
| Abstract: | Survey research has long been a cornerstone of comparative politics, yet little quantitative evidence exists regarding its aggregate political effects in developing countries. We address this gap by arguing that respondents may misperceive academic survey interviews as state surveillance, deterring them from protesting. Leveraging the random assignment of Afrobarometer interviews, the plausibly exogenous assignment of “official-like” interviewers, and a difference-in-differences design, we show that survey interviews have sizable effects on protest in Africa. When no respondent perceived the survey as government-sponsored, interviews increased the likelihood of protests by 538% relative to the pre-treatment average (an encouragement effect). In contrast, when all respondents perceived government sponsorship, survey interviews reduced the likelihood of protests by 458% relative to the pre-treatment average (a deterrence effect). These effects are primarily driven by surveys conducted in non-liberal democracies, whereas they are different or even opposite in other political regimes. Extensive robustness and mechanism checks provide further support. These findings imply unintended externalities of survey research on real-world politics. |
| Date: | 2026–03–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:xvk6n_v2 |
| By: | Abhishek Anand (Madras Institute of Development Studies); Josh Felman (JH Consulting); Arvind Subramanian (Peterson Institute for International Economics) |
| Abstract: | New evidence suggests that India misestimated its annual economic growth rate during the past two decades. It appears that the Indian economy did not grow at a stable rate over the past two decades, as was earlier estimated, but rather boomed during the early 2000s, then decelerated after the global financial crisis and subsequent domestic shocks. Methodological revisions made in February 2026, following commendable consultations, aimed to address the challenges identified. Key Takeaways India's annual economic growth during the boom years between 2005 and 2011 may have been underestimated by about 1-1 1/2 percentage points on average, and subsequent growth between 2012 and 2023 may have been overestimated by about 1 1/2-2 percentage points. The first methodological issue leading to the misestimation is that the economy's formal sector has been used as a proxy for the vast informal sector, even though the latter was disproportionately hit after 2015 by demonetization, the introduction of the goods and services tax, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The second methodological issue causing misestimation is that the deflators for many sectors have been based on commodity prices, which have moved sharply relative to others. |
| Keywords: | GDP mismeasurement, national accounts, informal sector, price deflators, India |
| JEL: | E01 O47 C82 O11 O53 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iie:wpaper:wp26-3 |
| By: | George, Mel; Clarke, Leon; Pachauri, Shonali; Patwardhan, Anand; Pelz, Setu; McJeon, Haewon |
| Abstract: | Energy poverty indicates difficulty in securing levels of decent living energy services. This study examines the intersectional dimensions of energy poverty, with a focus on social class, geography, income, education and gender. Using a nationally representative household survey from India, it demonstrates how overlapping inequities along these dimensions leads to significant disparities in reliable access, affordable use and clean and efficient energy service delivery. Additionally, it finds that these effects differ by the type of energy service as well the dimensions of energy poverty. A counterintuitive finding emerges: urban poor households face the highest cooking fuel affordability burden due to lack of biomass fallback options. This pattern of "reverse intersectionality, " where adding rural location to a deprivation profile reduces affordability pressure through access to non-market fuel sources, challenges standard assumptions of compounding harm. Such systemic inequities extend beyond income poverty and disproportionately affect households with multiple deprivations, whereas households without any of the underlying structural inequities are always considerably better off than the national average. No prior empirical work examines whether intersectional effects vary across energy poverty dimensions or fuel types, a gap with significant implications for measurement and targeting. These findings have important implications for policy, as they suggest that interventions aimed at reducing energy poverty in India must take into account the intersecting identities and experiences of different social groups, as well as the multidimensional nature of energy poverty beyond access alone. Targeted policies and programs that address the specific barriers faced by disadvantaged communities are suggested in order to promote greater energy access and equity in India. |
| Date: | 2026–02–23 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:s6d2b_v1 |
| By: | Dabalen, Andrew L.; Fuglie, Keith; Goyal, Aparajita |
| Abstract: | This paper examines agriculture growth performance in 20 countries in West and Central Africa over 2001–23. Most countries in the region continued to depend on land expansion to raise agricultural output. However, two countries in West Africa, Ghana and Senegal, stand apart. Over these two decades, Ghana and Senegal achieved rapid improvements in yields for a wide range of crops and agro-ecological zones. Agricultural labor productivity and total factor productivity also grew at rates comparable to those of the rest of the world. The paper investigates policy choices that may have contributed to accelerating and sustaining productivity growth. Compared to other countries in the region, Ghana and Senegal deepened rural infrastructure, invested significantly more in agricultural research, extension, and development, and expanded access to financial services. These factors helped achieve wider adoption of improved inputs and technologies and stimulate new economic activity along commodity value chains. |
| Date: | 2026–02–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11323 |
| By: | Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab; Karim, Ridwan |
| Abstract: | Identifying threshold effects of extreme heat is key to understanding the true scale of climate-related risks to human capital development. This paper investigates how extreme heat shapes adolescent schooling and labor outcomes in rural Bangladesh, combining household survey data on adolescents with high-resolution temperature records to estimate the effects of prior-year, cumulative, and early-life heat exposure. We identify a precise temperature threshold at 36°C, above which each additional day reduces school attendance by 3.1 percentage points and increases child labor by 2.5 percentage points. Below this threshold, moderate heat (30-36°C) shows minimal single-year effects, though cumulative exposure over three years reveals significant negative impacts, indicating limited household adaptation. Effects are disproportionately concentrated among girls, who shift primarily toward household work rather than wage labor. Three interconnected channels drive these effects: heat-induced income shocks (11% reduction in household income), increased domestic labor demands from heat-related illness, and restrictive gender norms that amplify these impacts by magnifying girls’ household responsibilities. Extending the analysis to early-life conditions, exposure during the first 1, 000 days also reduces adolescent schooling probability by 3.4-3.8 percentage points, with strongest effects at ages one and two. Boys show slightly larger early-life effects, contrasting with girls’ greater vulnerability to contemporaneous exposure, suggesting distinct mechanisms operating through biological development versus gendered household labor allocation. The findings point to both immediate income-mediated responses and long-term developmental pathways, with implications for temperature-triggered social protection, school infrastructure investments, and early-life health interventions. |
| Keywords: | heat stress; schools; children; rural areas; labour; heatwaves; child labour; climate change; adolescents; Bangladesh; Southern Asia |
| Date: | 2025–12–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:180558 |
| By: | Canavire Bacarreza, Gustavo (World Bank); Rios, Camilo (Boston University); Triveño, Luis (World Bank) |
| Abstract: | Land-use policies shape the spatial allocation of infrastructure, services, and development and thus have direct implications for welfare. This paper examines the effects of Colombia’s municipal territorial plan updates on poverty through the lens of the housing and services channel. Using municipality-level data from 2005 to 2023 and quasi-experimental treatment-effects methods, we find that in a matched design with extensive controls, plan updates reduce multidimensional poverty by roughly 1.6 percentage points. The gains are concentrated in smaller and medium-sized municipalities, especially those implementing broader plans (EOTs) and those with mid-range administrative capacity. Channel-specific estimates point to improvements in water access and housing quality. Overall, the findings indicate that the welfare impacts of planning reforms are real but place dependent, highlighting the roles of local capacity and baseline service deficits in determining whether regulatory updates translate into observable improvements. |
| Keywords: | urban planning, land-use regulation, multidimensional poverty, Colombia, program evaluation |
| JEL: | R52 O18 I32 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18452 |
| By: | Anna Balestra (Dipartimento di Politica Economica, DISCE, & International Peace Science Center (IPSC), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy); Raul Caruso (Dipartimento di Politica Economica, DISCE, & International Peace Science Center (IPSC), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy - European Center of Peace Science, Integration and Cooperation (CESPIC), Catholic University ‘Our Lady of Good Counsel’, Tirana, Albania) |
| Abstract: | Civil conflicts impose massive costs, yet their onset determinants remain contested. This paper examines whether deliveries of major conventional weapons (MCW) precipitate new intrastate violence episodes, using annual panel data for 46 Sub-Saharan African countries (1960–2022). We construct civil conflict onset on an explicit risk set - excluding ongoing-conflict years per McGrath (2015) - and model duration dependence via cubic peace-years polynomials (Carter and Signorino, 2010). The key regressor is inverse hyperbolic sine-transformed SIPRI TIV deliveries (contemporaneous plus lags), capturing realized coercive inflows. Within-country fixed effects models reveal a robust positive association: unusual delivery spikes elevate onset probability. Placebo leads yield no pre-trends; leave-one-country-out diagnostics confirm broad-based effects. Fiscal capacity enters negatively, supporting crowding-out channels. To connect with climate-related stress pathways, we control for lagged climatic anomalies using the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and its square: these aggregate country-year terms are imprecisely estimated and do not display robust direct effects on onset once fixed effects and institutional covariates are included, but their inclusion leaves the arms-onset relationship essentially unchanged. Results survive nonlinear triangulation (logit, PPML, cloglog), wild bootstrap, and permutation inference. Cumulative availability and binned exposures display monotone escalation. Findings advance Pamp et al. (2018) conditional insight - arms amplify hazard selectively in high-risk settings - via risk-set precision and Sub-Saharan identification, while suggesting that climate-conflict links may be difficult to detect in annual national panels where climatic exposure and its institutional mediation are highly heterogeneous. Policy cautions against unconditioned MCW to fragile recipients, favoring capacity-contingent restraint. |
| Keywords: | Civil Conflict Onset, Arms Imports, State Capacity, Climate Stress (SPEI), Sub-Saharan Africa, Risk-set Estimation |
| JEL: | D74 F51 H56 O17 O55 Q54 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctc:serie5:dipe0055 |
| By: | Mario Liebensteiner; Johannes Paha |
| Abstract: | Chronic electricity shortages constrain growth and welfare in many developing countries, where load shedding rations demand. Intermittent renewables can ease shortages, but their effects depend on how infeed timing aligns with scarcity. Using high-frequency data from South Africa and an instrumental-variables strategy, we estimate the effect of wind and solar generation on electricity rationing. On average, an additional MWh of wind generation reduces load shedding by 0.28 MWh, while an additional MWh of solar generation reduces it by 0.40 MWh. Wind provides a more robust reliability contribution across the day, including the evening peak, whereas solar benefits are concentrated in daylight hours. Our estimates permit a welfare-based evaluation of renewable investment. We show that the implied reliability benefits exceed benchmark investment costs by a wide margin and are complemented by sizeable climate and local air-pollution co-benefits. |
| Keywords: | load shedding, renewable energy, rolling blackouts, South Africa |
| JEL: | L94 O13 Q41 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12540 |
| By: | Mariana Marchionni (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP and CONICET); Julián Pedrazzi (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP and CONICET); María Florencia Pinto (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP) |
| Abstract: | Structural transformation—the shift from agriculture toward industry and services—is a defining feature of economic development, with the potential to reshape gender gaps in labor markets. Yet little is known about how this process has unfolded in rural Latin America, where women face a double disadvantage stemming from both gender and rurality. In this paper, we document the evolution of rural women’s labor market outcomes in 14 Latin American countries between 2000 and 2023, drawing on harmonized household surveys that provide comparable indicators across time and space. We complement this analysis with a pseudo-event study around the birth of the first child to estimate motherhood effects, and with time-use data from Mexico to explore household mechanisms that constrain women’s labor supply. Our results show that despite important educational progress, rural women continue to lag behind rural men and urban women in employment, hours worked, and earnings. Structural transformation has contributed to declining informality and rising participation in services and formal salaried jobs, but it has not closed rural-urban or gender gaps: unpaid family labor and other precarious forms of employment remain widespread. Motherhood further exacerbates these disadvantages. While rural mothers experience smaller short-term employment drops than urban mothers and show some recovery over time, they are increasingly pushed into unpaid work and low-skilled self-employment, reinforcing long-term income gaps. Evidence from Mexico suggests that this disadvantage is not primarily driven by childcare demands—similar across rural and urban mothers— but rather by heavier burdens of household chores, home production for own consumption, and lower access to labor-saving technologies. By providing the first systematic evidence on how structural transformation interacts with motherhood in rural Latin America, our paper makes two contributions. First, it fills a gap in the literature by offering a detailed, cross-country account of rural women’s labor market outcomes over two decades in a region where evidence has been scarce. Second, it brings together insights from the literature on structural change and child penalties, showing that structural transformation alone is insufficient to generate inclusive labor market opportunities for rural women when unpaid work and caregiving responsibilities remain unequally distributed. |
| JEL: | D63 J13 J16 J22 J31 |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dls:wpaper:0360 |
| By: | Cabrera-Hernandez, Francisco (Department of Economics, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas); Duval Hernández, Robert (Open University of Cyprus) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the labor market effects of Mexico’s 2019 minimum wage reform, which doubled wages in northern border municipalities. Using other northern municipalities with smaller wage adjustments as a comparison group, we examine changes in worker transitions across employment states. The reform lowered quit rates among formally employed workers but increased them for certain informal workers. Although the wage hike did not raise overall layoffs, it altered their composition: laid-off formal workers became more likely to transition into informal employment, while new formal hires increasingly came from previously employed informal workers. |
| Keywords: | minimum wage, employment transitions, Mexico |
| JEL: | J3 J38 J63 O10 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18443 |
| By: | Heckert, Jessica; Sow, Doulo; Tranchant, Jean-Pierre; Paz, Florencia; Gelli, Aulo |
| Abstract: | Armed conflict has myriad negative consequences on the wellbeing of women and men, and its non-random nature makes it difficult to study its impacts. We examine the changes in empowerment during the period of 2017-2020 in western Burkina Faso as armed conflict moved closer. We combined data from the randomized-controlled trial of Soutenir l’Exploitation Familiale pour Lancer l’Elevage des Volailles et Valoriser l’Economie Rural (SELEVER) a gender- and nutrition-sensitive poultry production intervention, which collected the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index with geospatial- and date-specific data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project database. To evaluate the effect of conflict on empowerment, we estimated a continuous difference-in-difference model, separately for women and men, across multiple empowerment indicators, in which the primary explanatory variable describes the change in distance to conflict during this time period. Then, to determine if the SELEVER program had a protective effect when there was increased proximity to conflict, we estimated these models separately for the treatment and control groups and compare the difference in the coefficients. As conflict encroached, there was a shift in intrahousehold decision making that suggests less coordination between spouses and fewer decisions made jointly, along with a greater acceptance of intimate partner violence among women. We also found increases in other outcomes, such as men’s group membership, and women’s and men’s access to credit. These changes may be attributable to how communities responded and how humanitarian aid was delivered. We found that the SELEVER program had a protective effect on men’s work balance and the amount of time that both women and men spent working. Notably, however, women spent more time on childcare activities as conflict become closer. |
| Keywords: | gender; women's empowerment; conflicts; randomized controlled trials; fragility; Burkina Faso; Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Western Africa |
| Date: | 2025–12–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:gsspwp:180989 |
| By: | Leight, Jessica; Mukerjee, Rishabh; Kala, Peggy |
| Abstract: | Adverse nutritional outcomes for children under five remain a significant challenge around the world, and there is growing evidence that women’s empowerment is associated with better children’s nutritional outcomes. In this paper, we analyze the association between women’s empowerment and the probability of stunting, wasting, underweight status, and achieving dietary diversity for children under five using a cross-country sample of Demographic and Health Survey data from three countries in the Asia – Pacific region: Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Timor-Leste. We construct the Survey-based Women’s Empowerment (SWPER) index as well as a slightly modified SWPER index using women’s reported experience of intimate partner violence (IPV) rather than attitudes toward domestic violence (employed in the original index). Our findings suggest that women’s empowerment as captured by the SWPER index is associated with a reduced incidence of stunting, wasting and underweight status and a higher probability that children achieve MDD, though this relationship is only weakly observed in Timor-Leste. In general, the index estimated using experience of IPV shows a clearer association with nutritional outcomes, vis-a-vis the index estimated using attitudes toward IPV. |
| Keywords: | women's empowerment; gender; child nutrition; nutrition; children; women; surveys; Papua New Guinea; Sri Lanka; Timor-Leste; Oceania; Asia; Southern Asia; South-eastern Asia |
| Date: | 2025–12–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:othbrf:178756 |
| By: | Bolivar, Osmar (Analytics, Values and Intelligence Laboratory); Canavire Bacarreza, Gustavo (World Bank); Balthrop, Andrew (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) |
| Abstract: | Road infrastructure boosts economic opportunities and thus contributes to poverty alleviation. This paper investigates the causal impact of paved primary roads on poverty and income mobility in Ecuador, with particular attention to the mechanisms through which these effects materialize. exploiting variation in road expansion between 2012 and 2019, we track the construction of new major roads and link this information to socioeconomic outcomes reported in the national household survey. To achieve representativeness at a fine geographical scale, we employ the max-p region algorithm. Using staggered difference-in-differences estimators, we identify the causal effects of road infrastructure on poverty reduction and income dynamics. The findings indicate that access to paved major roads significantly reduces poverty rates overall. Middle-income households benefit from income growth following road access and these gains are attributable primarily to improvements in employment quality rather than increases in employment rates, with the largest effects concentrated in the primary sector. |
| Keywords: | road infrastructure, poverty, middle class, Ecuador |
| JEL: | I32 O18 H54 C21 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18451 |
| By: | Hashad, Reem; Jovanovic, Nina; Karachiwalla, Naureen; Kurdi, Sikandra |
| Abstract: | Global food price increases and widespread inflationary shocks negatively affect poor households’ diets, particularly those of women who are more likely to be food insecure compared to men. This study evaluates the relationship between changes in food prices triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022 and poor mothers’ diets in Egypt, a country that heavily relies on imports of staple foods and is highly vulnerable to increases in international food prices. We combine food group specific governorate-level consumer price index (CPI) data with data on diets of 2, 868 poor mothers in Egypt collected before and after the onset of the war. Additionally, we examine the potential protective effect of Egypt’s large-scale food subsidy program, Tamween, whereby specific foods are sold at subsidized prices at specific retailers. Using two-way fixed effects models, we find that changes in food prices are significantly associated with changes in the composition of mothers’ diets. Mothers were less likely to consume dairy and fish and more likely to consume pulses and sweetened beverages after the war began. Poor mothers decreased consumption of unsubsidized foods, suggesting a protective role of the Egyptian food subsidy program. This paper also provides suggestive evidence that poor mothers from households engaged in agricultural production could be slightly less responsive to changes in food prices compared to mothers from households that do not engage in agricultural production. |
| Keywords: | inflation; diet; gender; poverty; mothers; dietary diversity; price volatility; Egypt; Northern Africa |
| Date: | 2025–12–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:179553 |