|
on Development |
| By: | Bussolo, Maurizio; Torre, Ivan; Winkler, Hernan |
| Abstract: | Jobs are the primary driver of movements into and out of poverty, yet which kinds of employment transitions are most closely associated with a household’s escape from poverty remains poorly understood. Assembling harmonized longitudinal household surveys for 41 countries that span the full range of development, we estimate the association of poverty exit, poverty entry, and welfare growth with changes in the allocation of a household’s working-age members across wage employment, employer status, and agricultural and non-agricultural self-employment. The welfare gain associated with wage work rises steeply with development while the return to non-agricultural self-employment falls, so that the two reverse rank: in the poorest economies a shift into self-employment is associated with escaping poverty at least as strongly as a shift into wage work, whereas in the richest only wage employment is. A sharp asymmetry separates the two margins of poverty: the composition of a household’s employment predicts whether it climbs out, but access to almost any type of employment predicts whether it avoids falling in. In the poorest and richest economies alike, women’s employment transitions are as strongly, if not more, associated to escaping and avoiding poverty than men’s job transitions. |
| Date: | 2026–10–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11487 |
| By: | Takaaki Masaki (Asian Development Bank); Jordan Imahori (University of Oxford); Koichi Ito (Asian Development Bank); Michalis Vousdoukas (MV Coastal and Climate Research LTD) |
| Abstract: | Coastal regions in Asia and the Pacific concentrate economic activity while facing intensifying flood risk, yet who is most exposed—and how exposure relates to local wealth—remains poorly understood. Combining satellite-derived wealth estimates at 5 km and 500 m resolution with projected coastal inundation maps under multiple scenarios across 10 countries, we find that coastal areas are on average 0.75 standard deviations wealthier than inland areas—a broad based dividend spanning urban and rural communities. Within coastal zones, however, flood exposed populations are 0.26–0.39 standard deviations poorer than their neighbors. This aggregate masks sharp heterogeneity: Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar face a persistent double burden of deprivation and exposure while the wealth gap in Cambodia worsens under high emissions. In the Philippines, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, and Pakistan, exposure increasingly concentrates in wealthier areas. Climate risk and socioeconomic dynamics are thus intertwined in country-specific ways, reshaping who is most vulnerable as emissions rise. |
| Keywords: | coastal flooding;sea level rise;asset wealth;spatial inequality;satellite imagery |
| JEL: | Q54 Q56 I32 R12 |
| Date: | 2026–10–26 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:adbewp:023856 |
| By: | Nguyen, Minh Cong; Yonzan, Nishant; Brunckhorst, Ben James; Kwizera, Sotaire; Lakner, Christoph; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Stemmler, Henry |
| Abstract: | Using harmonized household surveys from 154 countries, covering about 96 percent of the global population, this paper examines changes in geography and composition of poverty. It yields two main findings. First, global extreme poverty decreased substantially between 2003 and 2024 (by roughly 1.2 billion people), however progress slowed and became increasingly uneven between 2013 and 2024. By 2024, the poor were concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, fragile economies, rural communities, younger populations, groups with limited education, and connected with high-poverty subnational regions. Poverty overlaps strongly with drought exposure, although associations with floods, cyclones, and heatwaves are more mixed. Second, advances in urbanization and education—both strongly associated with poverty reduction in East and South Asia—have produced much smaller gains in Sub-Saharan Africa. East and South Asia had at least one decade where a 1-percentage-point increase in urbanization or greater than primary educational attainment was associated with a 10-percentage-point or greater decline in extreme poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa experienced similar changes in urbanization and education, but much more muted poverty reduction. |
| Date: | 2026–10–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11489 |
| By: | Nirash Paija; Raja Timilsina; Rabindra Nepal; D’Maris Coffman |
| Abstract: | Reliable electricity is critical for firms in developing economies, yet improvements in electricity infrastructure may not translate immediately into better firm performance. This study examines whether grid upgrades were associated with changes in electricity reliability and firm performance in Nepal. We combine three waves of the World Bank Enterprise Survey (2009, 2013, and 2023) with city-level information on major grid upgrades and predetermined industry electricity intensity from the 2006/07 Census of Manufacturing Establishments. Using a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) framework, we exploit variation across time, upgraded and comparison cities, and firms’ predetermined industry electricity intensity. The baseline estimates suggest that a one-standard-deviation increase in electricity intensity is associated with a 32.3-percentage-point larger decline in outage incidence and approximately 14.1 fewer hours of monthly outage exposure in upgraded cities relative to comparison cities. However, statistical significance is sensitive to model specification, and the outage-exposure estimate depends substantially on the composition of the comparison group. We find no statistically significant effects on real sales, employment, or labor productivity, while the positive estimates for total factor productivity provide only suggestive evidence of improvement. Pre-treatment placebo tests reveal no statistically significant differential changes, although the limited pre-treatment observations constrain their interpretation. Overall, the findings suggest that grid upgrading may improve electricity reliability, but the evidence is sensitive to identification and inference choices, and its implications for broader firm performance remain uncertain. |
| Keywords: | electricity reliability, grid infrastructure, firm performance, labor productivity, electricity intensity, difference-in-differences-in-differences, Nepal |
| JEL: | D24 L94 O12 O18 Q43 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:een:camaaa:2026-89 |
| By: | Ivan Tzintzun (Paris School of Economics); Lara Schwarz (University of California, Berkeley); Annika Lawrence (Asian Development Bank); Milan Thomas (Asian Development Bank) |
| Abstract: | As temperatures rise, understanding how extreme heat impacts student performance becomes increasingly important. This paper examines how exposure to high temperatures affects student learning and exam performance through cumulative channels. Using administrative records from Cambodia’s grade 12 national examination (2014–2023) linked with high-resolution reanalysis climate data, we estimate the impact of sustained heat during the school year on learning, proxied by exam scores. Our findings reveal that sustained exposure to high temperatures significantly reduces test scores, particularly among students in the social science track. A 1°C increase in average school year temperature lowers social science scores by roughly 0.05 standard deviations, suggesting that heat hampers the accumulation of learning over time. The results underscore that heat affects human capital formation and that adaptation capacity varies across socioeconomic and demographic groups. Students in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) tracks and those accustomed to hotter climates display partial resilience, while female social science track students remain disproportionately exposed. Policy responses can improve classroom infrastructure and scheduling to reduce cumulative heat stress. Understanding these pathways is essential for designing education systems that remain equitable and resilient in a warming world. |
| Keywords: | climate change;adaptation;high temperatures;global warming;educational attainment;high-stakes exams |
| JEL: | I21 I24 O15 Q54 |
| Date: | 2026–10–23 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:adbewp:023853 |
| By: | José L. Casco |
| Abstract: | Non-contributory pension schemes are increasingly prevalent as countries seek to combat poverty, yet their role in shaping inequality remains underexplored. This paper studies how such programs alter intra-household inequality using data from Mexican household income and expenditure surveys. The analysis first examines a local pension program in Mexico City, embedding an age-based quasi-experimental design to identify beneficiaries within a structural model of extended households. Results show that the program shifted resources from men to women and children, increasing women's bargaining power and improving the living standards of children and women by reducing their poverty rates. The paper then examines the national expansion of non-contributory pensions, exploiting regional variation in roll-out across states and the introduction of a federal program. The redistributive patterns observed in Mexico City are also evident nationally, although program effectiveness varies, with differential impacts on promoting gender equity and benefiting children. |
| Keywords: | Non-contributory Pensions;Resource Shares;Control of Resources;Inequality |
| JEL: | D10 J14 J16 J26 H55 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdm:wpaper:2026-06 |
| By: | Helena Morais (Cedeplar/UFMG); Rafael Ribeiro (Cedeplar/UFMG); Fernanda Cimini (Cedeplar/UFMG) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how political polarisation conditions the relationship between economic performance and electoral outcomes. While a large literature shows that voters tend to reward incumbents for good economic conditions and punish them for poor performance, these effects are far from universal, as polarisation functions as a contextual moderator of economic voting by altering how voters interpret economic information. We develop a formal theoretical model in which increasing polarisation expands the share of voters who are unresponsive to economic performance, reducing the economic accountability of voting. We test the model's predictions using data from 62 presidential elections in 16 Latin American countries between 1994 and 2019. The empirical analysis shows that public spending increases and inflation decreases incumbent reelection probability in low-polarisation contexts, consistent with standard economic voting models. However, these effects weaken significantly as polarisation rises and become statistically insignificant at high levels of polarisation. These findings suggest that polarisation systematically reshapes the mechanisms of electoral accountability by reducing voters' responsiveness to economic conditions. More broadly, the results highlight a trade-off inherent in democratic competition: while some degree of political polarisation may structure political choice, excessive levels of polarisation undermine the capacity of elections to discipline incumbents based on performance. |
| Keywords: | economic vote; polarisation; Latin America; theoretical model; empirical work. |
| JEL: | D72 P16 O54 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td704 |
| By: | Juan Carlos Angulo (Department of Economics, Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de Mexico); Andrea Y. Tapia (Department of Economics, Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de Mexico); Cesar Velazquez (Department of Economics, Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de Mexico) |
| Abstract: | Criminal organizations can affect local state capacity not only through violence but also through their interaction with local governments. This article examines whether criminal presence affects municipal public finances. Using 24 years of public finance data for the universe of Mexican municipalities and an event-study design, we exploit the timing of the first recorded presence of a criminal organization. We find that criminal presence is associated with lower unearmarked expenditures, driven particularly by a decline in absolute public investment and its share of total expenditure. Although the budget shares allocated to general services, personnel services, and transfers and subsidies increase, these changes do not necessarily reflect increases in absolute spending. We find no evidence of a change in own-source revenues, except in municipalities where only newly created criminal organizations are present, which exhibit higher own-source revenues. The contraction in expenditure is concentrated in municipalities with high criminal fragmentation and in those where historical criminal organizations are present. Overall, the findings indicate that organized crime is associated with a contraction in municipal expenditure and a change in budget composition. |
| JEL: | H72 K42 D73 O1 |
| Date: | 2026–10–20 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:smx:wpaper:2026013 |
| By: | Miriam Berretta (Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), L'Aquila, Italy); Adan Silverio-Murillo (School of Government and Public Transformation, Tecnológico de Monterrey) |
| Abstract: | Large infrastructure projects are promoted as development strategies, yet their social consequences are rarely studied. We examine how the construction of Mexico’s Tren Maya, a 1, 554-kilometer railway, affected violence against women. Exploiting the staggered start of construction across railway sections in a difference-in-differences design, we find that construction increased assault-related hospitalisations of women by 57.8%, driven by intimate partner violence (67.5%) and non-partner assaults (50.8%). Reported crimes of sexual abuse rose by 40.2%. We find no increase in intimate partner violence against men, while estimates for other male outcomes are not informative. Construction also reshaped local labour markets, expanding jobs in the male-dominated transport sector and female-dominated food services. These shifts are consistent with two potential channels: a male backlash against women’s employment, increasing intimate partner violence, and an influx of male workers, increasing assaults against women in public spaces. |
| Keywords: | infrastructure, railway, intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, domestic violence, Mexico |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gnt:wpaper:44 |
| By: | Zemar Hakim |
| Abstract: | I investigate the early childhood health outcomes of the Kenyan 2020–2021 desert locust invasion. To accountfor the multi-harvest setting, I build a treatment that conditions on the insect’s biological capacityto damage vegetation, the growth stage of the local crop, and subsequent vegetal decline, matching georeferencedlocust observations to the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. Children exposed inutero within 30 km of a verified damage event carry weight-for-height z-scores 0.185 standard deviationsbelow the control group, and are 26 percent more likely to be clinically wasted. Effects are strongestwhen children are exposed in the second and third trimester. Riverine livelihood zones, where householdsdepend heavily on their own harvest and have the least market cushion lose an additional 0.25 standarddeviations on weight-for-height beyond the average cropping-zone effect. The results suggest that thehealth consequences of an agricultural shock hinge on substitution as the key margin of adjustment, withhouseholds least able to replace lost harvests through markets bearing the largest nutritional penalty. |
| Keywords: | Desert locust, Child health, Wasting, Exposure Measurement, Kenya |
| JEL: | I15 O12 Q12 Q54 C18 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qed:wpaper:1546 |
| By: | Roberto Mauricio Sanchez-Torres (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)) |
| Abstract: | Lifespan is strongly shaped by standard of living. When premature mortality disproportionately affects the poor, conventional poverty measurements are likely to be underestimated, since they only account for the living, among whom poor groups are systematically underrepresented. The missing poor refers to individuals who died prematurely and who, had they survived, would have been counted among the poor. This research revisits the missing poor framework within the context of multidimensional poverty measurement, a particularly important extension given that mortality inequality has gradients beyond income alone. The objective of this study is to identify and assess the missing poor bias and its relationship with poverty as measured multidimensionally. It is shown that the missing poor bias is driven by differences in the survival probabilities of population subgroups, as well as by the weights assigned to each dimension in the poverty index. Empirical evidence from Cambodia, El Salvador and Zambia illustrates these theoretical findings, demonstrating that mortality inequality plays a crucial role in multidimensional poverty measurement, and that the missing poor bias is substantially larger in countries where mortality rates and their inequality are higher. |
| Keywords: | mortality paradox, multidimensional poverty, poverty measurement, premature mortality, selection biases |
| JEL: | I14 I32 |
| Date: | 2026–10–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctl:louvir:2026019 |
| By: | Bussolo, Maurizio; Lakner, Christoph; Nguyen, Minh Cong |
| Abstract: | This paper constructs a new global database that links harmonized labor-market information from household surveys to the welfare distributions underlying the global poverty estimates. Covering 150 economies and 96 percent of the world’s population between 2003 and 2024, the database places individuals in the global welfare distribution while recording their education, employment status, and sector of work. This linkage allows comparing labor market outcomes between poor and non-poor populations within and across countries over two decades. Decomposing growth in welfare per person between 2003 and 2024 into welfare per worker, the employment rate, and the working-age share shows that welfare per worker accounts for all the welfare growth in the bottom three quintiles of the global distribution, where the contribution of employment is negative. Relative to the nonpoor, poor workers are less educated, substantially more likely to be self-employed, and far more concentrated in agriculture, while employment rates are broadly similar and poor workers work somewhat fewer hours. At the $3.00 poverty line, 61 percent of poor workers have only primary education or less, 79 percent are self-employed, and 66 percent work in agriculture, compared with 25 percent, 35 percent, and 20 percent among the nonpoor. Counterfactual simulations suggest that narrowing gaps in education, employment type, and sector would reduce poverty substantially, and at the $3.00 line by more than raising employment. At the higher $8.30 line, raising employment matters as much, and nearly all of its effect comes from women’s employment. |
| Date: | 2026–10–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11488 |