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on Development |
| By: | Raphael Corbi (University of São Paulo); Chiara Falco (University of Milan); Luca J. Uberti (University of Milano-Bicocca) |
| Abstract: | We estimate the impact of infrastructure investment on conflict using 163 hydroelectric dams in Brazil (2002–2022). Leveraging the staggered rollout of construction in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that dams trigger sharp, temporary surges in land invasions, water disputes, and homicides. These effects peak during construction and dissipate upon operation, suggesting they stem from the displacement process rather than the public good itself. Crucially, conflict is mediated by local institutions: violence occurs only where property rights are weak and displacement affects vulnerable smallholders. Our results demonstrate that without effective compensation, state-led modernization generates destabilizing redistributive shocks. |
| Keywords: | Infrastructure, Institutional Friction, Property Rights, Conflict |
| JEL: | D61 D74 H41 O13 O22 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2026.01 |
| By: | Milagros Onofri (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP); Inés Berniell (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP); Raquel Fernández (NYU & NBER & CEPR); Azul Menduiña (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the sharp decline in fertility across Latin America using both period and cohort measures. Combining Vital Statistics, Census microdata, and UN population data, we decompose changes in fertility by age, education, and joint age–education groups. We show that the decline in period fertility between 2000 and 2022 is driven primarily by reductions in within-group birth rates rather than by changes in population composition, with the largest contributions coming from younger and less-educated women. Comparing the cohort born in the mid 1950s and the one born in the mid 1970s, we find that the decline in completed fertility reflects not only delayed childbearing but also substantial reductions in the average number of children per woman. This is driven primarily by lower fertility among mothers rather than by rising childlessness. Our findings provide new evidence on the nature of Latin America’s transition to below-replacement fertility and highlight several open questions for future research. |
| JEL: | J11 J13 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dls:wpaper:0368 |
| By: | Moustafa Feriga (University of East Anglia); Chahir Zaki (University of Orleans) |
| Abstract: | The informal sector is perceived as a buffer in crisis times in developing countries. Yet, it is generally characterized by low wages and high vulnerability. This paper explores how wages of informal workers react in the wake of a trade shock, with a special focus on the Egyptian case. To do so, we use worker and industry-level data for the tradeable sector from the Egyptian labor market panel survey between 1998 and 2006, a period during which Egypt experienced a significant trade liberalization wave. We find a significant effect on the formality wage premium where a 1-percentage point reduction in trade protection leads to 0.45 percentage points rise, on average, in the wage differential between formal and informal workers. The effect holds under different specifications and when the exogeneity assumption of industry protection is relaxed. |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:erg:wpaper:1801 |
| By: | Takeshima, Hiroyuki; Masias, Ian; Minten, Bart; van Asselt, Joanna; Naing, Phyo Thandar; Ei Win, Hnin |
| Abstract: | Resilient food and nutrition systems that support dietary diversity are central to improving welfare outcomes and fostering the formation of human capital, with lasting implications for socioeconomic development. Historically, while smallholders in developing countries have accessed food both from diversified farms or kitchen gardens, markets have increasingly become the more dominant source of diet diversity as agrifood systems continue their transformation. Yet little is known regarding how intensifying conflicts and social instability affect these linkages between agrifood systems and households’ dietary diversity. Addressing this knowledge gap is particularly relevant for countries like Myanmar, which is characterized not only by escalating conflicts in recent years but also by relatively lower levels of overall crop diversification and dietary diversity at the national level compared to many other countries in East and Southeast Asia. By using unique panel datasets from Myanmar that cover significant spatiotemporal variation in conflict intensity and addressing the potential endogeneity of crop diversification, we provide new evidence on the resilience of household dietary diversity in conflict-affected settings. We find that increased incidence of violent events at township levels (a proxy for conflict intensity) significantly lowers household dietary diversity during the post-monsoon season, particularly the diversity derived from purchased food items. These adverse effects are relatively more pronounced for healthier food items, such as pulses/legumes/nuts and vegetables/leaves. However, the negative impacts of conflicts on dietary diversity in the post-monsoon season are significantly mitigated by greater diversity in food crop production for farm households during the preceding monsoon season. Results are robust across different measurements of crop diversification and violent events. These findings suggest that in conflict-prone developing countries like Myanmar, household-level crop diversification remains an important strategy for farmers to safeguard household dietary diversity. |
| Keywords: | conflicts; diversification; diet; crop production; resilience; Myanmar; South-eastern Asia |
| Date: | 2026–03–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:gsspwp:181989 |
| By: | Hicham Doghmi (Central Bank of Morocco); Kamal Lahlou (Central Bank of Morocco) |
| Abstract: | Missing firm growth in developing countries: a firm-level analysisWhat are the key determinants of firm growth in developing countries? Using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) spanning 2010–2024, we examine the impact of three distinct categories of factors on firm growth dynamics: (1) firm-level characteristics, (2) contextual factors, and (3) access to finance. Our analysis reveals that each category is essential, with both internal capabilities and external conditions playing complementary roles in shaping firm growth trajectories. We find that firms with stronger technological capabilities achieve significantly higher growth. In contrast, firms facing greater exposure to political instability and financing constraints experience markedly slower growth, with small firms being significantly more vulnerable to such constraints than large firms. Access to bank financing at the firm and sector levels is associated with robust growth gains. These findings are not driven by omitted variable bias or reverse causality; they remain robust across a wide range of sensitivity analyses and estimation strategies, including matching techniques and an instrumental variable (IV) strategy. Exploring the mechanism underlying the adverse effects of the business environment, we show that political instability and financing constraints impede the development of firms’ technological capabilities, which in turn undermines their growth potential. Our results underscore the importance of both firm-level capabilities and the broader enabling environment in fostering private sector development in developing economies. |
| Keywords: | Firm growth; Firm characteristics; Institutional quality; Access to credit; MENA countries |
| JEL: | D22 G30 J00 L25 O12 O14 |
| Date: | 2026–03–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gii:giihei:heidwp05-2026 |
| By: | Asher, Sam (Imperial College London Business School); Jha, Kritarth (Development Data Lab); Novosad, Paul (Dartmouth College); Adukia, Anjali (University of Chicago); Tan, Brandon (IMF) |
| Abstract: | We study residential segregation and access to public services across 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S. Within cities, public facilities and infrastructure are systematically less available in Muslim and Scheduled Caste neighborhoods. Nearly all regressive allocation is across neighborhoods within cities at the most informal and least studied form of government. These inequalities are not visible in the aggregate data typically used for research and policy. |
| Keywords: | segregation, neighborhoods, place-based policies, marginalized groups, infrastructure, access to public services, electricity, schools, sanitation, India, Muslims, Scheduled Castes |
| JEL: | H4 H41 I24 J15 O15 R12 R13 R23 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18403 |
| By: | Ulimwengu, John M. |
| Abstract: | Households in low- and middle-income countries increasingly face overlapping economic, climatic, health, and conflict-related shocks that jointly erode welfare and food security. Yet many empirical and operational tools still measure shocks one at a time or aggregate them using ad hoc rules that assume equal severity and linear effects. This paper proposes a non-parametric multi-shock index (MSI) that summarizes household exposure to multiple shocks using an assumption-light, data-driven approach. The MSI construction proceeds in two steps: (i) shocks are empirically filtered based on their observed negative association with food security outcomes (anchored to the Food Consumption Score), and (ii) retained shocks are aggregated using alternative weighting schemes, including unweighted, population-weighted, and prevalence-weighted variants. We validate the MSI using multiple food security measures—Food Consumption Score (FCS), Reduced Coping Strategy Index (rCSI), Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), and Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS). An application using FAO’s Data in Emergencies (DIEM) household survey for Nigeria illustrates the approach and shows that cumulative exposure—especially systemic and compound exposure—is strongly associated with deteriorating food security outcomes. Among tested variants, the prevalence-weighted MSI provides the clearest discriminatory power and distributional sensitivity, supporting its use for targeting, monitoring, and shock-responsive programming (FAO, 2016; Maxwell et al., 2014; World Bank, 2018). |
| Keywords: | food security; diet; resilience; modelling; indicators; surveys; Nigeria; Western Africa |
| Date: | 2026–03–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:gsspwp:181990 |
| 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:gsspwp:181545 |
| By: | Gabriel Puron-Cid (Department of Public Administration - Centro de Investigacion y Docencias Economicas, A.C. (CIDE)); Heidi Jane M. Smith (Department of Economics, Universidad Iberoamericana) |
| Abstract: | Motivated by high-profile subnational fiscal crises linked to corrup-tion—such as Coahuila’s debt buildup under Governor Humberto Moreira—this chapter examines how corruption is associated with the fiscal condition of Mexican municipalities within a multi-level governance setting. Using a panel of 92 municipalities and 28 states (2018, 2019, 2021; 277 observations), the study relates survey-based corruption victimization measures to a latent municipal fiscal condition construct grounded in a financial sustainability frame-work. The empirical strategy uses structural equation modeling (SEM) with a Multiple Indicators, Multiple Causes (MIMIC) specifi-cation to estimate correlations between corruption (municipal and state) and fiscal condition while incorporating key socio-economic controls, without claiming causality. Results indicate a nuanced pat-tern: municipal corruption is negatively but not significantly associ-ated with fiscal condition, whereas state-level corruption shows a positive association with the latent fiscal condition measure, along-side evidence consistent with spillovers between state and municipal corruption. The analysis underscores the importance of embedding financial indicators in their socio-economic context and highlights policy levers focused on oversight, transparency, and capacity building to mitigate corruption risks in subnational public financial management. |
| JEL: | D73 H72 H77 |
| Date: | 2026–02–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:smx:wpaper:2026001 |