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on Development |
| By: | Dang, Hai-Anh (World Bank); Lanjouw, Peter (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) |
| Abstract: | A considerable degree of poverty mobility can occur in countries even though overall, aggregate, poverty remains unchanged. This paper reviews studies on poverty mobility in developing countries, using concepts organized by four choices: the unit of analysis, the time frame, the reference distribution, and the data structure. Ten stylized facts are drawn from the literature. An illustrative application asks whether similar patterns appear in the dynamics of places, using the Subnational Poverty and Inequality Database (SPID) for 1, 949 regions in 135 economies over 2000–2024. We find that at the $4.20-a-day line, movement across fixed poverty bands points consistently towards lower poverty. Persistent high poverty is geographically concentrated in mostly African economies, and disproportionately in fragile ones, in which measurement is also considerably more problematic. Income-group upgrades go together with broader and faster regional poverty reduction. Movements in monetary and multidimensional dynamics are generally consistent. An apparent convergence pattern among initially poorer regions is sensitive to illustrative measurement-error assumptions. We further highlight data limitations and future research directions. |
| Keywords: | poverty mobility, poverty dynamics, persistent poverty, subnational data, measurement error, developing countries |
| JEL: | I32 D31 O10 O15 C81 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18953 |
| By: | Ryan Abman (San Diego State University); Leah Lakdawala (Wake Forest University); Clark Lundberg (San Diego State University and Center for Effective Global Action); Eduardo Nakasone (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) |
| Abstract: | Trade liberalization can increase schooling while reducing what children learn. We study this tension in Peru, where large unilateral tariff reductions between 2007 and 2016 generated substantial local variation in import competition. Combining household surveys with administrative records of test performance, we examine effects on children's schooling, work, learning, and later outcomes. We document a trade-off between schooling quantity and learning quality: greater exposure increased attendance but reduced relative gains in math achievement. This pattern extends from primary into secondary school, where exposed districts saw even larger participation gains, yet the relative math learning gap continued to widen as affected cohorts aged. We trace these effects to countervailing income and substitution channels. Declining protected-sector opportunities lowered the opportunity cost of schooling, while negative income shocks led more children to work while in school and shifted students from private to public schools, where teachers per student fell. In the longer run, affected cohorts were more likely to complete secondary school but shifted away from university and toward technical and professional programs, and by young adulthood were less likely to be employed and earned lower wages. Trade reforms can thus expand school access while weakening skill formation, revealing human-capital costs that enrollment metrics may miss |
| Keywords: | trade liberalization; import competition; human capital; schooling; learning; child labor; Peru |
| JEL: | F16 F13 I21 I25 J22 O15 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:wfuewp:023632 |
| By: | Bloomfield, Juanita; Balsa, Ana; Cid, Alejandro |
| Abstract: | Despite growing investment in education technology, evidence on how to integrate digital tools eectively into public education systems remains limited. Substituting classroom instruction with computer-aided learning has often failed to improve outcomes, even though schools remain the most direct route to scale educational innovations. This paper studies an alternative approach: delivering personalized educational software to households, where smartphone access is widespread, while experimentally varying school involvement. We evaluate Leo Leo, an adaptive early literacy app for young children, using a randomized controlled trial in 105 public schools in Nuevo León, Mexico. Schools were assigned to either (i) a family-only intervention providing access to the app, (ii) a combined family-and-school intervention that additionally provided teachers and principals with information on childrens progress, or (iii) a control group that received neither the app nor school support. The home-based technology generates robust gains in early literacy, with suggestive positive spillovers to early numeracy, when complemented by school support; the family-only intervention produces no signicant learning gains. Descriptive mechanism analyses are most consistent with greater child engagement with the software as the leading channel. We nd no indication that changes in parental inputs play a role, based on a household survey with a lower response than the student assessment. Overall, the results show that while home-based delivery of educational technology can enhance scalability, institutional involvement remains critical for translating scalable technology into learning gains. |
| JEL: | I21 C93 O15 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:idb:brikps:14736 |
| By: | Ahmed Pirzada |
| Abstract: | Foreign remittances now exceed 5% of GDP in nearly a third of countries. However, despite their growing importance, we know little about how these shape the direction of structural transformation. I exploit sub-national variation in remittance dependence across districts in Pakistan to consider how these affect local labour markets both through own-district exposure and through geographic spillovers. I find that moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile of own remittance dependence raises the construction labour share by 1.0 percentage point, about 9% of the mean. However, the estimate remains imprecise. In contrast, the effect due to geographic spillover is not only large but also robust across specifications. Moving from 25th to the 75th percentile of geographic exposure raises the home district’s construction share by 3.1 percentage points and decreases the retail share by 3.2 percentage points, pointing to reallocation within the non-tradables. The construction boom also tightens regional labour market, increasing wages across sectors, including manufacturing. This pattern is consistent with a local dutch-disease channel where a boom in non-tradables increases factor prices across both non-tradables and tradables, potentially affecting competitiveness of the tradables. Data on household expenditure and input-output linkages support a demand-led interpretation. |
| Date: | 2026–01–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bri:uobdis:26/848 |
| By: | Busso, Matias (Inter American Development Bank); Gonzalez-Velosa, Carolina (Inter American Development Bank); Muñoz-Morales, Juan (IÉSEG School of Management); Ruiz, Juanita (Georgetown University); Valencia, Juan (Inter American Development Bank); van der Werf, Cynthia (Inter American Development Bank) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies whether government-issued skill certification improves labor market integration when workers' skills are hard to verify. We evaluate a randomized offer of access to an occupation-specific certification program in Colombia among locals and migrants, two groups with different ex ante signaling capacity. The program certifies existing skills rather than providing training. Among locals, the offer increases employment by reducing inactivity and raises hours worked. The effects persist unevenly over time and are robust to attrition bounds and alternative outcome measures. Among migrants, estimates are less precise and provide no evidence of effects in employment, hours, or wages. The results show that a common skill certification generates different patterns of labor-market adjustment among locals and migrants. |
| Keywords: | signaling, certifications, skills, migration, Colombia |
| JEL: | J24 J61 J64 I26 O15 D82 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18963 |
| By: | Molina, Teresa (University of Hawaii at Manoa); Tan, Cara (California Policy Lab) |
| Abstract: | Using population census data, this paper documents substantial variation in municipality-level measures of upward and relative education mobility across the Philippines. Regressions that control for a rich set of covariates leave one-fifth of the variation in upward mobility and two-thirds of the variation in relative mobility unexplained. To explore the extent to which these measures capture meaningful variation that can be changed by government policy, we exploit municipality-level variation in exposure to a national conditional cash transfer program. Exposure to the program significantly increased average municipality education and upward mobility but had no significant effects on relative mobility. |
| Keywords: | intergenerational mobility, conditional cash transfers, education, Philippines |
| JEL: | J62 I24 I38 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18921 |
| By: | Kaustabh Adhya; Malavika Thirumalai Ananthakrishnan |
| Abstract: | Conflicts damage economies, but is the damage always uniform across sectors? We test whether this is the case using the Maoist-Naxalite insurgency in India’s Red Corridor between 2016 and 2020. We estimate the role of insurgency violence in affecting economic activity across non-farm (VIIRS Nighttime Lights, VNL) and land-based subsistence (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index, NDVI) sectors. Using prior disruptions to insurgents’ operational capacity as a source of exogenous variation in armed clashes between insurgent and counter-insurgent forces, we find that a 0.1-unit increase in violence exposure, equivalent to an armed clash occurring roughly 60 km closer, reduces VNL by 18.04% and weakly increases NDVI by 0.36% in the following year. We provide suggestive evidence that this divergence is driven by a reallocation of labour across sectors, showing a rise in households primarily engaged in forest-based production alongside a decline in non-farm engagement following an increased exposure to violence. The findings imply that violent conflicts can produce heterogeneous rather than uniform effects depending on actors’ incentives. They caution against mitigation policies based on violence intensity alone: doing so may risk misjudging both which sectors are at risk and how recovery unfolds if the selectivity of a conflict’s economic effects goes unaccounted for. Our main results remain causal and robust to a battery of tests. |
| Keywords: | Maoist-Naxalite Insurgency; Economic Activity; Labour Reallocation |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ukc:ukcedp:2606 |
| By: | Jesús Arellano-González; Anna Karina Pérez-Peña; Mauricio Iván Acosta-García; Miriam Juárez-Torres |
| Abstract: | This paper estimates the impact of tropical cyclones on food prices in Mexico using monthly panel data of the price indexes of different food categories and the method of local projections proposed by Jordà (2005). The impact of tropical cyclones is aproximated with estimates of the maximum sustained wind speed they reach as they impact Mexican cities. The results suggest a temporary increase in food prices following the impact of a tropical cyclone, driven primarily by increases in the prices of fresh vegetables and dry legumes. For example, a hurricane reaching a maximum sustained wind speed of 100 km/h is associated with an immediate 3.1% increase in fresh vegetable prices relative to a scenario without a cyclone. The results also suggest that food prices tend to be less sensitive to tropical cyclone impacts in cities with more developed infrastructure. |
| Keywords: | Food prices;Tropical cyclones;Local projections;Panel data |
| JEL: | E31 Q15 Q54 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdm:wpaper:2026-04 |