Zaldivar, SamanthaRosas, NinaAcevedo, Maria Cecilia
23页
查看更多>>摘要：This paper examines the impact of a "cash plus" intervention on youth entrepreneurship and skills for-mation during the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, using evidence from a randomized control trial. The inter-vention combined a regular stream of modest cash injections with training in either technical skills, business skills, or a combination of these two types of training. The results suggest that such interven-tions can build resilience to aggregate shocks by increasing employment and entrepreneurship, building cognitive and non-cognitive skills, and protecting household consumption and investments. However, results are heterogeneous. Youth with higher initial noncognitive skills experienced positive labor market and entrepreneurship impacts, while weaker noncognitive ability, poorer youth upgraded skills more extensively, but channeled benefits into more consumption. The findings confirm the age-malleability of noncognitive skills and suggest that, in low-ability contexts, the sensitive years for skill investments may reach into early adulthood. They also highlight dynamic policy trade-offs in productivity gains and poverty reduction and indicate the relevance of noncognitive measures for targeting. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper performs a meta-analysis of the effect of financial development and liberalization on macroe-conomic growth in Latin America and the Caribbean using a total of 233 estimates collected from 21 pre-vious works. Meta-synthesis of the collected estimates demonstrates that it is probable that financial development and liberalization enhance economic growth in the region, and these policy measures have the potential to have a meaningful impact on the real economy. The synthesis results also reveal that the choice of financial variables significantly affects reported estimates in the literature. Meta-regression analysis of literature heterogeneity and test for publication selection bias produce findings that are com-patible with the synthesis results. The test results of publication selection bias also confirm that the exist-ing literature contains genuine empirical evidence of the growth-promoting effect of finance in the region. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
查看更多>>摘要：Brazil's South-South cooperation (SSC) has been accused of using a depoliticizing language of similarity and horizontality that hid structural asymmetries between very divergent realities. Focusing on a SSC project in health between Brazil and Mozambique, the Mozambican Pharmaceutical Ltd. (SMM), this article seeks to understand whether SSC can in fact re-politicize development. Drawing on a poststructuralist approach to discourse, I see re-politicization as challenging views of development in line with foreign aid (privatization in this context) and the enactment of initiatives in line with SSC principles (state ownership). I explore the political negotiations and conflict around the implementation of the SMM and argue that while initially the language of horizontality masked structural differences between Brazil and Mozambique, it was later mobilized to challenge Mozambique's desire to privatize the SMM. A compromise between stakeholders allowed the SMM to be majority state-owned, in what I say represented some degree of structural transformation. My analysis shows that development principles are neither universal (a criticism long addressed at foreign aid) nor do they have a single effect. The implementation of SSC projects that aim to effect structural transformation on highly divergent contexts will be subject to contestation, negotiation and accommodation by stakeholders, and the strategic employment of principles. The article suggests that SSC would require a more frequent engagement between partners so that SSC norms become naturalized. More broadly, it echoes part of the SSC literature that calls for a focus on development encounters, political dynamics and local constructions of reality rather than generic policy statements or principles. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
查看更多>>摘要：We present the results of a cluster-randomized controlled trial that evaluates the effects of a free, center based parenting intervention on early cognitive development and parenting practices in 100 rural villages in China. We then compare these effects to a previous trial of a home-based intervention conducted in the same region, using the same parenting curriculum and public service system, accounting for potential differences between the studies. We find that the center-based intervention did not have a significant impact on child development outcomes, but did lead to increases in the material investments, time investments, and parenting skills of caregivers. The average impact of the center-based intervention on child skills and investments in children was significantly smaller than the home-visiting intervention. Analysis of the possible mechanisms suggests that the difference in effects was driven primarily by different patterns of selection into program participation. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
查看更多>>摘要：We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of the poor in a semi-rural set-ting in Bangladesh. We use an unusually rich dataset which tracks the economic and financial trans-actions of sixty poor and very poor individuals and their families on a daily real-time basis for 12 months, from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2020. These households for the past five years have volunteered as respondents in a 'financial diaries' study known as the 'Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project'. We use a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative case studies of five diarists with a quantitative analysis of the daily data extracted from the diaries. We document the behavioral responses to COVID-19 by individual diarists, which shows the varied experiences of the poor during the pandemic. Further, we find that the pandemic had significant negative effects on the livelihoods of the poor in our study, with financial inflows and outflows, incomes and household expenditures much below pre-pandemic levels in the pandemic period. Government lockdowns in April and May 2020 led to a sharp decline in incomes and household expenditures. While incomes and expenditures recov-ered in the post-lockdown period, they remained below pre-pandemic levels. Financial transactions such as borrowing, saving withdrawals and exchange of monetary gifts came to a standstill in the lockdown period, making it difficult for households to use conventional coping mechanisms in the face of a large unanticipated decline in incomes. Exploring the coping mechanisms that households used to adjust to the declines in incomes and their lack of access to formal and informal sources of finance, we find that households drew down on their cash reserves at home as well as cutting down on non-food expenditures to protect their spending on food. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
查看更多>>摘要：A growing literature considers the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a interlinked network, connected by co-benefits and trade-offs between pairs of SDGs. Such network descriptions naturally prompt important questions concerning the emergence and identification of system-level features. This paper develops mathematical techniques to address, quantitatively, the extent to which these interlinkage networks point to the likelihood of greater progress on some SDGs than on others, the sensitivity of the networks to the addition of new links (or the strengthening or weakening of existing ones), and the existence of implicit hierarchies within Agenda 2030. The methods we discuss are applicable to any directed network but we interpret them here in the context of three interlinkage matrices produced from expert analysis and literature reviews. We use these as three specific examples to discuss the quantitative results that reveal similarities and differences between these networks, as well as to comment on the mathematical techniques themselves. In broad terms, our findings confirm those from other sources, such as the Sustainable Development Solutions Network: for example, that globally SDGs 12-15 are most at risk. Perhaps of greater value is that analysis of the interlinkage networks is able to illuminate the underlying structural issues that lead to these systemic conclusions, such as the extent to which, at the whole system level, the structure of SDG interlinkages favours some SDGs over others. The sensitivity analyses also suggest ways to quantify possible improvements to an SDG interlinkage network, since the sensitivity analyses are able to identify the modifications of the network that would best improve outcomes across the whole of Agenda 2030. This therefore indicates possibilities for informing policy-making, since the interlinkage networks themselves are implicitly descriptions of the overlaps, co-benefits and tradeoffs that are anticipated to be likely to arise from a set of existing or proposed future policy actions. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
查看更多>>摘要：While previous studies analyzed the welfare effects of smallholder participation in supermarket channels, little is known about the effects over time of supplying supermarkets on farm household incomes and diets, possible trade-offs, and opportunity costs of supermarkets on different income sources. We use panel data from smallholder vegetable farmers in Kenya to address these research gaps. The results show that supermarket contracts increase overall income by 61% and the dietary diversity score of nutritious foods by 4%, on average. Supermarket contracts also increase farm income without sacrificing income from other sources. In terms of participation dynamics, supermarket stayers and dropouts achieve overall income gains, but newcomers do not immediately benefit, due to their huge initial capital investment. Supermarket participation is not a panacea for all smallholder marketing and livelihood challenges but benefits farmers who can meet contractual requirements. (c) 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Ozawa, SachikoLaing, Sarah K.Higgins, Colleen R.Yemeke, Tatenda T....
13页
查看更多>>摘要：There is growing interest to use early cognitive ability to predict schooling and employment outcomes in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). Rather than using educational attainment and school enroll -ment as predictors of future economic growth or of improving an individual's earning potential, mounting evidence suggests that cognitive ability may be a better predictor. The relationship between cognitive abil-ity, education, and employment are essential to predict future development in LMICs. We performed a sys-tematic literature review and meta-analysis of the evidence regarding the relationship between cognitive ability and educational outcomes, and between cognitive ability and economic outcomes across LMICs. We searched peer-reviewed studies since 2000 that quantitatively measured these relationships. Based on an initial search of 3,766 records, we identified 14 studies, including 8 studies that examined the cognition-education link and 8 studies that assessed cognition-employment returns in LMICs. Identified studies showed that higher cognitive ability increased the probability of school enrollment, academic achieve-ment, and educational attainment across LMICs. A meta-analysis of returns to wages from cognitive ability suggested that a standard deviation increase in cognitive test scores was associated with a 4.5% (95% CI 2.6%-9.6%) increase in wages. Investments into early cognitive development could play a critical role in improving educational and economic outcomes in LMICs. Further research should focus particularly in low-income countries with the least evidence, and examine the impact on education and economic out-comes by cognitive domains to provide more robust evidence for policy makers to take action. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
查看更多>>摘要：We structurally estimate a model of occupational choice between wage work and entrepreneurship which allows for 'involuntary entrepreneurship' (running a business out of necessity). Involuntary entrepreneurs would earn higher income as workers but cannot access a wage job because of labor market frictions. Using Thai urban household data, we estimate the share of involuntary entrepreneurs as 19% of all businesses in our sample, with robustness runs yielding a range from as low as 7% to as high as 25%, depending on the data stratification and empirical specification. Involuntary entrepreneurs earn significantly lower income (85% less on average) than the rest of the entrepreneurs and are more likely among low-wealth and low-schooling households. Decomposing the estimated effects of the labor and credit market frictions, our results imply 18.7% excess (involuntary) entrepreneurs because of labor market frictions and 0.6% fewer entrepreneurs because of credit frictions, both relative to the unconstrained optimum. Counterfactual policy evaluations show that involuntary entrepreneurship can only be reduced by directly targeting labor market frictions, with attention paid to the equilibrium effect on the market wage. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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