查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The AuthorsIn household surveys, husbands and wives who are asked the same set of survey questions often provide different responses. The levels of concordance in responses to questions about who owns assets and makes decisions in a household may hold valuable information about household dynamics and women's well-being. These relationships may be especially indicative in the South Asian context where couples often reside in joint households with the husbands’ parents, resulting in different power structures. Using data from Nepal, we study patterns of concordance between spouses on survey questions regarding household asset ownership and decision making. We analyze these patterns separately for couples that reside with the husband's parents and those that do not. We consider concordance regarding both the asset ownership and decision making of wives and individuals other than the respondent couple. We find that discordance regarding wives’ asset ownership and decision making is both substantial and systematic. Wives are much more likely than husbands to report their own participation in asset ownership and decision making, in both joint and separate households. Regarding the involvement of others, the modal response in joint households is concordance that others own assets and make decisions; however, wives are more likely than husbands to acknowledge this. Spousal concordance that wives own assets or make decisions, and discordance in which wives report that they own assets or make decisions, are both correlated with some improved measures of wives’ well-being. In households with in-laws present, concordance that others are involved is correlated with worse outcomes for wives. These results highlight that spousal concordance is not necessarily indicative of wives’ well-being, especially in joint households.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdWe study the political behavior of family firms, the most prevalent corporate structure across the developing world. We argue that family firms are more politically active because their longer time horizons enable them to build and sustain relationships with political actors and to extract benefits from their political investments. Combining previously untapped firm-level information on family ties in publicly listed Brazilian firms with data on corporate campaign contributions, we document that family firms are 15 percentage points more likely to contribute to political campaigns compared to non-family firms — an 82 percent increase. We also find that individuals with family ties in a firm's leadership positions are more likely to make contributions. Contributions by family firms are more persistent over time, indicating that they reflect relationships. Family firms that contribute to campaigns are rewarded with state-subsidized loans, while those that fail to contribute face a penalty, suggesting a dynamic of reciprocity between business and state actors. Finally, we show that the entry of institutional investors has the potential to crowd out family ties within firms. The results provide empirical support to the claims of studies of comparative capitalism, while showing that the equilibria they describe are not necessarily static.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The AuthorsSouth-South relations have raised hopes of a new development geography – one based on solidarity and more horizontal partnerships among countries in the Global South. In recent years, however, many of these aspirations have proven far-fetched. In the case of Brazil, the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro may even suggest that the South–South hype is now over and done. However, empirical accounts of the engagement of Southern, emerging market-based multinationals across the Global South, such as that of Brazil's mining corporation Vale in Mozambique, remain scarce. One missing perspective in defining South-South relations is the agency of other actors beyond emerging powers’ governments. This article therefore goes beyond the pre-eminence of the Brazilian state. Instead, it analyses how South–South relations have been signified and used by two critical actors in the context of Vale's extractive operations in Mozambique: first, the professionals involved in corporate responsibility projects and second, the Mozambican power elites. There is a range of analyses of South–South ties, the imaginaries and hopes associated with them, and their practical possibilities which change according to the expectations, demands, and interests of different actors. We observe that Brazilian professionals in particular have built on specific cultural framings and imaginaries associated with South–South relations to claim a distinct vision and practice of corporate responsibility. Taking note of the prominent role played by Mozambique's ruling party Frelimo, we further demonstrate how Mozambican power elites have harnessed, through gatekeeping practices, the country's commodity-spurred architecture of South–South relations to reaffirm political power and amplify individual economic interests. In light of Vale's current withdrawal from Mozambique, we posit that our analysis provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the multiple makings, and implications of South-South engagement, the controversies linked to the role of Brazilian capital in Africa, and Mozambique's development through extraction.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdConventional approaches to targeting social safety net programs select beneficiaries on the basis of income or expenditure levels. We argue that these approaches neglect human diversity and agency, which can lead to counterintuitive targeting outcomes and thus a misallocation of benefits. In light of these issues, we develop an alternative method for targeting that is based on the capabilities approach, which we claim provides a more rigorous normative framework for targeting that respects both human diversity and agency. In particular, we adapt Bayesian additive regression trees for the estimation of human capabilities and demonstrate how the resulting estimates can be used to target social safety net programs. We examine the targeting implications of our method through a variety of simulation exercises and also with real data from a field experiment conducted in Indonesia. Relative to more traditional approaches – including not only the full and proxy means test, but also community-based targeting – we find that our method identifies a fundamentally different and arguably more disadvantaged group of beneficiaries.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdThis paper assesses the impact of an integrated skills training program given to youth aged 17–25-year-old living under the $2/day poverty line in the cocoa belt region of Ghana. Despite being a leading producer of cocoa and having a burgeoning youth population, it is estimated that the average age of a cocoa farmer in Ghana is greater than 50 years. To introduce young people to cocoa farming and address the potential barriers they face in order to do that; a multi-faceted skills training programme was designed with the ultimate aim of improving and diversifying youth livelihoods. The training had three key components: i) cocoa academies (which includes agricultural practices; life skills and financial literacy); ii) business incubators (including entrepreneurial training, networks, mentoring) and iii) supporting enabling environment (access to land and finance). Combining quasi-experimental methods Propensity Score Matching with Difference in Differences, we estimate the causal effect of the programme on agricultural outcomes (farming, agricultural practices), financial behaviour outcomes (saving practices, mobile banking) and livelihood outcomes (employment, income, poverty likelihood) one year after the completion of training. The results of the impact evaluation suggest that compared to the control group (youth non-participants), youths who participated in the training adopt better agricultural practices (26 percentage points (pp)), cultivate cocoa (24 pp), and are more likely to engage in farming (22 pp). We also find a 28.7% increase in income in the last seven days and hours worked by 12.4%. Youth also increase the use of banks for saving (16 pp), save using mobile money (6.7 pp), the use of Village Savings and Loan Associations (1.7 pp) and, in general, the use of mobile money for both sending and receiving transfers (10.6 pp). The sex-disaggregated sub-sample analysis provides other valuable insights on the intervention.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdThis study examines the non-linear impact of non-pastoral income on livestock herd size using balanced panel data collected through surveys in 2013, 2016, and 2018 in pastoral areas in Inner Mongolia, China. Unlike previous studies, this analysis proposes that non-pastoral income has both substitution and wealth effects on livestock herd size. Our theoretical model and empirical result reveal a U-shaped relationship between non-pastoral income and livestock herd size. Initial increase in non-pastoral income and employment partially substitutes out livestock production, resulting in decreased livestock herd size. However, with continued increase in non-pastoral income, the wealth effect begins to dominate. Due to the inability to trade pasture ownership and inefficient transfer of use rights given the current Chinese land tenure system, wealth accumulated through non-pastoral income may enable additional animal production, which leads to increased livestock herd size and possible overgrazing. Our findings suggest sustainable use and management of pastures should consider the nonlinear impact of non-pastoral income under the prevailing land tenure system.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdGender parity in education—an important global development goal—has been primarily measured through school enrollment, and the gender parity in education quality has received limited attention until recently. We address this issue by highlighting the intrahousehold allocation of education expenditure. We extend the hurdle model into a three-part model to enable decomposition of households’ education decisions into enrollment, total education expenditure, and share of the total education expenditure on the core component, or items relating to the quality of education such as private tutoring. We apply this model to four rounds of nationally representative household surveys from Bangladesh, a country that offers a unique setting in South Asia with the Female Stipend Programs (FSPs), a nationwide gender-targeted conditional cash transfer program. We demonstrate a strong profemale bias in the enrollment decision but contrasting promale bias in the other two decisions, conditional on enrollment. We argue that this contradirectional gender gap is unique to Bangladesh and that it can be explained partly by the FSPs. Both the three-part model and a separate analysis of double-difference model show that the FSPs promoted girls’ secondary school enrollment. However, the FSPs did not narrow the gender gap in the intrahousehold allocation of educational resources. Consistently, we find a gender gap in on-time completion of secondary school. Our findings collectively highlight the complex interplay of intrahousehold decisions and underscore the importance of minding the gender gap in the quality of education and implementing complementary policies to address it in developing countries.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The Author(s)How do weather anomalies affect the economy at the local level? This paper presents a new data set that links weather data to annual average night-light emission data for 24.000 0.5°× 0.5° grid-cells around the globe for the period 1992–2013. Interpreting night-light emission as a proxy for economic activity, these data allow one to investigate how weather anomalies affect economic activity. Global coverage avoids selection bias, while high spatial resolution avoids averaging out heterogeneity in local impacts at higher aggregation levels. Our data show significant effects on the local growth of night-light for storms, excessive precipitation, droughts, and cold spells. Moreover, we find evidence for significant spatial spillovers to neighboring areas. Our results suggest that these offsetting spillovers are typically local. As positive and negative effects average out in larger areas, our results call for the analysis of economic effects of weather anomalies at a high geographical resolution. Finally, our results are driven by events in lower income regions. As climate change is expected to make weather patterns more erratic, our new data can inform emerging debates on how this will affect the economy in both science and politics.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The Author(s)Place-based resettlement capacity assessments to identify potential resettlement places for climate migrants are needed to guide resettlement programs related to climate change. This article proposes and validates a conceptual climate change resettlement capacity (CCRC) framework that can be used to identify potential resettlement places for climate migrants. The CCRC framework focuses on livelihood reconstruction, as this is the primary aim of most resettlement programs and a key for successful resettlement and mitigation of impoverishment of resettled people and communities. The framework has two main dimensions – assets and conditions – as its foundation, with a set of subdimensions and generic indicators identified for both of them. Expert evaluation was used to validate the framework. The operationalization of the framework is illustrated through a case study of two regions of Ethiopia vulnerable to climate change. The framework is designed to assist international organizations, governments, planners, and policymakers in identifying both the most suitable and least suitable places to resettle communities in the face of actual or anticipated displacements due to climate change. In addition, the framework can be used by researchers to undertake theoretical and empirical studies on resettlement induced by climate change. With minor modifications, the framework can also be applied to resettlement capacity assessments for non-climate resettlement programs and research.
查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The Author(s)A growing body of evidence suggests that criminal organizations across the Global South actively exploit natural resources in the communities where they operate with important sociopolitical consequences. In this article, we investigate the case of Mexico where the incursion of criminal groups into the mining and export-agricultural sectors impacts violence at the local level. We propose two mechanisms that explain why criminal groups diversify. First, the war-profit motive suggests that competition and state repression prompt criminal organizations to look for non-traditional sources of incomes and to build up their violence-making capacities. Second, the governance motive suggests that extracting rents from key industries represents a strategy for these organizations to establish territorial control in local communities. Using homicide data from 2007 to 2011, we demonstrate that access to primary sector revenues is associated with higher levels of violence among Mexican municipalities. Using qualitative evidence from Michoacán, we show how the introduction of criminal governance systems to rural areas was a key factor in explaining why criminal groups diversified toward mining and export-agriculture.
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