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World Development
Elsevier Science Ltd.
World Development

Elsevier Science Ltd.

0305-750X

World Development/Journal World DevelopmentSSCIAHCIISSHP
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    Sustaining escapes from poverty

    Diwakar V.Shepherd A.
    16页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdThe objectives of this research are to identify the difference between sustained and temporary poverty escapes for policy and program design, based on research in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nepal, Niger, the Philippines, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. The method adopted is the q-squared method used in studies on the dynamics of poverty, embedded in a conceptual extension of the capability approach through a risk chain analysis. The results show that key livelihood factors conducive to sustained escapes include diversification of economic activities typically spanning agricultural and off-farm sectors, and sometimes involving rural-urban migration. Important tangible assets include general asset holdings of consumer durables, farm or business equipment, livestock, and electricity. Intangible assets include the completion of at least lower secondary education of the household head, good health, and different forms of social relationships and networks. However, while livelihood strategies help improve income and build assets necessary for resilience, various risks permeate. In these risky contexts, the study finds that the enabling environment is critical in determining whether households can ultimately sustain escapes from poverty. Interactive features of this environment that are conducive to sustained escapes include context-specific pro-poor policy and infrastructure, for example around livestock insurance, climate-smart agriculture alongside predictable disaster risk management, universal health coverage, and supporting a negotiated approach to norm change. Together, these features place an emphasis on collective risk management, beyond a focus only or even primarily on inclusive growth policies. The paper argues that it is essential to understand the circumstances in which people live, from the local (micro) up to the societal (macro) contexts that can influence their ability to sustain a poverty escape, and respond in ways that together address the multifaceted sources of risk and vulnerability, which in turn allows for the less interrupted development of people's capabilities.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    From public service access to service quality: The distributive politics of piped water in Bangalore

    Kumar T.Post A.E.Ray I.Otsuka M....
    14页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdPublic service access in low- and middle- income countries is shaped by how much governments spend on services and where they choose to prioritize delivery. Accordingly, the local public goods and distributive politics literatures are largely focused on government spending and patterns of access. We argue that, even after access is granted, service quality can vary dramatically, and may vary with socio-economic and political characteristics. We provide one of the first analyses of a key dimension of service quality: intermittency, which affects vital services such as water and electricity for hundreds of millions of people. We illustrate how to study it by highlighting the specific facets of intermittency that must be managed within the network; we show that these dimensions may be manipulated separately, and that infrastructure network structure shapes the allocation of intermittency. The literature from urban India shows that access to water connections (like access to many other local public goods) is typically associated with higher socio-economic status. In contrast, we find that in our study sites in Bangalore, water flows through pipes more frequently and predictably in low-income areas—thereby underscoring the importance of studying intermittency, and service quality more generally, as phenomena distinct from access.
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    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Natural disasters and labor migration: Evidence from Nepal's earthquake

    Shakya S.Basnet S.Paudel J.
    14页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdThe 2015 earthquake in Nepal affected approximately 8 million people, resulting in an economic loss of 10 billion US dollars. We exploit the quasi-random spatial and temporal nature of ground tremors to evaluate the impact of the 2015 earthquake on international labor migration per 100,000 population in Nepal. Using different sets of difference-in-differences research designs, we show that the number of work permits issued to Nepalese individuals for international migration decreased significantly in districts severely affected by the 2015 earthquake. Results further indicate that the effect of the earthquake on international labor migration is statistically significant and negative only among males. Together, these results provide strong evidence that natural disasters induce significant changes in labor market outcomes in a developing country setting.
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    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Inflation news and the poor: The role of ethnic heterogeneity

    Nordvik F.M.
    14页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The Author(s)Incomes are more unequally distributed in ethnically diverse populations than in more homogenous ones. In this paper, I help explain this pattern by showing that unanticipated inflation reduces the income share of the poor in ethnically fractionalized countries, while increasing it in ethnically homogenous populations. I propose a mechanism to explain the result, where inflation-hedging among the rich is more prevalent in ethnically fractionalized countries because inflation is more volatile. To identify episodes of unanticipated price increases, I construct a novel data set of inflation shocks across 189 countries, using the revisions to the inflation forecasts in IMFs World Economic outlook between spring and fall reports.
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    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    The redistributive power of cash transfers vs VAT exemptions: A multi-country study

    Warwick R.Harris T.Phillips D.Goldman M....
    20页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The AuthorsLike high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) offer reduced rates and exemptions on particular goods and services in their value-added tax (VAT) systems. These policies are often motivated by distributional concerns and target items thought to take up a larger share of the budgets of poorer households. This paper explores the effectiveness of such policies in six LMICs. We estimate their impact on tax revenues, inequality and poverty, and compare these effects to existing cash transfer schemes and a hypothetical Universal Transfer (UT) funded by broadening the VAT base. To do so, we use tax-benefit microsimulation models incorporating input–output tables, allowing us to estimate the impact of exemptions on consumer prices due to VAT embedded in supply chains. We show that although preferential VAT rates reduce poverty, they are not well targeted towards poor households overall. Existing cash transfer schemes are better targeted but generally have limited coverage. A UT funded by a broader VAT base would create large net gains for the poorest households, reducing inequality and most measures of extreme poverty in each of the countries studied. Our results suggest that the widespread practice of providing special VAT treatment to certain goods and services is an expensive way of reaching poor households. In principle, expanding the VAT base and social protection schemes in tandem has the potential to both raise tax revenues and reduce poverty. Such reforms therefore warrant consideration for LMICs as they pursue Domestic Revenue Mobilisation and broader development objectives.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Boosting rural labor off-farm employment through urban expansion in China

    Sheng Y.Zhao Y.Zhang Q.Dong W....
    15页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdRural development is widely believed to interact with the structural transformation, but little is known about how this happens in developing countries. This paper explores the impact of structural transformation on rural development through the length of analyzing the role of urban growth in creating off-farm employment for rural labor in China. By combining five waves of farm surveys for 1,234 households for the period of 2000–2018 with a newly constructed urban gravity index for 370 cities, we show that rapid urban growth in China has significantly contributed to rural development by increasing off-farm employment for rural labor by 47–71 million since 2000. Moreover, the positive impact started with the emergence of a few large metropolitan cities but ended with the growth of local, relatively small cities, suggesting the interaction between structural transformation and rural development is at a nationwide level.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Corruption, institutional trust and political engagement in Peru

    Beesley C.Hawkins D.
    12页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdWidespread corruption and lack of trust in political institutions are common development problems that are likely deeply interconnected. We contribute to the existing understanding of their relationship using survey experimental methods and by investigating how different dimensions of corruption affect trust. Does grand versus petty corruption affect citizen trust in political institutions? What about corruption with positive versus negative consequences? After presenting respondents in Peru with randomly assigned information about these specific aspects of political corruption, we measure 1) attitudes about trust in government institutions and 2) behavioral engagement in anti-corruption efforts through donations to a well-known Peruvian NGO. We find that petty corruption, but not grand corruption, decreased institutional trust compared to a control. Additionally, in contrast to previous findings showing that “beneficial” corruption reduces electoral punishments for individual politicians, both positive and negative consequences decreased institutional trust. Corruption information did not alter donations to an NGO. Going beyond the correlations found in prior observational studies, this paper demonstrates a causal relationship between corruption information and institutional trust. Our results signal the importance of addressing petty corruption to improve public trust. They also emphasize important difficulties in motivating citizen action against corruption because anti-corruption messaging can decrease trust, while failing to motivate even low-cost political action.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Local corruption, total factor productivity and firm heterogeneity: Empirical evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms

    Demir F.Hu C.Liu J.Shen H....
    15页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021This paper examines the effects of local corruption on total factor productivity (TFP) of manufacturing firms in China. The empirical analysis is based on a novel corruption dataset we developed on local corruption in China at various disaggregation levels. The empirical results using fixed effects and instrumental variable estimation methods suggest that corruption has an economically and statistically significant negative effect on firm productivity. The estimated economic cost of corruption is found to be high; a one standard deviation increase in corruption reduces firm TFP by around 3.8%. We also find that firm heterogeneity shapes business reactions to corruption in a given geographical location. Increasing corruption hurts firms less when they are publicly owned, export-oriented, more profitable, have faster growth, or operate in industries with lower levels of competition. We also show that firms in cities with higher levels of human capital and higher levels of public spending on education and scientific research are less sensitive to corruption. As for transmission channels, we find that corruption is likely to hurt TFP through its negative effects on private ownership, investment rate, export intensity, innovation, leverage, employment growth, and profit.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Fewer, better pathways for all? Intersectional impacts of rural school consolidation in China's minority regions

    Hannum E.Wang F.
    17页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdPrimary school consolidation—the closure of small community schools or their mergers into larger, better-resourced schools—is emerging as a significant policy response to changing demographics in middle income countries with large rural populations. In China, large-scale consolidation took place in the early 21st century. Because officially-recognized minority populations disproportionately reside in rural and remote areas, minority students were among those at elevated risk of experiencing school consolidation. We analyze heterogeneous effects of consolidation on educational attainment and reported national language ability in China by exploiting variations in closure timing across villages and cohorts captured in a 2011 survey of provinces and autonomous regions with substantial minority populations. We consider heterogeneous treatment effects across groups defined at the intersections of minority status, gender, and community ethnic composition and socioeconomic status. Compared to villages with schools, villages whose schools had closed reported that the schools students now attended were better resourced, less likely to offer minority language of instruction, more likely to have Han teachers, farther away, and more likely to require boarding. Much more than Han youth, ethnic minority youth were negatively affected by closure, in terms of its impact on both educational attainment and written Mandarin facility. However, for both outcomes, significant penalties accruing to minority youth occurred only in the poorest villages. Penalties were generally heavier for girls, but in the most ethnically segregated minority villages, boys from minority families were highly vulnerable to closure effects on attainment and written Mandarin facility. Results show that intersections of minority status, gender, and community characteristics can delineate significant heterogeneities in policy impacts.
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    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Frontier NGOs: Conservancies, control, and violence in northern Kenya

    Mkutu K.Schetter C.Muller-Kone M.
    12页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The Author(s)During the last decades, the boundaries between humanitarian aid and development on the one side and security and physical force on the other side became increasingly permeable. Several Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) operating in the field of humanitarian aid and development established their own security measures and structures of force in order to fulfil their mandates. In this article, we deal with the particular question of why and how NGOs become involved in organizing force in nature conservation areas, and to what effect. This question is analysed using the example of the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), which is the largest NGO governing conservancies in northern Kenya. During the last two decades, NRT emerged as a state within the state: its influence and control reach far beyond the realm of conservation. To understand the role NRT is playing, we apply the approach of Frontier Studies. We shed light on the reshuffling of the organization of force in northern Kenya – habitually considered to be the role of the state – as a consequence of the establishment of conservancies by NRT. NRT's security personnel have become a decisive force in northern Kenya, which is not only providing security, but is also drawn into intercommunal violent conflicts. We aim to explain why an environmental NGO could become such an outstanding player in the (re-)organization of force, and why the state at least tolerates the expansion of NRT. With this example, we would like to draw attention to the very fact that in frontier contexts NGOs resemble non-governmental agents of the state. They become exposed to public discourses, while the government can easily absolve itself of any blame.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier