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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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    The short-term impacts of COVID-19 on households in developing countries: An overview based on a harmonized dataset of high-frequency surveys

    Bundervoet, TomDavalos, Maria E.Garcia, Natalia
    13页
    查看更多>>摘要：We combine new data from high-frequency surveys with data on the stringency of containment measures to examine the short-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on households in developing countries. This paper is one of the first to document the impacts of COVID-19 on households across a large number of developing countries and to do so for a comparable time-period, corresponding to the peak of the pandemic-induced drop in human mobility, and the first to systematically analyze the cross- and within-country effects on employment, income, food security and learning. Using representative data from 31 countries, accounting for a combined population of almost 1.4 billion, we find that in the average country 36 percent of respondents stopped working in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, 65 percent of households reported decreases in income, and 30 percent of children were unable to continue learning during school closures. Pandemic-induced jobs and income losses translated into heightened food insecurity at the household level. The more stringent the virus containment measures, the higher the likelihood of jobs and income losses. The pandemic's effects were widespread and regressive, disproportionally affecting vulnerable segments of the population. Women, youth, and workers without higher education - groups disadvantaged in the labor market before the COVID-19 shock - were significantly more likely to lose their jobs and experience decreased incomes. Self-employed and casual workers the most vulnerable workers in developing countries - bore the brunt of the pandemic-induced income losses. Interruptions in learning were most salient for children from lower-income countries, and within countries for children from lower-income households with lower-educated parents and in rural areas. The unequal impacts of the pandemic across socio-economic groups risk cementing inequality of opportunity and undermining social mobility and calls for policies to foster an inclusive recovery and strengthen resilience to future shocks. (C) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Long-term impacts of school nutrition: Evidence from China's school meal reform

    Fang, GuanfuZhu, Ying
    14页
    查看更多>>摘要：Child malnutrition remains a major public health concern, especially in many developing countries. This paper examines the long-term effects of a school meal program on individuals' cognitive and health outcomes in rural China. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the Student Nutrition Improvement Program (SNIP), we find that early exposure to the SNIP (ages 6-15) significantly improved children's cognitive and health outcomes in the long run. These effects are not observed in urban residents who experienced similar socioeconomic changes in the same county. Empirical tests suggest that short-term improvements in children's nutrient intakes and mothers' labor market performance were likely to be potential mechanisms. Moreover, the effects of early exposure to the SNIP are stronger among children from low-socioeconomic status families. Our results suggest that the school nutrition program could be an important investment in children's long-run human capital. This may be relevant for many developing countries today that attempt to provide or have provided subsidized school meals. (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Economies of scale of large-scale international development interventions: Evidence from self-help groups in India

    Siwach, GarimaPaul, Sohinide Hoop, Thomas
    16页
    查看更多>>摘要：Livelihoods and microfinance programs for women often show reduced impacts after scale-up. Yet, program scale-up may reduce average per capita costs and maintain cost-effectiveness despite lower impact. This paper presents evidence on the association between program scale, costs, and cost-effectiveness by analyzing how the costs of a large-scale Self-Help Group (SHG) program in India changed from its inception in 2007 to its scale-up in 2019. We use expenditure data from program's audit statements of Jeevika - the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society - and find that a 1% increase in program membership was associated with a 0.6% increase in annual program expenditures, indicating large economies of scale. Predicted costs from regressions suggest that the annual per capita program expenditures declined from $29 when the program covered 100,000 members to $5 when it reached 10 million members. Previous impact evaluations of Jeevika showed sizeable but smaller substitutions away from high-cost debt after scale-up than during the pilot, but we found that economies of scale led to similar cost-effectiveness ratios for this outcome. We also found that formation of higher-level federations is associated with lower marginal costs than setting up SHGs. However, previous evidence suggests that Jeevika did not generate average impacts on women's agency and asset ownership after scale-up. Building on a rich history of research on Jeevika, we argue that program implementers must identify key success factors in pilot programs to minimize tradeoffs between cost savings and potentially reduced impacts after scale-up. Further, we suggest investments in linking SHGs to federations to improve the cost-effectiveness of SHGs. (C) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Political competition and public healthcare: Evidence from India

    Kailthya, SubhamKambhampati, Uma
    21页
    查看更多>>摘要：In this paper, we examine the causal effect of political competition on public provision of healthcare. Specifically, we investigate whether the effect of political competition on more visible public goods (e.g. health centre access) differs from its impact on less visible public goods (e.g. health centre capacity such as doctors, medical supplies, etc.). Using granular data from three recent waves of the Indian District Level Household Survey (DLHS) during 2002-2013 and an instrumental variable approach, we find that incumbents respond to electoral competition, measured as the effective number of parties (ENP), by trading-off less visible health centre capacity for more visible access to health centres. We provide suggestive evidence that focusing on more visible health centres boosts the incumbent party's re-election prospects providing a clear motive for incumbent's action. In addition, we examine the effect of election-year cycles and the role of political alignment in healthcare provision and find compelling evidence of a political economic mechanism at work. By contrast, political competition has no measurable impact on key health outcomes. We conduct several robustness checks to ensure that our estimates are reliable. Thus, our results suggest that electoral competition must be accompanied by strong checks on accountability to improve health outcomes. (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Forest income and livelihoods on Pemba: A quantitative ethnography

    Andrews, JeffreyMulder, Monique Borgerhoff
    16页
    查看更多>>摘要：This paper offers a systematic approach to quantifying the socio-economic role of forests for 'forest-dependent' communities. Focusing on the island of Pemba (Zanzibar, Tanzania), we investigate how forest income contributes to livelihood portfolios, local inequality, and households' insurance against shocks. We also examine how forest income is affected by local institutions and household socio-demographics. We use a series of non-parametric measures in conjunction with multi-level Bayesian models supported by directed acyclic graphs to address these questions. On average, we find that 27% of household income comes from forests, with 83% of that value deriving from fuel products, and that 62% of the total value of forest products are harvested from the agroforestry scrub matrix. At the same time, forest income scales positively with income, forest-dependency scales negatively. Top income earners control similar to 4 times more forest income than low earners. However, when we consider forestry against other economic sectors, forest income reduces overall income inequality on the island. Despite forests being critical for the poor, we find it offers little insurance against shocks, especially for the vulnerable. In fact, in contrast to expectations, we find that the well-insured are the most likely to increase forest use in response to shocks. Regarding institutions, most forest products come from either government land or land owned by other private individuals, indicating weak tenure institutions on the island. Finally, young, poorly educated male-headed households, which are not integrated into markets, are the most likely to have high forest income. However, female-headed households are generally more dependent due to a lack of alternative income sources. Our results are encouraging as the use of tools from formal causal inference and detailed Bayesian modelling, in conjunction with a quantitative ethnography, build upon previous findings while improving our understanding of local socio-ecological systems. (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    The effect of armed conflict on intimate partner violence: Evidence from the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria

    Ekhator-Mobayode, Uche EseosaHanmer, Lucia C.Rubiano-Matulevich, ElianaArango, Diana Jimena...
    16页
    查看更多>>摘要：Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common form of violence against women in both conflict and non-conflict settings but in conflict settings it often receives less attention than other forms of genderbased violence (GBV), such as conflict-related sexual violence. To examine whether increased rates of IPV are linked to conflict we use data from Domestic Violence module of the Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) collected in 2008 and 2013 and spatially link them to the Boko Haram (BH) actor file of the Armed Conflict Location and Events Database (ACLED). To estimate whether the BH insurgency is associated with increases in IPV we use a quasi-experimental approach, employing a kernelbased difference-in-difference model. We also examine the effect of the BH insurgency on women's likelihood of experiencing controlling behavior from a husband or partner, women's autonomy in household decision-making and their control over their own earnings. We find that the presence of BH increases the probability that women experience physical or sexual IPV by about 4 percentage points after controlling for known correlates of IPV; partner's alcohol use, previous exposure to IPV and condoning IPV as a social norm. Further, we find controlling behaviors from husbands/partners - another form of IPV - are heightened in locations that are impacted by the BH insurgency. In these places women's risk of experiencing controlling behavior increases by 14 percentage points, indicating that the BH insurgency exacerbates another form of IPV; behaviors that are often pre-cursors to physical and sexual IPV. Our results underscore the need for policy makers to prioritize programs that respond to and prevent IPV in conflict affected settings. Effective program responses can be both integrated into sectoral programs and delivered as standalone programs alongside other interventions that provide services to communities living in conflict-affected settings. (C) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Horrible trade-offs in a pandemic: Poverty, fiscal space, policy, and welfare

    Hausmann, RicardoSchetter, Ulrich
    22页
    查看更多>>摘要：We analyze how poverty and a country's fiscal space impact policy and welfare in times of a pandemic. We introduce a subsistence level of consumption into a tractable heterogeneous agent framework, and use this framework to characterize optimal joint policies of a lockdown and transfer payments. In our model, a more stringent lockdown helps fighting the pandemic, but it also deepens the recession, which implies that poorer parts of society find it harder to subsist. This reduces their compliance with the lockdown, and may cause deprivation of the very poor, giving rise to an excruciating trade-off between saving lives from the pandemic and from deprivation. Transfer payments help mitigate this trade-off. We show that, ceteris paribus, the optimal lockdown is stricter in richer countries and the aggregate death burden and welfare losses smaller. We then consider a government borrowing constraint and show that limited fiscal space lowers the optimal lockdown and welfare, and increases the aggregate death burden during the pandemic. This is particularly true in societies where a larger fraction of the population is in poverty. We discuss evidence from the literature and provide reduced-form regressions that support the relevance of our main mechanisms. We finally discuss distributional consequences and the political economy of fighting a pandemic. (C) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Employment and sustainability: The relation between precarious work and spatial inequality in the neoliberal city

    Senoret, AndresInes Ramirez, MariaRehner, Johannes
    13页
    查看更多>>摘要：The creation of employment opportunities is a key factor to economic growth, but when pursuing sustainable development, work arrangements must also be fair and stable. In contrast, precarious employment is a common and serious limitation to prospects for development and personal well being in Latin American cities. Discussing this phenomenon in the developing world requires considering the ongoing transformation of the neoliberal urban labour market, the commodity-driven economic structure, and questioning how such features relate to the likelihood of urban sustainable development. The present study addresses precarity in urban labour markets and subjective perceptions of stability and prospects and asks how marginalisation and fragmented urban spaces in a neoliberal context relate to the structural characteristics of precarious labour. This relationship between labour and space is analysed based on survey data from different types of neighbourhoods in Chile's two largest metropolitan areas - Santiago and Concepcion - using multilevel regression and ANOVA. Our study finds that precarious employment and poor prospects replicate and reinforce typical territorial inequalities and thus constitute a serious limitation for sustainable development. We conclude that the current labour market, the features of neoliberal extractivism, and weak formal social protection are obstructing urban development that is sustainable in terms of employment. Thus, the conceptual debate on sustainability and urban policy should focus more on the negative effects of precarious employment and its particular relation to spatial fragmentation in growing urban areas. (C) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Income shock and food insecurity prediction Vietnam under the pandemic

    Vu, KhoaNguyen Dinh Tuan VuongTu-Anh Vu-ThanhAnh Ngoc Nguyen...
    27页
    查看更多>>摘要：As COVID-19 threatens the food security of vulnerable populations across the globe, there is an increasing need to identify places that are affected most in order to target aid. We propose a two-step approach to predict changes in food insecurity risk caused by income shocks at a granular level using existing household-level data and external information on aggregate income shocks. We apply this approach to assess changes in food insecurity risk during the pandemic in Vietnam. Using national household survey data between 2010 and 2018, we first estimate that a 10% decrease in income leads to a 3.5% increase in food insecurity. We then use the 2019 national Labor Force Survey to predict changes in the share of food-insecure households caused by the income shocks during the pandemic for 702 districts. We find that the small, predicted change in food insecurity risk at the national level masks substantial variation at the district level, and changes in food insecurity risk are larger among young children. Food relief policies, therefore, should prioritize a small number of districts predicted to be severely affected. (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier