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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 long-term health impact of Agent Orange: Evidence from the Vietnam War

    Le D.T.Pham T.M.Polachek S.
    16页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World BankThis paper examines the long-term health impact of Agent Orange, a toxic military herbicide containing dioxin that was used extensively during the U.S.-Vietnam war in the 1960–70s. Using a nationally representative health survey and an instrumental variable approach that addresses the potential endogeneity in the location and the intensity of U.S. defoliant missions, we report several findings. First, relative to the average prevalence rate of the sample population, we find that Vietnamese civilians located in a commune one-standard-deviation more exposed to herbicide during the war were 19.75% more likely to suffer from a health disease medically linked to Agent Orange three decades later. Second, disaggregating by disease types, we observe significant effects on blood pressure disease and mobility disability. Third, across cohorts, we find significant detrimental effect on those born before herbicide missions ended, especially among wartime children, infants, and those in utero during the 1962–1971 period.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Detailed geographic information, conflict exposure, and health impacts

    Akresh R.Caruso G.D.Thirumurthy H.
    9页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2022We expand existing research by estimating the impact of exposure to conflict on children's health outcomes using geographic information on households’ distance from conflict sites—a more accurate measure of shock exposure than the traditional approach using regional-level information—and compare the impact of exposure in utero versus after birth. The identification strategy relies on exogenous variation in the conflict's geographic extent and timing. Using multiple waves of survey data from Ethiopia and Eritrea, we find that conflict-exposed children have significantly lower height-for-age. With GPS information that enables accounting for households’ distance from the conflict sites, negative impacts of conflict exposure are two to three times larger than if exposure is measured at the imprecise regional level. Results are robust to addressing potential exposure misclassification due to migration happening between the war and the survey collection date.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Teacher pay in Africa: Evidence from 15 countries

    Evans D.K.Yuan F.Filmer D.
    29页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 The World BankPay levels for public sector workers—and especially teachers—are a constant source of controversy. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, protests and strikes suggest that pay is low, while comparisons to average national income per capita suggest that it is high. This study presents data on teacher earnings from 15 African countries. The results suggest that in several (seven) countries, teachers’ monthly earnings are lower than other formal sector workers with comparable levels of education and experience. However, in all of those countries, teachers report working significantly fewer hours than other workers, such that hourly earnings are significantly lower for teachers in only one country. The study documents non-pecuniary benefits (such as medical insurance or a pension) for teachers relative to other workers: of the 13 country surveys that report non-pecuniary benefits, teachers are more likely to receive at least one benefit than other workers in 11. Teachers who report fewer hours are no more likely to report holding a second job, although teachers overall are nearly two times more likely to hold a second job than other workers. The study documents other characteristics of the teacher labor force across countries—e.g., mostly male but less so than other workers, mostly employed by the public sector. The study also documents within-country variation across types of teacher contracts—e.g., teachers on fixed term contracts make about 70 percent of teachers on permanent contracts, with wide variation across countries. The large heterogeneity in teacher earnings premia is not easily explained by observed characteristics of the countries’ economies or education systems. Nonetheless, after taking hours and non-pecuniary benefits into account, we find no evidence that teachers are systematically underpaid in this sample of countries.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    The interrelated impacts of credit access, market access and forest proximity on livelihood strategies in Cambodia

    Felkner J.S.Lee H.Shaikh S.Kolata A....
    22页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 Elsevier LtdLivelihood diversification strategies in developing countries are influenced by access to financial credit, to markets and to forests. Understanding their interrelated impacts has important implications for development policy, for market access, credit provision, and forest conservation. Using a survey of 2,417 households in 64 villages in four Provinces in Cambodia and satellite data on forest extent, we test hypotheses and quantify the relative contributions and first-order interactions effects of market and road access, forest access, and formal and informal financial credit access on household expenditures and livelihood incomes. We test hypotheses about their statistical interactions, their relative contributions to incomes, and how their effects differ within and outside the Mekong River floodplain. Market and road access are significant with gross income and expenditures, as well as portfolio shifts to off-farm business activities. Forest access contributes significantly to gross income and expenditures. Credit utilization is significant with gross income, expenditures, off-farm business, and livestock activities. Households below the poverty line use financial credit primarily for consumption and agricultural investments, but above the poverty line for business investment and purchasing assets. Market access and financial credit are more important for incomes in the Mekong floodplain area, while forest access is more important outside it. Using dominance analysis, we find that financial credit contributes more than market or forest access to gross income, expenditures, and livestock income. However, market access is more important than credit for off-farm, on-farm and crop incomes, and forest access contributes more to gross income than formal credit access. We also test for first-order interactions between these effects and find they are statistically significant, confirming a synergistic interaction between credit, market and forest access. Market access improves the impact of credit use, as credit use improves gross and off-farm incomes with improved access to large cities, and improves livestock incomes with improved road access. Forests and roads act synergistically to improve household incomes in areas with good city market access, as forest access contributes more to gross income, expenditures and off-farm incomes in areas with good primary road access, and to on-farm incomes in areas with good secondary road access. Our findings show that market, road, credit and forest effects are interconnected and interdependent, but support each other, and significant interaction effects between forest and market access suggest that policies for poverty reduction and forest conservation should be coordinated with the development of roads to improve potential forest returns.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Does decentralization encourage pro-poor targeting? Evidence from Kenya's constituencies development fund

    Harris J.A.Posner D.N.
    11页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2022Decentralization is thought to facilitate poverty reduction by giving power over resource distribution to officials with local knowledge about where resources are most needed. However, decentralization also implies less oversight and greater opportunities for local officials to divert resources for political or personal ends. We investigate this tradeoff by exploring the degree to which Kenya's premier decentralized development program—the Constituency Development Fund–targets the poor. Using a detailed spatial dataset of 32,000 CDF projects and data on the local distribution of poverty within Kenyan constituencies, we find that most MPs do not target the poor in their distribution of CDF projects. In places where they do, this tends to be in constituencies that are more rural, not too large, and, in keeping with the findings in Harris and Posner (2019), where the poor and non-poor are spatially segregated from one another. Our analyses suggest that the poor are underserved not just because politicians lack incentives to target them with development resources but because the poor are challenging to reach. In addition to these substantive findings, we also make a methodological contribution by underscoring how aggregation to the administrative unit may truncate important variation within geographic areas, and how a point-level analysis may avoid this pitfall.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Sex-disaggregated agricultural extension and weather variability in Africa south of the Sahara

    Azzarri C.Nico G.
    17页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 The Author(s)Climate change and extreme weather shocks pose serious threats to a number of agricultural outcomes, including agricultural production, productivity, and income, especially when households depend heavily on this activity. Agricultural extension and rural advisory services are key instruments in promoting technical change, advancing agricultural productivity growth and, ultimately, improving farm livelihoods, and are expected to mitigate the negative effects of climate change and extreme weather shocks. Their mitigation effects, however, may vary depending on the sex of the recipient. This paper investigates the role of sex-disaggregated agricultural extension recipients in contexts where agricultural performance of farm households is affected by weather variability. To this aim, we match multiple rounds of panel microdata from the nationally representative, consumption-based Living Standards Measurement Study -Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA), collected in four sub-Saharan African countries, with remote sensing data on biophysical dimensions over a long-term horizon as well as year-specific weather shocks. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a micro-level dataset with individual-level information on agricultural extension services’ recipients has been assembled and examined to investigate the effects of extreme weather shocks and climate change. Applying panel data econometric estimators, the study finds that agricultural extension and advisory services translate into higher agricultural performance of farm households where women are also among the beneficiaries, as compared to non-beneficiaries and households where beneficiaries are men only. Moreover, these services can mitigate the negative effects of weather variability and climate change, controlling for country and time fixed effects as well as holding all other variables constant. These results call for national and international policies and interventions strengthening rural advisory services, especially targeted to women in settings where household livelihoods are predominantly agriculture-based and weather variability and shocks are expected to negatively affect farming activities.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Domestic workers and sexual harassment in India: Examining preferred response strategies

    Dev P.Kulkarni V.Vijayalakshmi A.
    12页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier LtdThe purpose of this research is to understand how women working as domestic workers, who are part of the informal sector, are likely to respond to sexual harassment incidents. Unlike the organized sector, women in informal and nontraditional workspaces often do not have access to formal organizational mechanisms for lodging complaints, thus making it important to understand their response strategies. To understand their likely response to sexual harassment in the informal sector, we conducted a detailed survey of 387 domestic workers in India where we presented each respondent with eleven possible sexual harassment scenarios and nine possible responses to each such scenario. We find that (a) women are most likely to employ strategies that are self-focused and with minimal support from friends/family. (b) Women complain to authorities/family only when they can furnish evidence of harassment. (c) Women are not likely to complain to their female supervisor under any circumstances. And (d) unsurprisingly, poorer, and migrant women are likely to be more silent than women who are relatively better-off about harassment. The results, in brief, show a distrust of the current systems. By examining this informal and unorganized workspace, we offer a stronger theoretical understanding of employee responses to sexual harassment and provide practical suggestions.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Decentred regulation: The case of private healthcare in India

    Hunter B.M.Murray S.F.Marathe S.Chakravarthi I....
    13页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2022In order to progress towards more equitable social welfare systems we need an improved understanding of regulation in social sectors such as health and education. However, research to date has tended to focus on roles for governments and professions, overlooking the broader range of regulatory systems that emerge in contexts of market-based provisioning and partial state regulation. In this article we examine the regulation of private healthcare in India using an analytical approach informed by ‘decentred’ and ‘regulatory capitalism’ perspectives. We apply these ideas to qualitative data on private healthcare and its regulation in Maharashtra (review of press media, semi-structured interviews with 43 respondents, and three witness seminars), in order to describe the range of state and non-state actors involved in setting rules and norms in this context, whose interests are represented by these activities, and what problems arise. We show an eclectic set of regulatory systems in operation. Government and statutory councils do perform limited and sporadic regulatory roles, typically organised around legislation, licensing and inspections, and often prompted by the judicial arm of the state. But a range of industry-level actors, private organisations and public insurers are involved too, promoting their own interests in the sector via the offices of regulatory capitalism: accreditation companies, insurers, platform operators and consumer courts. Rules and norms are extensive but diffuse. These are produced not just through laws, licensing and professional codes of conduct, but also through industry influence over standards, practices and market organisation, and through individualised attempts to negotiate exceptions and redressal. Our findings demonstrate regulation in a marketised social sector to be partial, disjointed and decentred to multiple loci, actively representing differing interests. Greater understanding of the different actors and processes at play in such contexts can inform future progress towards universal systems for social welfare.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    A sustainable livelihoods framework for the 21st century

    Natarajan N.Newsham A.Rigg J.Suhardiman D....
    15页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2022 Elsevier LtdThis paper proposes a reformulation of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) fit for the 21st century. The article explores the rise and usage of the original SLF, highlighting how its popularity among development practitioners emerged both from its practical focus, and its depoliticization of wider shifts in the development landscape at the time. Distilling the various critiques that have emerged around the use of the SLF and sustainable livelihoods approaches, the article highlights problems of theory, method, scale, historical conceptualisation, politics, and debates on decolonising knowledge. It further explores two key shifts in the global development landscape that characterise the 21st century, namely the impacts of climate change on rural livelihoods, and the shifts wrought by globalisation, before highlighting the structural and relational turns in critical development literature. In speaking to both historical critiques and more recent debates, we present a SLF for the 21st century, foregrounding a structural, spatially-disaggregated, dynamic and ecologically-coherent approach to framing rural livelihoods. We offer a framework and not an approach, hoping that that our SLF leaves open the possibility for different theoretical traditions to better work with emerging rural livelihoods.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier

    Weather shocks across seasons and child health: Evidence from a panel study in the Kyrgyz Republic

    Freudenreich H.Bruck T.Aladysheva A.
    21页
    查看更多>>摘要：? 2021 The Author(s)It has been shown consistently in the literature that early life exposure to extreme weather events affects children's nutritional status and related long-term health and well-being outcomes. The effects of weather shocks other than rainfall, as well as heterogeneous effects among population subgroups and moderators of this relationship, however, are less well understood. By combining a rich three-wave representative household panel dataset from Kyrgyzstan, a country where weather extremes such as droughts, floods but also cold spells are predicted to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change in the near future, with location-matched weather data, this paper analyzes how different weather shocks (cold winter, drought, excessive rainfall) affect the probability of stunting of children under five. Using fixed effects regression models, we find that children under 20 months are most severely affected by all three types of early life weather shocks. Most notably, we find that cold shocks experienced in winter increase the probability of stunting, and that this effect is particularly pronounced for households that mainly rely on electricity for indoor heating, potentially due to frequent power cuts occurring in winter. We do not find rural/urban differences, but we find some seasonal effects of shock exposure. Overall, effects are driven by boys, even though we do not find statistically significant gender differences. Identifying the geographical and sociodemographic subgroups of children most vulnerable to extreme weather events can support the design of targeted policies addressing child malnutrition.
      原文链接:
    • NSTL
    • Elsevier