Recent World Development Articles
Geography of Gender Gaps: Regional Patterns of Income and Farm–Nonfarm Interaction Among Male- and Female-Headed Households in Eight African Countries
Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt | Göran Djurfeldt | Johanna Bergman Lodin
Summary: Many studies stress the existence of gender based income gaps across African production systems. Contextualizing such gaps in relation to regional characteristics, production systems, and nonfarm linkages challenges this. Household level data from 21 regions across eight African countries, collected in 2002 and 2008, are used to analyze production dynamics, market participation, and nonfarm linkages. Gender gaps are absent in 17 of the regions regardless of the overall regional income level. The results suggest that neither poverty nor growth in general discriminates against female headed households, but that causes of gender discrimination need to be found in specific regional contexts.
Child Poverty in an Emergency and Conflict Context: A Multidimensional Profile and an Identification of the Poorest Children in Western Darfur
Jean-François Trani | Tim I. Cannings
Summary: The conflict in Darfur represents a complex emergency situation. Challenges to humanitarian intervention are multiplied by inadequate information on local living conditions. This study applies the Alkire and Foster multidimensional poverty index to a set of dimensions of deprivation identified through a household survey, including dimensions usually missing such as economic exploitation, physical safety, empowerment, and psychological wellbeing. Our findings show that children with disabilities, particularly girls, are more often multidimensionally poor. We argue that multiple domains of deprivation complicate efforts to tackle poverty among children in Western Darfur and require a more comprehensive and coordinated approach by relief agencies.
Contemporary Processes of Large-Scale Land Acquisition in Sub-Saharan Africa: Legal Deficiency or Elite Capture of the Rule of Law?
Laura German | George Schoneveld | Esther Mwangi
Summary: Growth of emerging economies, policy commitments to biofuels and volatility in commodity prices have contributed to a marked increase in the pace and scale of foreign direct investment in land-based enterprises in the global South. This paper explores the relationship between policy and practice associated with customary rights protections in the context of large-scale land acquisitions through a document review and case study analyses from Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia. Findings point to the difficulty of safeguarding customary rights even in countries providing “best practice” legal protections, and point to the fundamental role of human agency in shaping outcomes.
Bad Governance and Poor Children: A Comparative Analysis of Government Efficiency and Severe Child Deprivation in 68 Low- and Middle-income Countries
Björn Halleröd | Bo Rothstein | Adel Daoud | Shailen Nandy
Summary: Research on democratization and quality of government (QoG) has highlighted the impact of poor governance on people’s living conditions. Simultaneously we have gained knowledge about global child poverty. Here these two strands of research are brought together. We use survey micro-data from 68 low- and middle-income countries (N=2,120,734) measuring deprivation of seven basic human needs (safe water, food, sanitation, shelter, education, health care, and information) among children. We show that QoG affected four of the deprivation indicators. In contrast, democratization appears to have no impact on the extent of child deprivation.
Summary: Using a unique dataset that I collected in three villages in semi-arid India, I analyze the role of perceived returns to education and social norms regarding the ideal age of marriage in the educational plans, i.e., aspirations, parents have for their children. I show that perceptions of the ideal age of marriage significantly constrain the education that parents aspire to have for their daughters, but not their sons. Furthermore, aspirations are sensitive to the perceived returns to higher education in the case of boys, but not in the case of girls.
Chao Li | John Gibson
Summary: China’s local populations can be counted in two ways: people with hukou household registration from each place, and people actually residing in each place. For most of the first three decades of the reform era the hukou count denominated per capita GDP figures. Output and living standards were overstated in coastal provinces and understated in the interior. The distortion grew bigger as the non-hukou migrants increased to over 100 million. Much of the apparent increase in inter-provincial inequality is a statistical artifact caused by this distortion. The recent switch to using the resident count to denominate GDP introduced new distortions.
Summary: How can policymakers circumvent obstacles to taxing economic elites? This question is critical for developing countries, especially in Latin America where strengthening tax capacity depends significantly on tapping under-taxed, highly-concentrated income and profits. Drawing on diverse literatures and extensive fieldwork, the paper identifies six strategies that facilitate enactment of modest tax increases by mobilizing popular support and/or tempering elite antagonism. Case studies from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia illustrate the effect of these strategies on the fate of tax reform initiatives. The analysis builds theory on tax politics and yields implications for research on reform coalitions and gradual institutional change.
Bart Victor | Edward F. Fischer | Bruce Cooil | Alfredo Vergara | Abraham Mukolo | Meridith Blevins
Summary: In the capability approach to poverty, wellbeing is threatened by both deficits of wealth and deficits of agency. Sen describes that “unfreedom,” or low levels of agency, will suppress the wellbeing effects of higher levels of wealth. We introduce another condition, “frustrated freedom,” in which higher levels of agency belief can heighten the poverty effects of low levels of wealth. Presenting data from a study of female heads of household in rural Mozambique, we find that agency belief moderates the relationship between wealth and wellbeing, uncovering evidence of frustrated freedom.
Rethinking Microentrepreneurship and Business Development Programs: Vulnerability and Ambition in Low-income Urban Caribbean Households
Summary: Current development thinking and practice emphasize the potential of microentrepreneurship for poverty reduction. To effectuate this potential, many business development programs (BDPs), particularly focusing on microfinance and training, were implemented. This article questions the relevance of BDPs for microentrepreneurs through a comparative study on home-based economic activities (HBEAs) in two Caribbean cities. It shows that BDPs are relevant to only a minority of entrepreneurs. This can be explained by variations in household vulnerability and entrepreneurial ambition. The article therefore argues that analyzing microentrepreneurship’s relevance for poverty reduction requires an understanding of microenterprises in the broader context of household livelihood characteristics.
Dirk Michael Boehe | Luciano Barin Cruz
Summary: This paper investigates why and under which institutional circumstances female membership in microfinance institutions (MFI) improves MFI performance in terms of debt repayment. Specifically, this paper theorizes that female membership in MFIs improves the MFI’s performance through enhanced debt repayment, especially under adverse cognitive and regulatory institutional conditions. We draw upon unique qualitative and quantitative data covering 26 microfinance projects in 22 African, Eastern European, Latin American, and Asian countries. This study has implications for the microfinance literature in that it challenges the widely held assumption that female participation has a positive effect on MFI performance under all institutional circumstances.
Corrigendum to “The Pitfalls of Water Privatization: Failure and Reform in Malaysia” [World Development 40(12) (2012) 2552–2563]
Privatization of Education and Labor Force Inequality in Urban Francophone Africa: The Transition from School to Work in Ouagadougou
Anne E. Calvès | Jean-François Kobiané | Afiwa N’Bouké
Summary: As in many other francophone African countries, there has been increased privatization of the school system in Burkina Faso since the 1990s, especially in urban areas. Based on a unique retrospective survey conducted in Ouagadougou, this research investigates a largely unexplored issue in Africa: the impact of private schooling on subsequent transition to paid employment. While private schooling accelerates entry into the paid labor market and increases the odds of getting a waged first job, multivariate analyses reveal that this advantage is caused by differentials in the educational attainment and socio-economic origin of school-leavers from private and public schools.
Reyes Aterido | Thorsten Beck | Leonardo Iacovone
Summary: We show the existence of an unconditional gender gap in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, when key observable characteristics of the enterprises or individuals are taken into account the gender gap disappears. In the case of enterprises, we explain our finding with differences in key characteristics and a potential selection bias. In the case of individuals, the lower use of formal financial services by women can be explained by gender gaps in other dimensions related to the use of financial services, such as their lower level of income and education, and by their household and employment status.
The Impact of International Standards Certification on the Performance of Firms in Less Developed Countries
Micheline Goedhuys | Leo Sleuwaegen
Summary: This paper examines the effects of international standards certification (ISC) on both productivity and sales performance for firms from a wide set of countries exhibiting different degrees of institutional development. Against a large dataset of manufacturing firms operating in 59 countries we find that ISC raises productivity and sales performance of firms through efficiency gains and quality signaling, with the effects being larger in countries where market supporting institutions are weak. The largest gain in performance comes from direct productivity improvements helping firms to climb the technological ladder and closing the productivity gap with firms based in developed countries.
Summary: We argue that an understanding of the political drivers of economic growth needs an explanation of the political dynamics around the transition from one growth phase to another, and that the political drivers of early stage growth accelerations are different from that of growth maintenance. Informal institutions are likely to play a role in growth acceleration, while formal institutions of credible commitment, the provisioning of public goods and the overcoming of co-ordination failures will be more important in growth maintenance. We present empirical evidence drawn from country case-studies and cross-country econometric analysis that provides support to our theoretical propositions.
Summary: The Human Development Index (HDI) has been criticized for not incorporating distributional issues. We propose using census data to construct a municipal-based HDI that allows exploring the distribution of human development with unprecedented geographical coverage and detail. Moreover, we present a new methodology that allows decomposing overall human development inequality according to the contribution of its subcomponents. We illustrate our methodology for Mexico’s last three census rounds. Municipal-based human development has increased over time and inequality between municipalities has decreased. The wealth component has increasingly accounted for most of the existing inequality in human development during the last 20years.
Summary: In developing countries, assessments of progress toward development goals are based increasingly on household surveys. These are inappropriate for obtaining information about the poorest. Typically, they omit by design: the homeless; those in institutions; and mobile, nomadic, or pastoralist populations. Moreover, in practice, household surveys typically under-represent: those in fragile, disjointed households; slum populations and areas posing security risks. Those six sub-groups constitute a large fraction of the “poorest of the poor”. We estimate that 250 million are missed worldwide from the sampling frames of such surveys and from many censuses and their omission may well lead to substantial biases.
Can One-to-One Computing Narrow the Digital Divide and the Educational Gap in China? The Case of Beijing Migrant Schools
Di Mo | Johan Swinnen | Linxiu Zhang | Hongmei Yi | Qinghe Qu | Matthew Boswell | Scott Rozelle
Summary: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a high profile initiative to narrow the inequality of access to ICT and improve educational performance. However, there is little empirical evidence on its impacts. In order to assess the effectiveness of OLPC, we conducted a randomized experiment of OLPC with Chinese characteristics involving 300 third-grade students in Beijing migrant schools. Our results show that the program improved student computer skills by 0.33 standard deviations and math scores by 0.17 standard deviations. The program also increased student time spent using educational software and decreased student time spent watching TV. Student self-esteem also improved.
Peter Nunnenkamp | Hannes Öhler | Tillmann Schwörer
Summary: The accountability of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has various dimensions. From an economic perspective, official financiers, private donors as well as aid recipients could expect more charitable output from NGOs, if less efficient organizations were squeezed out of international development activities. We consider administrative overheads as an important aspect of NGO efficiency. Our empirical analysis focuses on the effects of administrative overheads, public funding and the interrelations between these two factors on the probability of “market” exit for almost 900 US based NGOs with overseas aid activities since the mid-1980s. We find that larger administrative overheads increase the probability of exit for NGOs receiving any public funding. However, this effect weakens with increasing shares of public funding of NGOs.
Innovation, Intellectual Property Rights, and Economic Development: A Unified Empirical Investigation
John Hudson | Alexandru Minea
Summary: Two important strands of literature investigate the way the effect of intellectual property rights (IPR) on innovation depends on either the initial IPR level or the level of economic development. We expand on this by studying their joint effect, in a single, unified, empirical framework. We find that the effect of IPR on innovation is more complex than previously thought, displaying important nonlinearities depending on the initial levels of both IPR and per capita GDP. The policy implications of this are examined and include the conclusion that a single global level of IPR is in general sub-optimal.
Victor Lledó | Marcos Poplawski-Ribeiro
Summary: This paper investigates economic and institutional constraints to fiscal policy implementation in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that planned fiscal adjustments or expansions are less likely to be implemented the larger they are, the more fragile the rule of law in the country, and the weaker the institutions framing the implementation of the annual fiscal budget. The findings support ongoing efforts in the region to enhance forecasting capacity; adopt realistic fiscal plans; and strengthen governance and public financial management procedures, with a focus on accounting, reporting, and external controls of government’s fiscal accounts.
Fiscal Incentives, Public Spending, and Productivity – County-Level Evidence from a Chinese Province
Summary: This article develops a new empirical approach to analyze the potential link between fiscal decentralization and economic efficiency based on a stochastic frontier model with spatial error correction. Fiscal decentralization is not considered to be a source of growth in itself but an incentive scheme that impacts local governments’ spending as a means to improve investment conditions. Panel data for Zhejiang Province during 1995–2005 indicate that revenue and expenditure decentralization both promoted allocative efficiency. Yet, the impact of fiscal incentives decreases with rising income inequality among county governments.
Jens Friis Lund | Moeko Saito-Jensen
Summary: Based on case studies of two communities implementing participatory forestry in Tanzania and India, we revisit the issue of elite capture of participatory initiatives. Our cases illustrate how initial elite capture of the participatory initiatives is circumvented over time through various forms of resistance orchestrated by initially disadvantaged groups. Based on the cases we argue that studies of elite capture should be based on in-depth and longitudinal empirical investigations that carefully characterize forms and outcomes of elite capture and consider both the changing dynamics of social settings and the perceptions held by the people under study.
Doris A. Oberdabernig
Summary: Investigating how lending programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) affect poverty and inequality, we explicitly address model uncertainty. We control for endogenous selection into IMF programs using data on 86 low- and middle income countries for the 1982–2009 period and analyze program effects on various poverty and inequality measures. The results rely on averaging over 90 specifications of treatment effect models and indicate adverse short-run effects of IMF agreements on poverty and inequality for the whole sample, while for a 2000–09 subsample the results are reversed. There is evidence that significant short-run effects might disappear in the long-run.
Are Remittances a Substitute for Credit? Carrying the Financial Burden of Health Shocks in National and Transnational Households
Christian Ambrosius | Alfredo Cuecuecha
Summary: This paper tests for the assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households using Mexican household panel data. While the occurrence of serious health shocks that required hospital treatment doubled the average debt burden of exposed households compared to the control group, households with nuclear family members (a parent, child, or spouse) in the US did not increase their debts due to health shocks. This finding is consistent with the view that remittances respond to households’ demand for financing emergencies and make them less reliant on debt-financing.
Jakob Vestergaard | Robert H. Wade
Summary: The global economic crisis raised the urgency of reforming the Bretton Woods organizations in order to get more “buy in” from developing countries. But the “voice” reforms announced in 2010, heralded as a major shift in favor of developing countries, left them severely under-represented relative to their weight in the world economy, both collectively and many individually. This paper reveals how the World Bank and representatives of western states manipulated the process to make voting power changes appear substantial. The paper then discusses alternative voting power systems for the Bank, in light of the generally accepted need to enhance the legitimacy of the organization.
Joseph Francois | Miriam Manchin
Summary: We work with a panel of bilateral trade, exploring the influence of infrastructure and institutional quality on patterns of trade with a Poisson estimator, extended with the Baier and Berstrand method for multilateral resistance and accounting for firm heterogeneity and selection. Trade depends on institutional quality and exporter and importer access to well developed transport and communications infrastructure. While we emphasize exports of developing countries, low institutional and infrastructure quality in the South also limits market access for exports from the North. The pattern of results implies that policy emphasis on developing country market access while not providing enough support for trade facilitation, may be misplaced.
The Global Food Crisis: Disaster, Opportunity or Non-event? Household Level Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire
Ralitza Dimova | Monnet Gbakou
Summary: Using 2008 LSMS data for Côte d’Ivoire, we study the welfare implications of the price increase of key imported staple food—rice—and consider the consumption smoothing effect of locally produced food and cash crop varieties. While middle income urban households are adversely affected by rising rice prices, relatively poor rural households benefit. Availability of local staple alternatives leads to further income redistribution from net consumers toward net producers of staples. By contrast, the ability to generate income from tropical cash crops not only improves the welfare of rural households, but helps smooth the consumption of urban households.
ALFRED M. WU | WEN WANG
Summary: This study is the first attempt to examine the determinants of expenditure decentralization at sub-provincial levels in China. The Chinese central government gives detailed guidelines to local governments on public finance, but, ironically, their expenditure assignment is far from being well-regulated. Differences in fiscal decentralization on the expenditure side are enormous among local governments. Employing a panel dataset of 1995–2006, we provide empirical evidence that transfer dependency negatively affects expenditure decentralization in Chinese local governments. It suggests that intermediate governments, i.e., provincial governments, may have “grabbed” central grants for self-interests.
Philippe Louis | Alex Seret | Bart Baesens
Summary: This paper contributes to the literature by investigating whether the increased focus on financial self-sustainability of microfinance institutions has been disadvantageous to the target audience. We investigate the association between social efficiency and financial performance using a comprehensive data set that includes 650 microfinance institutions. A self-organizing map methodology is used to fully capture the existing heterogeneity among institutions. The results show that we cannot support the hypothesis that there exists a trade-off. On the contrary, we find evidence of a significant, positive relationship between social efficiency and financial performance.
Summary: This paper presents a methodology to measure vulnerability to asset-poverty. Using repeated cross-section data, age–cohort decomposition techniques focusing on second-order moments can be used to identify and estimate the variance of shocks on assets and, therefore, the probability of being poor in the future. Estimates from the Ghana Living Standard Surveys show that expected asset-poverty is a reliable proxy for expected consumption-poverty. Applying the methodology to eight Demographic Health Surveys countries, households in rural areas are found to be unambiguously more vulnerable to poverty than those in urban areas.
Does Economic Upgrading Lead to Social Upgrading in Global Production Networks? Evidence from Morocco
Summary: This paper contributes to the global production networks (GPNs) literature by analyzing the relationship between economic upgrading (increase in the value added of production) and social upgrading (improvements for workers in GPNs). It does so by drawing on primary data from Moroccan garment supplier firms, showing that economic upgrading can lead to social upgrading with mixed outcomes. Especially in a fast fashion model, the most advanced form of economic upgrading, functional upgrading, often translates into social upgrading and downgrading simultaneously for different workers. This is due to contradictory commercial requirements imposed by global buyers in GPNs.
Private Donations, Government Grants, Commercial Activities, and Fundraising: Cointegration and Causality for NGOs in International Development Cooperation
Dierk Herzer | Peter Nunnenkamp
Summary: NGOs could help scale up foreign aid efforts by mobilizing private donations. However, fundraising activities do not necessarily result in higher donations, and substitution effects between different sources of revenue may diminish the overall pool of NGOs’ resources. This paper examines the long-run determinants of private donations to US-based NGOs engaged in international development cooperation using panel cointegration techniques. According to our results, a marginal dollar spent on fundraising yields almost five dollars in new donations in the long-run. Government grants crowd in private donations in the long-run, whereas commercial revenues crowd out donations in the long-run.
Corrigendum to ‘Displacement and Erosion of Informal Risk-Sharing: Evidence from Nepal’ [World Development 43 (2013) 42-55]
Available online 15 May 2013
Lai Ming Lam | Saumik Paul
Corrigendum to “Disrupting Demand for Commercial Seed: Input Subsidies in Malawi and Zambia” [World Dev. 45 (2013) 75–91]
Available online 10 May 2013
Nicole M. Mason | Jacob Ricker-Gilbert
Summary: This paper examines the consequences of participation in unenforceable international human rights institutions for economic and political development. Specifically, we study the empirical relationship between foreign aid, human rights, and participation in the United Nations Human Rights Treaties (HRT). We find that HRT participation has a significant positive effect on a country’s foreign aid receipts, but precipitates a decline in domestic human rights institutions. Taken together, the results suggest that rewarding participation in international human rights agreements with foreign aid is detrimental to human rights in recipient countries.
The Privatization of the Fixed-Line Telecommunications Operator in OECD, Latin America, Asia, and Africa: One Size Does Not Fit All
F. Gasmi | A. Maingard | P. Noumba | L. Recuero Virto
Summary: This paper challenges the idea that there exists a unique model of reform for infrastructure sectors which is equally applicable across regions and countries and expected to yield similar outcomes. We perform an empirical analysis of the impact of privatization of the fixed-line activity of the traditional telecommunications operator on network expansion, tariffs, and labor efficiency in a 1985–2007 data set on a selection of 108 countries that we split into regional sub-samples. We find that the performance of privatization depends to a large extent on regional factors related to market profitability, wealth, and geography.
Elena Ianchovichina | Antonio Estache | Renaud Foucart | Grégoire Garsous | Tito Yepes
Summary: To meet its infrastructure needs, the Middle East needs to invest, on average, around 6% of its GDP annually, although with differences across countries. This could lead to direct job creation of about 2.5 million direct, indirect and induced infrastructure-related jobs. Because of significant differences in financing opportunities, fiscal constraints could be binding for the poorest countries. The effectiveness of job creation from infrastructure will depend on the quality of targeting and on cost subsidies as well as on the effectiveness of (re)training programs. Managing unrealistic expectations will also matter as infrastructure jobs will help but will not solve the region’s employment challenge.
Returning to Dakar: A Mixed Methods Analysis of the Role of Migration Experience for Occupational Status
Cora Leonie Mezger Kveder | Marie-Laurence Flahaux
Summary: This paper applies mixed methods to examine the occupational status of Senegalese return migrants and nonmigrants in Dakar and to explore the role of differential migration experiences for occupational outcomes. The analysis uses quantitative data from the MAFE-Senegal survey (2008) and qualitative semi-structured interviews with return migrants. While returnees do not seem to drop out of the labor market, they are overrepresented among the self-employed. However, self-employment is not necessarily associated with positive migration experiences. Rather than a choice, self-employment appears to be a “last resort” for individuals who were not able to accumulate capital or prepare their return.
Fredrik N.G. Andersson | David L. Edgerton | Sonja Opper
Summary: China’s unbalanced growth strategy has seemingly fostered growing inter-regional growth disparities and there is little evidence of wealth trickling down from richer provinces to poorer provinces. Standard convergence tests, however, may be ill specified to detect underlying long-term growth trends in small samples due to the pronounced and frequent inter-regional short-term fluctuations. Our paper suggests a novel approach to distinguish between these long-term growth trends and short-term fluctuations. Based on provincial data from 1978 to 2009, our results indicate that China’s provinces only diverge over the short-term. Over the long term, provinces cluster into two converging growth clubs.
Summary: Over the past decade, there have been a number of initiatives to promote a more systematic integration of “quantitative” and “qualitative,” or “Q-Squared,” approaches to poverty analysis in the Global South, and a large body of literature had emerged. The objective of the article is to present a (selective) review of this empirical work with a view to demonstrate the value it has added for understanding and explaining poverty. The evidence strongly suggests that Q-Squared approaches have aided our understanding of the characteristics of the poor and the causes of poverty.
Jee Young Kim
Summary: What happens when transnational private regulation of labor standards is put into practice on the factory floor? This article addresses this question with field research data on Vietnam’s apparel and footwear industries. The Vietnamese case shows that code enforcement and implementation are highly political processes fraught with conflicts and attempts at evasion. The consequences, moreover, contradict the conventional wisdom of low regulatory effectiveness; heightened legal awareness and strengthened labor law enforcement may result from these processes. This study illustrates two mechanisms (conflict and ritualistic compliance) that can raise the effectiveness of private regulation.
Summary: This paper examines the social determinants of the rule of law by comparing Jamaica and Barbados, two countries with many similarities, but with divergent outcomes concerning the rule of law. The research takes a comparative historical approach, specifically investigating the origins of the divergence of the rule of law between Jamaica and Barbados by focusing on the late colonial period (1937–1966). Using new data collected from archival research, state legitimacy is identified as the key factor that helps explain the divergent trajectories of the rule of law in Jamaica and Barbados post-independence. Going beyond state-based explanations of the rule of law, the analysis suggests that the rule of law not only depends on characteristics of the state, but also on characteristics of society.
Adeel Malik | Bassem Awadallah
Summary: A singular failure of the Arab world is the absence of a private sector that is independent, competitive, and integrated with global markets. This paper argues that private sector development is both a political and regional challenge. In so far as the private sector generates incomes that are independent of the rent streams controlled by the state, it can pose a direct political challenge. It is also a regional challenge, since fragmented markets deny scale economies to firms and entrench the power of insiders. We argue that overcoming regional economic barriers constitutes the single most important collective action problem facing the region since the fall of Ottoman Empire.
Governance of Global Value Chains in Response to Food Safety and Certification Standards: The Case of Shrimp from Vietnam
Nhuong Tran | Conner Bailey | Norbert Wilson | Michael Phillips
Summary: We use global value chain (GVC) theory to understand governance of Vietnam’s shrimp farming industry. We describe this GVC as buyer-driven with important food safety standards imposed by governments of importing countries and new certification systems promoted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Governance relations are clear between governments in importing countries and Vietnam, and between importers and NGOs. Governance relations become more fragmented further down the chain where large numbers of small-scale producers and traders operate. This fragmentation may adversely affect access to the most lucrative markets and have the unanticipated effect of marginalizing small-scale farmers and traders.
Kjetil Bjorvatn | Mohammad Reza Farzanegan
Summary: This study argues that resource wealth is a key factor for understanding income effects of demographic transition. We develop a simple model highlighting how the income effect of increased labor supply may depend on resource rents, and provide empirical evidence that support the theoretical predictions. Using panel data covering the period from 1982 to 2006 for more than 120 countries, we find a negative interaction effect between resource wealth and demographic transition on national income. Moreover, the negative interaction effect does not depend on institutional quality, and is found also across different samples.
Boris Branisa | Stephan Klasen | Maria Ziegler
Summary: We examine the effect of social institutions related to gender inequality on development outcomes. By characterizing and applying the recently developed Social Institution and Gender Index (SIGI) and its sub-components, we show how social institutions related to gender inequality are associated with female education, child mortality, fertility, and governance (corruption) in developing countries, even when controlling for other socioeconomic and cultural factors. Policies focusing on affecting gendered development outcomes need to consider inequalities in social institutions as a constraint and consider promoting ways to reduce gender inequalities in social institutions.