analyzing nutritional impacts of policies an empirical study for malawi summary widespread malnutrition in developing countries calls for appropriate strategies presupposing good knowledge about nutritional impacts of policies little previous work has been carried out in this direction especially with respect to micronutrients we use representative household data from malawi and develop a demand systems approach to estimate income and price elasticities of food demand and nutrient consumption these estimates are applied for policy simulations given multiple nutritional deficiencies income related policies are better suited than price policies to improve nutrition while consumer price subsidies for maize improve calorie and mineral consumption they can worsen vitamin consumption in urban areas

the effect of income on child development this study presents estimates of the effect of parental income on children s cognitive social and emotional development the effect of current income is small especially when income is treated as endogenous the effect of permanent income is substantially larger but relatively small when compared to the magnitude of recent policy induced changes in income family background characteristics play a more important role than income in determining child outcomes policies that affect family income will have little direct impact on child development unless they result in very large and permanent changes in income

commodity price shocks and child outcomes the 1990 cocoa crisis in cote d ivoire abstract we look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 cote d ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers children suffered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment labor height stature and morbidity using precrisis 1985 88 and postcrisis 1993 data we propose a difference in difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes whereby we compare children of cocoa producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village this causal effect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine hence human capital investments are definitely procyclical in this context we also provide evidence of gender bias against young girls with respect to education and health care we finally argue that the difference in difference variations can be interpreted as private income effects likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints

impacts in uganda of rising global food prices the role of diversified staples and limited price transmission this study assesses the potential impact of rising world food prices on the welfare of ugandan households while uganda experienced sharply higher food prices in 2008 as a landlocked food exporting country the causes of those price changes were mainly regional and indirect rather than directly transmitted from global markets using trade volumes food prices and household survey data we describe how uganda unlike some other countries is partially shielded from direct impacts of global food price movements although the majority of ugandans are net food buyers the adverse impact at household level of rising global prices is moderated by the relatively large quantity and range of staples consumed that come from home production moreover several of these are not widely traded some population groups in uganda are vulnerable to rising food prices however primarily those for whom maize is an important staple including those dependent upon humanitarian relief and the urban poor only a relatively small group of ugandan households will benefit directly and immediately from rising food prices the significant net sellers of food crops constituting between 12 and 27 of the population in this assessment we do not estimate the level and extent of wider second round effects from these higher prices jel classification q18 r22

economywide impacts of climate change on agriculture in sub saharan africa two possible adaptation scenarios to climate change for sub saharan africa are analyzed under the sres b2 scenario the first scenario doubles the irrigated area in sub saharan africa by 2050 compared to the baseline but keeps total crop area constant the second scenario increases both rainfed and irrigated crop yields by 25 for all sub saharan african countries the two adaptation scenarios are analyzed with impact a partial equilibrium agricultural sector model combined with a water simulation module and with gtap w a general equilibrium model including water resources the methodology combines the advantages of a partial equilibrium approach which considers detailed water agriculture linkages with a general equilibrium approach which takes into account linkages between agriculture and nonagricultural sectors and includes a full treatment of factor markets the efficacy of the two scenarios as adaptation measures to cope with climate change is discussed due to the limited initial irrigated area in the region an increase in agricultural productivity achieves better outcomes than an expansion of irrigated area even though sub saharan africa is not a key contributor to global food production rainfed irrigated or total both scenarios help lower world food prices stimulating national and international food markets

measurement errors in agricultural data and their implications on marginal returns to modern agricultural inputs the low uptake of modern agricultural technologies in sub saharan african countries has encouraged researchers to revisit the returns to or profitability of these agricultural inputs a related strand of literature is exploring the allocative efficiency of these factors of production in african agriculture however all these studies rely on self reported agricultural data which are prone to nonclassical measurement errors the errors in these data are correlated with the true values of variables of interest in this article we investigate the implication of measurement errors in self reported agricultural input and production data on marginal returns to these modern agricultural inputs we consider a generic two sided measurement error problem where both production and inputs can be measured with error and these errors can be correlated we employ both self reported and objective measures of production and plot size to compute output elasticities under these alternative measurement scenarios we find that using self reported production and plot size overestimates output elasticities and hence marginal returns to modern agricultural inputs including chemical fertilizer and improved seed these results are noteworthy in terms of informing conventional technology diffusion strategies as well as in view of revisiting existing presumptions about the profitability of modern agricultural inputs

cyclicality mortality and the value of time the case of coffee price fluctuations and child survival in colombia recent studies demonstrate procyclical mortality in wealthy countries but there are reasons to expect a countercyclical relationship in developing nations we investigate how child survival in colombia responds to fluctuations in world arabica coffee prices and document starkly procyclical child deaths in studying this result s behavioral underpinnings we highlight that 1 the leading determinants of child health are inexpensive but require considerable time and 2 as the value of time declines with falling coffee prices so does the relative price of health we find a variety of direct evidence consistent with the primacy of time in child health production

income inequality size of government and tax progressivity a positive theory abstract i investigate the relationship between income inequality and the composition of public spending in redistributive policies i extend the meltzer richard model of voting over redistribution allowing voters to choose not only the amount of a uniform lump sum transfer but also the level of provision of a public good the governmental budget is balanced thus these two choices determine the tax rate on labor income the multidimensionality of the policy space implies that there is no condorcet winner i adopt a citizen candidate model of electoral competition to tackle this problem i show that the progressivity of the tax system is increasing in the mean to median income ratio while the size of the government need not be this means that higher income inequality implies a more progressive tax system but in contrast with the traditional analysis it may also result in a smaller size of government such results are consistent with the most recent findings in the empirical literature

inequality redistribution and growth a challenge to the conventional political economy approach abstract this paper reconsiders the conventional political economy view that 1 1 more unequal societies tend to make more redistribution and 2 2 more redistribution is harmful to growth we present a number of theoretical arguments suggesting that the two previous implications are not necessarily true and that the empirically observed negative correlation between inequality and growth might just come from the fact that more unequal societies tend to redistribute less which in turn is actually detrimental to growth

a new view of agricultural productivity in sub saharan africa and economic growth in sub saharan africa despite this recognition little is known about the issue a few studies have presented rudimentary analyses of agricultural productivity in africa but the more analytically sophisticated studies of cross country productivity have essentially ignored africa part of the problem has been the lack of an appropriate output aggregate for african agriculture in the present paper i develop such an aggregate and present a new view of cross country agricultural productivity in africa contrary to previous findings i find evidence of a notable recovery of african agricultural productivity during the 1980s although the sustainability of that recovery is in question

child labor and schooling responses to anticipated income in south africa abstract forward looking unconstrained households make child labor and schooling decisions considering their permanent income and weighing the relative returns to child time in various potential activities the timing of anticipated changes in income should have no effect on child labor and schooling in a setting where households can borrow against permanent income however this study documents large increases in schooling attendance and declines in total hours worked when black south african families become eligible for fully anticipatable social pension income as an explanation the data are most consistent with liquidity constraints for black elder males forcing rural families into less schooling for boys than they would choose absent the constraint perhaps because of schooling costs

commodity prices and intra household labor allocation volatility in commodity markets poses a distinct risk to farmers in developing countries who rely on cash crop agriculture we combine a time series of international coffee prices with a long running panel on coffee growing households in vietnam to investigate coping mechanisms employed by farmers in a transitioning economy we find that households cope with lower coffee prices by increasing wage labor of adults with children and adolescents substituting for adults on the farm heterogeneity analysis indicates a stronger substitution pattern among women ethnic minorities and households with fewer assets a variety of robustness checks corroborate these findings account of this finding should be taken in formulating and implementing social protection and inclusive growth policies

changing food prices and rural welfare a nonparametric examination of the cote d ivoire changes in and absolute levels of agricultural pricing and food production may affect consumer food prices producer incentives income distribution and government revenue the nature of these relationships and effects are of especial policy concern in developing countries nonparametric estimation techniques are applied to 1985 living standards household survey data of the cote divoire to estimate the impact of a food price change on income distribution this study examines how food prices are related to agricultural income across rural income in the country in examining a different country considering a wider variety of crops estimating engel curves and applying confidence bands the analysis extends work of a s deaton analysis indicates that while food grown for home consumption is important net food sales and a percentage of total expenditure seem inconsequential at any level of welfare agricultural households grow crops to meet their consumption needs and sell the surplus only when harvests are especially bountiful income elasticities with respect to prices are therefore small these findings suggest that no simple set of small price changes will significantly increase the marketed surplus of food and that structural adjustment policies may be pursued without concern for devastating poor households research is needed into ways of increasing food production through methods other than price changes results also indicate that price increases do not necessarily benefit only large well off farms and that a wide range of issues may be considered with nonparametric estimation techniques

a biological theory of social discounting we consider a growth model in which intergenerational transfers are made via stocks of private and public capital private capital is the outcome of individuals private savings while decisions regarding public capital are made collectively we hypothesize that private saving choices evolve through individual selection while public saving decisions are the result of group selection the main result of the paper is that the equilibrium rate of return to private capital is at least 2 3 percent more than the rate of return to public capital in other words social choices involving intertemporal trade offs exhibit much more patience than individual choices do jel d11 d71 d91 h43 policy issues often involve intergenerational trade offs one highly publicized and polarizing example concerns the appropriate response to global warming while nordhaus 1994 concluded that there was no need to enact draconian policies to reduce co 2 emissions immediately stern 2006 insisted that the situation was in fact dire the difference in position can be attributed almost exclusively to the rates of time preference assumed by these two authors nordhaus used a few percent based on estimates deriving from private economic behavior while stern essentially set it equal to zero on the basis of a philosophical stance it then becomes clear that co 2 emissions should be taken seriously if for some reason private rates of time preference are too high when applied to public decisions since such decisions should then be made on the basis of a lower rate 1

cash transfer programs and agricultural production the case of malawi cash transfer programs are increasingly utilized to combat poverty and hunger while building the human capital of future generations however they have been faulted by some for failing to build the productive capacity of current generations this article analyzes the impact of the malawi social cash transfer scheme on agricultural production the results show strong increases in ownership of productive agricultural assets in time devoted to household farms and in food types consumed from own production coupled with a sharp decrease in ganyu labor which is often used as a coping mechanism once food stores have been depleted these results are most likely achieved by helping farmers overcome credit and liquidity constraints this research shows that cash transfer programs can help the capacity of extremely poor farm households to expand agriculture production even if the goal of the program is focusing on other dimensions of poverty

distributional effects of growth and public expenditures in africa estimates for tanzania and rwanda summary in this paper we explore the effects of fiscal policies and growth on measures of household welfare across the distribution of expenditures for two african countries rwanda and tanzania we explore the effect of government expenditures on expenditure growth in each quintile of the expenditure distribution and the effect of growth for each group we find that the benefits of growth are concentrated among the better off sectors of the population in these two countries perhaps to the detriment of the poorer sectors by looking at the effects within a country and across different groups of households and administrative entities we exploit variation in expenditures and growth across and within regions of each country to estimate the elasticities of expenditure with respect to fiscal expenditure and mean expenditure growth at different points of the expenditure distribution using household survey data and government expenditure data at the district level we find that overall mean expenditure growth benefits the top expenditure groups the welfare spillovers are mostly present for top 20 of the expenditure distribution with the middle of the distribution in tanzania responding slightly to these spillovers public social expenditures do not appear to affect inequality considerably but do tend to work toward decreasing inequality however mean expenditure growth is related to increases in inequality in the sense that the richest sectors of the population benefit the most from growth we find that the growth elasticity of expenditure is only above one for the top quintile in both countries in tanzania a 1 increase in average household expenditure is related to a 1 96 expenditure growth in the top quintile and 0 43 in the third quintile in rwanda a 1 increase in average household expenditure is related to a 1 93 increase in household expenditure in the top 20 of the distribution

blessing and curse the gold boom and local development in colombia abstract i provide a microeconomic channel for the resource curse using the boom in colombian gold mining as a case study identification strategies exploit trend changes in international gold prices after 2002 and regional gold production capabilities as measured by water supply the majority of gold mining in colombia is placer mining and water is important for industrial gold production i find that the gold boom decreases local unemployment in the short term by 3 5 however given the lack of capacity to effectively ban child labor these economic opportunities are also available for children my results indicate that because of the gold boom the probability that a child works increases by 9 3 and school attendance decreases by 23 9 capital accumulation seems to be permanently hurt since the probability that a child is lagging three or more grades behind increases by 9 these effects are only discernible after 2002 the human capital results can be retrieved from different databases furthermore results are robust to a series of robustness checks restricting the sample to gold producers and their neighbors using alternative sets of controls and restricting the sample to non migrants resources are a blessing in the short term but a curse for long term economic growth if human capital is productive

how do oil producers respond to giant oil field discoveries abstract the classical hotelling model predicts that the optimal extraction level rises immediately after an unexpected resource discovery whereas in reality there are substantial adjustment costs in petroleum production and an average lag of several years between a discovery and the start of production using a large panel of country level production data and a difference in differences identification approach i show that domestic production levels respond before a newly found oil field comes on line and that this increase is driven by non opec producers consistent with different responses of opec and non opec drilling activity offshore fields and exceptionally large super or mega giant fields are also more likely to raise country level production given that domestic petroleum consumption rises by less in response to a discovery at least part of the increase in production seems to go into net oil exports

education demand and age at school enrollment in tanzania in tanzania actual school enrollment takes place 2 or 3 years later on average than the legal enrollment age in this paper we develop a micro economic model that allows us to disentangle various explanations for such delays we simultaneously estimate enrollment age and schooling duration by maximum likelihood techniques using data from the human resource development survey carried out in tanzania in 1992 93 a particularly interesting result of our econometric analysis is that boys and girls follow fundamentally different patterns of schooling our model suggests that this could be due to different return from pre school training in the family s economic activities or it could be related to the wish to have girls ready to be married as early as possible

optimal consumption of a nonrenewable resource with stochastic discoveries and a random environment we present a general model for the optimal consumption of a nonrenewable resource under two kinds of uncertainties one source of uncertainty is in the resource discovery process and the other is in the economic environment that affects resource supply and demand conditions such as exhaustion and development of a substitute the problem is formulated as one of optimally controlling a storage process with markov additive discoveries the optimal value of the resource stock is characterized as the solution of a functional equation and the existence of an optimal consumption policy is established it is shown that in a given environment the optimal consumption rate is increasing and the resource price is decreasing in the level of proven reserves a counterexample is provided to show that better environments may in fact mean higher prices and lower consumption rates finally a variety of examples is given to illustrate the scope and applicability of the general model

market aspects in product life cycle inventory methodology abstract in planning a product life cycle inventory analysis the correct choice of methodology often depends on market information this paper discusses a number of points in the life cycle inventory methodology choice of product alternatives geographical system boundaries technological levels and co product allocation rules where the market aspect becomes obvious and where a disregard for these aspects may lead to serious flaws in the results

the impact of export crop production on nutritional status in cote d ivoire abstract in exploring the implications of the commercialization of agriculture on nutrition in cote d ivoire this paper found that sales of export crops combined with the domestic marketing of food crops represent the most important sources of incomes for rural households rich and poor alike increasing the price of the heavily taxed export crops cocoa and coffee will raise incomes throughout the income distribution increasing the profitability and productivity of cotton will not only raise rural incomes but will also have positive distributional consequences a reduced form nutrition model was estimated in order to examine the impact of income as well as the allocation of land to the production of the major export crops rather than to food crops on nutritional status results indicate that higher incomes improve long term nutritional status and that the share of land allocated to export crops does not affect the nutritional status of preschool aged children even when controlling for income in combination these facts suggest that raising incomes through exploiting comparative advantage in export crops such as coffee cocoa and cotton will have positive nutritional outcomes in cote d ivoire

economic growth and the demand for education is there a wealth effect abstract human capital investment in developing countries is thought to be significantly constrained by household resources this paper studies the relationship between household resources and the demand for education using recent household survey data from vietnam the data cover a period 1993 1998 of exceptional income growth in vietnam during which secondary school enrollment rose substantially using consumption expenditures to measure household wealth we find a positive and significant relationship between changes in wealth and changes in the demand for education this wealth effect persists even after controlling for locality specific factors such as changes in education returns and the supply and quality of schools and for the opportunity costs of schooling

models of political economy of growth a short survey abstract this paper surveys recent work on the political economy of growth after presenting the general structure of a model of politics and growth with heterogenous agents we discuss the role of dynamic strategic political behavior the existence of multiple equilibria and how endogenous political participation interacts with the dynamics of wealth distribution and economic development

the impact of the rebound effect of the use of first generation biofuels in the eu on greenhouse gas emissions a critical review an important objective of the mandated blending of biofuel in conventional gasoline and diesel in the eu is reducing greenhouse gas ghg emissions an important assumption thereby is that biofuels replace the production and consumption of oil however recent literature challenges this assumption because an increased use of biofuels will lower oil prices and therefore result in increase crude oil consumption this so called rebound effect offsets the expected ghg emission saving effects of using biofuels a review of eight studies mainly on current and future us biofuel policies provides insights in the current state of research into this topic showing a wide range of values of the rebound effect of biofuel use depending among others on the biofuel policy the applied method and the model parameter assumptions generally estimated rebound effects are negative in the country where biofuel use is being promoted i e the use of 1 unit of biofuel reduces oil consumption by less than 1 unit units on energy basis the rebound effects in other countries are always positive biofuel use reduces oil consumption by less than 1 unit so the total fuel consumption is increasing the net global rebound effect is usually positive which means that ghg emissions savings are not achieved as much as usually is assumed or emissions may even increase own estimations with the global magnet computable general equilibrium model indicate a global rebound effect of the 10 biofuel blend mandate in the eu in the year 2020 of 22 30 i e the use of 1 unit of biofuel reduces global oil consumption by 0 78 0 70 units this means that ghg emissions will not be reduced as much as usually is assumed or may even increase these results show that rebound effects can significantly lower the effectiveness of biofuel policies in reducing ghg emissions

through time changes in family income inequality the effect of non synchronous regional growth factors affecting the dynamics of income inequality in the us during the 1948 92 period are examined specifically it extends the work of maxwell who found that through time changes in family income inequality are related to demographic and industry factors and draws upon the insights of other researchers who have recognized that the us national economy is actually a composite of semi autonomous regional economies the results provide strong evidence that family income inequality is related to the pattern of regional economic growth and the relative proportion of unmarried families

you get what you pay for schooling incentives and child labor abstract can schooling promotion deter child participation in hazardous forms of child labor we examine two interventions intended to promote schooling and deter child labor for children associated with carpet factories in kathmandu the first intervention provides scholarships for school related expenses the second provides the scholarship and an in kind stipend conditional on school attendance paying for schooling expenses promotes schooling but only at the beginning of the school year when most schooling expenses occur the scholarship combined with the conditional stipend increases school attendance rates by 11 decreases grade failure rates by 46 and reduces carpet weaving by 48 financial support lasted one year effects on schooling and weaving do not persist past the year of support you get what you pay for when schooling incentives are used to combat hazardous child labor

the economics of exploration for non renewable resources abstract the literature on exploration for non renewable resources is surveyed following a brief synopsis in section 2 section 3 focuses on issues related to the world market for resources section 4 considers more microeconomic supply related issues linked to the exploration of the small region or play section 5 turns to the small but growing literature on exploration as a learning process related to r d the latter sections pay particular attention to empirical and policy aspects

school subsidies for the poor evaluating the mexican progresa poverty program abstract this paper evaluates how the progresa program which provides poor mothers in rural mexico with education grants has affected enrollment poor children who reside in communities randomly selected to participate in the initial phase of the progresa are compared to those who reside in other control communities pre program comparisons check the randomized design and double difference estimators of the program s effect on the treated are calculated by grade and sex probit models are also estimated for the probability that a child is enrolled controlling for additional characteristics of the child their parents local schools and community and for sample attrition to evaluate the sensitivity of the program estimates these estimates of program short run effects on enrollment are extrapolated to the lifetime schooling and the earnings of adults to approximate the internal rate of return on the public schooling subsidies as they increase expected private wages

toward a green revolution in africa what would it achieve and what would it require the current global food crisis has reemphasized the costliness of africa s failure to achieve food security and poverty reduction the instrument by which other more successful developing countries achieved these outcomes was a green revolution in agriculture while previous research has provided largely discursive appraisals of the viability of an african green revolution this article adopts a more rigorous methodology to address that question first an economy wide multimarket model augmented with existing poverty growth elasticities is developed to assess the likely impacts of a rapid acceleration in food production of the kind witnessed in previous green revolutions on food prices consumption and demand farmer revenue and poverty our results suggest that a rapid growth in staple production together with more integrated regional markets would reduce food prices by roughly 20 40 for consumers and 10 20 for producers among the major crops this translates into a large rise in farm revenues annual agricultural growth rates of 6 5 or higher broader income growth and food security and over 70 million africans being lifted out of poverty the article concludes by emphasizing the kinds of fundamental policy actions and resources that would be required for achieving these outcomes

child health and household resources in south africa evidence from the old age pension program this paper presents nonparametric evidence on the effects of the expansion of the old age pension program in south africa on child health did this increase in household resources improve child health and nutrition does the gender of the recipient of the pension affect its impact the answers to these questions have very important policy implications there is evidence that inadequate nutrition during childhood and even in utero affects long term physical development as well as the development of cognitive skills this in turn affects productivity later in life see partha dasgupta 1993 john strauss and duncan thomas 1998 t paul schultz 1999 in the united states the evidence suggests that monetary transfers to the poor have very little impact on child welfare janet currie 1995 susan mayer 1997 however the effects of parental income and monetary transfers on child outcomes are likely to be of greater magnitude among poor households in developing countries the south african pension program provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate the possible effects of such a monetary transfer this paper exploits the rapid increase in the coverage and benefits of the old age pension program in south africa which took place in the early 1990 s anne case and angus deaton 1998 at the end of the apartheid era the government committed to achieving parity of benefits and eligibility requirements between whites and africans this was achieved mostly by increasing the benefits received by the africans in 1993 80 percent of african women above age 60 and 77 percent of african men above 65 received the pension the maximum benefit of 370 rands per month aproximately 3 per day was equal to half of the minimum wage and about twice the median income per capita in rural areas due to living arrangements inherited from the apartheid era close to onethird of african children under the age of 5 currently live with a pension recipient children who live with a pension recipient tend to come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds as a consequence they tend to be smaller than other children their age to estimate the effect of receiving a pension on the anthropometric status of children this paper exploits the fact that height reflects accumulated investments in child nutrition the larger the proportion of her life during which a child is well nourished the taller she will be given her age due to the expansion of the program in the early 1990 s individuals of qualified age became more likely to receive a pension and the benefits became substantially larger thus children born after the expansion of the program are more likely to have spent a larger fraction of their lives wellnourished if they live with a pension recipient to the extent that the pension resulted in improved nutrition in this paper i present nonparametric evidence of the program s effect on nutrition based on this observation

household welfare and the pricing of cocoa and coffee in cote d ivoire lessons from the living standards surveys cocoa and coffee are the most important crops in cote d ivoire until recently the difference between world and administered producer prices provided an important source of government revenue as a result of a continued decline of world prices of both crops however the ivoirien government was forced to cut producer prices in half because 40 percent of ivoirien households grow either cocoa or coffee this cut can be expected to have a considerable impact on the welfare level of these households the authors use the 1985 living standards measurement survey to estimate the welfare effects of producer price changes for ivoirien households permitting an evaluation of the probable consequences of the recent price cut using nonparametric econometric techniques they find that although many households will suffer losses of income the cuts will not have adverse distributional effects cocoa and coffee farmers are scattered throughout the income distribution but most are concentrated in the middle

anatomy of a crisis the causes and consequences of surging food prices although the potential causes and consequences of recent rising international food prices have attracted widespread attention many existing appraisals are superficial and or piecemeal this article attempts to provide a more comprehensive review of these issues based on the best and most recent research as well as on fresh theoretical and empirical analysis we first analyze the causes of the current crisis by considering how well standard explanations hold up against relevant economic theory and important stylized facts some explanations turn out to hold up much better than others especially rising oil prices the depreciation of the u s dollar biofuels demand and some commodity specific explanations we then provide an appraisal of the likely macro and microeconomic impacts of the crisis on developing countries we observe a large gap between macro and micro factors which when identifying the most vulnerable countries often point in different directions we conclude with a brief discussion of what ought to be learned from this crisis

a martingale characterization of the price of a nonrenewable resource with decisions involving uncertainty abstract this paper presents a general model of nonrenewable resource consumption and exploration decisions involving uncertainty about the time of occurrence of an event such as exhaustion stock discovery or a substitute development the resulting price process is characterized in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions under which the price is expected to rise at a rate equal to greater than or less than the discount rate the general model is illustrated and the price process and the optimal decisions are characterized by examining the three types of uncertainty indicated above

adaptation to land constraints is africa different since the seminal works of malthus and boserup scientists have long debated the impact of population growth and land constraints on the wellbeing of rural people today these concerns are particularly relevant to africa with its rapid population growth very small farms and chronic food insecurity in this paper we examine adaptation to falling land labor ratios using a comprehensive theoretical framework in which households faced with binding land constraints can respond in three ways intensifying agricultural production diversifying out of agriculture and reducing fertility rates using cross country data and drawing upon the existing literature we reach three conclusions first population density is associated with reduced fallows and more intensive use of land but not fertilizer use or irrigation indicating major challenges in achieving sustainable intensification or agricultural productivity growth second there is little evidence of successful non farm diversification in response to land pressures in africa from domestic or international income sources third rural africans in land constrained countries desire smaller families but have thus far benefited little from family planning policies these findings underscore the need for a coordinated multi sectoral approach to sustainably reduce poverty in the region

adoption of modern varieties farmers welfare and crop biodiversity evidence from uganda abstract this paper assesses the impact of modern varieties adoption on farmers welfare and crop biodiversity conserved in situ using nationally representative data collected in 2009 2010 in uganda an endogenous switching regression model estimates the net economic and environmental effects of switching from local landraces to modern species results show that after controlling for market and agro ecological factors the local varieties perform better than modern ones in marginalized and climatic vulnerable areas crop biodiversity shows to play a fundamental role in farmers risk minimizing strategies when the available modern varieties are not adaptable to the local context and not supported by the required level of agro intensification rural development policies should consider the heterogeneity in the adoption returns and support diversity conservation as a national strategic asset for a suitable bioprospecting and a best fitting agricultural system implementation

self reported food insecurity in africa during the food price crisis this article analyzes data on self reported food insecurity of more than 50 000 individuals in 18 sub saharan african countries over the period 2005 2008 when global food prices increased dramatically the average level of self reported food insecurity was high but remarkably stable over time at about 54 however this average hides large heterogeneity both within countries and across countries in eight of the sample countries self reported food security improved while it worsened in the ten other countries our results suggest that heterogeneous effects in self reported food security are consistent with economic predictions as they are correlated with economic growth and net food consumption both at the household and country level specifically in the face of rising food prices self reported food security improved on average in rural households while it worsened in urban households a finding that holds when using global prices or domestic food prices improvements in food security over time were also positively correlated with net food exports and gdp per capita growth while the self reported indicator used in this paper requires further study and one should carefully interpret the results our findings suggest the need for a critical evaluation of the currently used data and numbers in the public debate on food prices and food insecurity

comparative analysis of attributional corporate greenhouse gas accounting consequential life cycle assessment and project policy level accounting a bioenergy case study abstract in order to avoid dangerous climate change greenhouse gas accounting methods are needed to inform decisions on mitigation action this paper explores the differences between attributional and consequential greenhouse gas accounting methods focusing on attributional corporate greenhouse gas inventories consequential life cycle assessment and project policy greenhouse gas accounting the case study of a 6 mw bioheat plant is used to explore the different results and information these methods provide the findings show that attributional corporate inventories may not capture the full consequences of the decision in question even with full scope 3 reporting and are therefore not sufficient for mitigation planning although consequential life cycle assessment and the project policy level method both aim to show the full consequences of the decision the project policy level method has a number of advantages including the provision of a transparent baseline scenario and the distribution of emissions removals over time the temporal distribution of emissions removals is important as the carbon debt of the bioheat plant can exceed 100 years making the intervention incompatible with 2050 reduction targets an additional contribution from the study is the use of normative decision theory to further develop the idea that the uncertainty associated with bioenergy outcomes is itself a highly decision relevant finding

are we overestimating the negative impact of higher food prices evidence from ghana most studies of the welfare impact of higher food prices adopt deaton s approach based on the first order effect of prices changes using income and expenditure survey data this paper explores the impact of higher maize and food prices in ghana and considers the sensitivity of results to changes in several assumptions if second order effects are included incorporating household response to price changes the welfare impact of food price increases is more positive but only modestly so however if we assume that marketing margins are constant in real terms rather than proportional to prices the welfare impact is substantially more positive these findings highlight the need for more research on the behavior of marketing margins under volatile prices

consequential life cycle assessment of bioenergy systems a literature review abstract policies and business decisions intended to promote the use of bioenergy should be based on accurate estimates of the sustainability impacts of various alternatives including indirect consequences of any change consequential life cycle assessment clca attempts to include such impacts in the analysis this paper reviews studies that have adopted a clca approach to analysing the use of bioenergy describing their main topics approaches empirical and methodological aspects and scenarios the review finds that the production of studies proceeded at a modest pace from 2007 with a significant increase occurring from 2015 onward the most studied impact is global warming potential gwp although other impacts are frequently taken into consideration a majority of the studies concern the agricultural followed by the forest sector the literature has a european emphasis and relatively few studies have focused on low and middle income countries the review also finds a diversity in terms of how empirical and methodological aspects are taken into consideration based on the findings of the review areas of improvement for future research are suggested an increased focus on bioenergy use in the household sectors more studies in under researched regions more precise explanations of the clca methods used a critical examination of the scenarios and methodological collaboration with economic bio sector modelling in addition the factors that affect the generalizability of the results can be discussed in a more systematic manner frameworks and procedures for improving the applicability and validity of clca will likely emerge as the research field develops

the political economy of growth a critical survey of the recent literature this article reviews the recent literature on the political economy of growth focusing on the research that has developed at the intersection of the endogenous growth literature and the new political economy it explores the relationship among four key variables economic growth and capital accumulation political instability political freedom and democratic institutions and income inequality

on the determination of the us aggregate health care expenditure per capita real health care expenditure is examined against three major groups of explanatory variables economic demographic and health stock and it is found that the three groups of variables have an impact on real health care spending other subcategories such as real private and government health care pharmaceutical dental home nursing ambulatory personal medical consumption and in patient expenditures have also been examined and have been found to be affected by the explanatory variables for several subcomponents there is evidence of supplier inducement of the demographic group of variables the ageing population had an impact only on the per capita real overall and private health care outlay and pharmaceutical spending also cointegrating relationships were found and consistent estimators of the elasticities found

child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia conducted between 1995 and 1996 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of food aid on child growth and shocks in communities on the child level food aid has a positive significant impact on the growth in height of children the total amount of food aid appears on average to be sufficient to offset the negative effects of plot damage on child growth given the fact there remains a massive amount of child stunting there must be large amounts of mis targeting of aid girls seem to be more resilient to shocks than boys

rice prices and income distribution in thailand a non parametric analysis rice is a staple crop in thailand significantly entering both household production and consumption this paper examines the effect of rice prices on the distribution of real income across households taking into account household characteristics and geographical location the data set is a large scale survey of 11 893 households simple nonparametric techniques for regression and density estimation are used these methods depend on few assumptions and generate flexible graphical results that are directly informative about the problem at hand the main results are that higher rice prices should benefit all rural households but the largest benefits accrue to rural households in the middle of the income distribution copyright 1989 by royal economic society

urban agriculture poverty and food security empirical evidence from a sample of developing countries urban agriculture may have a role to play in addressing urban food insecurity problems which are bound to become increasingly important with the secular trend towards the urbanization of poverty and of pop ulation in developing regions our understanding of the importance nature and food security implica tions of urban agriculture is however plagued by a lack of good quality reliable data while studies based on survey data do exist for several major cities much of the evidence is still qualitative if not anec dotal using a recently created dataset bringing together comparable nationally representative house hold survey data for 15 developing or transition countries this paper analyzes in a comparative international perspective the importance of urban agriculture for the urban poor and food insecure some clear hints do come from our analysis on the one hand the potential for urban agriculture to play a sub stantial role in urban poverty and food insecurity reduction should not be overemphasised as its share in income and overall agricultural production is often quite limited on the other hand though its role should also not be too easily dismissed particularly in much of africa and in all those countries in which agriculture provides a substantial share of income for the urban poor and for those groups of households to which it constitutes an important source of livelihoods we also find fairly consistent evidence of a positive statistical association between engagement in urban agriculture and dietary adequacy indicators

expanding access to agricultural inputs in africa a review of recent market development experience abstract this paper asks what can be done to expand input use in africa and can it be done in a manner that supports continued growth of private sector input markets the precarious food security situation in many african countries has prompted governments and donors to use input distribution or credit programs as a means of rapidly increasing food supply for the poor these efforts however often reduce the ability of input market development programs to stimulate commercial interest in input supply a review of both types of programs describes recent efforts to address constraints to expanded input use and finds that further expansion is often constrained by inadequate investment in a variety of public goods needed to stimulate input led agricultural intensification rather than continuing to invest resources in programs to provide inputs or credit directly to farmers governments with donor assistance should consider shifting their focus to the serious deficiencies in the provision of public goods roads irrigation basic education market information systems research and extension and improved institutions contract law and enforcement systems of grades and standards improvements in these areas can both lower costs of supply and increase farm level demand creating a situation where the private sector will have greater incentives to expand input distribution networks to zones and farmers who currently do not have access

risk financial markets and human capital in a developing country this paper explores the link between financial market incompleteness and human capital accumulation we examine how child school attendance responds to seasonal fluctuations in the income of agrarian households using panel data from rural india to pinpoint market imperfections we study responses to aggregate and idiosyncratic as well as to anticipated and unanticipated income shocks our main finding is that seasonal fluctuations in school attendance are a form of self insurance but one which does not result in a substantial loss of human capital on average

input use and market development in sub saharan africa an overview abstract this paper sets forth the background and objectives of this special issue trends in input use since 1980 are reviewed and a conceptual framework is presented for analyzing problems of input use and formulating strategies for resolving them reasons for low levels of fertilizer use by smallholder farmers are summarized briefly the essential points of the papers in the special issue and their implications for further expansion of input use in sub saharan africa are then outlined

foods and fads the welfare impacts of rising quinoa prices in peru abstract riding on a wave of interest in superfoods in rich countries quinoa went in less than a decade from being largely unknown outside of south america to being an upper class staple in the united states the united kingdom and elsewhere as a result concerned commentators suggested that the rising international demand for quinoa which tripled prices might have substantially harmed peruvian quinoa consumers we study the impacts of rising quinoa prices on the welfare of peruvian households our analysis suggests these fears are unwarranted a descriptive analysis shows that quinoa is a small part

the impact of food inflation on urban poverty and its monetary cost some back of the envelope calculations this paper uses a sample of 73 developing countries to estimate the change in the cost of alleviating urban poverty brought about by the recent increase in food prices this cost is approximated by the change in the poverty deficit that is the variation in financial resources required to eliminate poverty under perfect targeting the results show that for most countries the cost represents less than 0 1 percent of gross domestic product however in the most severely affected it may exceed 3 percent in all countries the change in the poverty deficit is mostly due to the negative real income effect of those households that were poor before the price shock while the cost attributable to new households falling into poverty is negligible thus in countries where transfer mechanisms with effective targeting already exist the most cost effective strategy would be to scale up such programs rather than designing tools to identify the new poor

household income and child schooling in vietnam the stronger are the associations between household income and child schooling the lower is intergenerational social mobility and the less equal is opportunity this study estimates the associations between household income and children s school success in vietnam the estimates indicate that these associations are considerable this article also investigates some ways in which policies relate to household incomes school fees are progressive but school fees are only about one third of what households pay directly to schools and are a much smaller proportion of a household s total school related expenditures total household expenditures paid directly to schools increase with household income less proportionately than do school fees alone so the overall structure of such payments is less progressive than is the structure of school fees because school enrollment is positively related to household income moreover the structure of school fees is less progressive for the entire population than for the selected subset that has children enrolled in school further the two school quality measures that have the strongest positive association with children s school success are much more available to higher income households meaning that higher income households have greater school expenditures in part because they are obtaining higher quality schooling and not because charges for the same quality schooling are progressive across income classes

risk bearing and the theory of income distribution this paper develops the stochastic theory of distribution with a dynamic model which focuses on the role of incomplete insurance in generating inequality unlike previous work our approach takes explicit account of the reason for market incompleteness in modeling agents behaviour in particular the amount of risk borne is endogenous using a model of growth with altruism in which agents are risk averse and there is moral hazard we show that lineage wealth follows a markov process which converges globally to an ergodic distribution this also represents the long run population distribution of wealth we discuss the role of particular assumptions such as availability of production loans and unboundedness of utility in yielding the qualitative properties of the distribution of wealth the choice of occupation and the prevention of poverty traps

education in a crisis abstract the year 1998 saw the onset of a major economic and financial crisis in indonesia gdp fell by 12 that year the effect on education of the next generation is examined on average household spending on education declined most dramatically among the poorest households spending reductions were particularly marked in poor households with more young children while there was a tendency to protect education spending in poor households with more older children the evidence on school enrollments mirrors these findings poor households apparently sought to protect investments in the schooling of older children at the expense of the education of younger children

the global food crisis disaster opportunity or non event household level evidence from cote d ivoire summary using 2008 lsms data for cote 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

world food prices and poverty incidence in a food exporting country a multihousehold general equilibrium analysis for thailand a multisectoral multihousehold general equilibrium model of the thai economy is used to analyze the implications of recent increases in international food prices higher food prices especially staple grains worsen poverty incidence in thailand despite the presence of large numbers of poor farmers many of whom benefit from higher prices the positive effect on the welfare of poor farmers is dominated by the negative effect on poor consumers of the recent price increases for rice sugar cassava maize soybeans urea and petroleum the increases in rice prices raise poverty incidence the most despite thailand being the world s largest rice exporter

development at the border policies and national integration in cote d ivoire and its neighbors regression discontinuity designs applied to a set of household surveys from the 1980 90s allow to examine whether cote d ivoire s aggregate wealth was translated at the borders of neighboring countries at the border of ghana and at the end of the 1980s large discontinuities are detected for consumption child stunting and access to electricity and safe water border discontinuities in consumption can be explained by differences in cash crop policies cocoa and coffee when these policies converged in the 1990s the only differences that persisted were those in rural facilities in the north cash crop cotton income again made a difference for consumption and nutrition the case of mali on the one hand large differences in welfare can hold at the borders dividing african countries despite their assumed porosity on the other hand border discontinuities seem to reflect the impact of reversible public policies rather than intangible institutional traits

factor shares and savings in endogenous growth in models of steady investment driven growth an individual s propensity to save depends on how much of his income is drawn from accumulated factors of production capital rather than from nonaccumulated factors when agents are heterogeneous in this respect growth oriented policies have distributional consequences and in the absence of lump sum redistribution their implementation faces political constraints if the median voter is capital poor relative to the economy s representative agent political interactions tend to slow down growth when policy acts on capital s income share and tend to accelerate it when investment subsidies are the policy instrument of choice copyright 1993 by american economic association

price unit value and quality demanded abstract given the paucity of quality price data it is common to rely on unit value average expenditure per unit as a proxy for price but this is an imperfect proxy if households respond to price increases by substituting to lower quality goods this paper draws on survey data that contain both unit value and price to estimate the severity of quality substitution in indonesia finding that it is prevalent the paper next calculates price elasticities that correct for quality substitution evaluating and ultimately rejecting a commonly used method for calculating price elasticities using only unit value data finally it demonstrates that quality substitution can result in biased price elasticities even when price is perfectly observed

transposing lessons between different forms of consequential greenhouse gas accounting lessons for consequential life cycle assessment project level accounting and policy level accounting abstract greenhouse gas accounting has developed in a number of semi isolated fields of practice and there appears to be considerable opportunity for transposing methodological innovations and lessons between these different fields this research paper identifies three consequential forms of greenhouse gas accounting consequential life cycle assessment project level accounting and policy level accounting these methods are described in detail and then compared in order to identify the key methodological differences and the potential lessons that can be transposed between them analysis of the substantive methodological differences suggests that consequential life cycle assessment could be enhanced by adopting the same structure used in project and policy level accounting which provides a time series of impacts aggregate level analysis and a transparent specification of the baseline and decision scenarios there is a case for conceptualising a unified form of consequential time series assessment of which project policy and product assessments would be sub types

information and exhaustible resources a bayesian analysis abstract we develop a continuous time bayesian model of investment in information about an exhaustible resource because of the way that information affects expectations the deterministic hotelling rule turns out to be more appropriate as a description of how resource owners forecast the value of their stocks than as a predictor of observed changes in the resource price a flow of information generates both unanticipated changes in expectations which cause the mean rate of change in the resource price to deviate systematically from the deterministic hotelling rule and reductions in uncertainty which do not affect the hotelling prediction

do macroeconomic crises always slow human capital accumulation the impact of macroeconomic crises on the investments made by parents in the human capital of their children is a question of considerable policy importance analysis of the effects of the profound 1988 92 macroeconomic crisis in peru on the schooling and employment decisions of school age children in urban areas finds no effect on attendance rates but a significant decline in the fraction of children who are both employed and attend school it also finds significantly higher mean educational attainment for children exposed to the crisis than for those who were not these findings may be related children who are not employed have more time available and may therefore put more effort into school

food price increases and net food importing countries lessons from the recent past recent increases in food and other commodity prices have highlighted concerns that many poor countries are net food importers and higher food prices would worsen their trade balances in this article we analyze the changes in food trade balances associated with the 32 increase in food prices from 2000 2001 to 2004 2005 we find a small deterioration in food trade balances of low income countries and an improvement in middle income countries the deterioration is most severe for countries in conflict and small island states so attention should be placed first on these countries and on a few very low income countries that are also vulnerable because low income countries as a group had much lower agricultural gdp growth rates than middle income countries the answers to food vulnerability in low income countries should probably be addressed within the context of incentives for agricultural production

on market mediated emissions and regulations on life cycle emissions abstract we analyze the use of life cycle assessment lca as a regulatory tool using biofuel regulations as an illustrative example a regulatory context calls for a consequential lca clca of a policy as opposed to an attributional lca alca of a product in performing clca issues of scale price effects technology and policy in the counterfactual state of the world strategic behavior policy horizon etc need consideration this appears to increase both uncertainty in estimates and the cost of performing lca we suggest heuristics for determining vulnerability to harmful indirect effects at an early stage in the policy process and discuss alternative policies to limit harmful indirect effects without engaging in the full effort of computation and selection of a central estimate for uncertain outcomes

distribution and growth cross country evidence an endogenous growth model is presented to examine the determinants of economic growth and income distribution and their relationship three major findings from a cross country analysis of 45 countries are 1 a higher level of educational attainment of the labour force has an equalizing effect on income distribution while the larger the dispersion of schooling among the labour force the greater the income inequality 2 human capital investment as well as physical capital investment are significant factors contributing to economic growth and 3 income inequality has a negative effect on economic growth supporting the existence of a complementary relationship between equity and growth

woody biomass energy potential in 2050 abstract from a biophysical perspective woody biomass resources are large enough to cover a substantial share of the world s primary energy consumption in 2050 however these resources have alternative uses and their accessibility is limited which tends to decrease their competitiveness with respect to other forms of energy hence the key question of woody biomass use for energy is not the amount of resources but rather their price in this study we consider the question from the perspective of energy wood supply curves which display the available amount of woody biomass for large scale energy production at various hypothetical energy wood prices these curves are estimated by the global biosphere management model globiom which is a global partial equilibrium model of forest and agricultural sectors the global energy wood supply is estimated to be 0 23 gm 3 year 0 165 ej year when energy wood prices vary in a range of 0 30 gj 0 216 m 3 if we add household fuelwood to energy wood then woody biomass could satisfy 2 18 of world primary energy consumption in 2050 if primary forests are excluded from wood supply then the potential decreases up to 25

under the weather health schooling and economic consequences of early life rainfall life in rural areas of developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk such as illness or mortality of household members crop or other income loss due to natural phenomena weather insect infestations or fire for example and civil conflict in addition to their contemporaneous effects the effects of certain types of shocks may still be felt many years or even decades later from a public policy standpoint it is particularly important to identify shocks that have large long run effects moreover the mechanics underlying the persistence of shocks may be of con siderable interest for example a health shock may have a long run effect simply because the health shock itself persists over time alternately the health shock may not directly affect long run outcomes but it could affect some other outcome such as educational attainment that helps determine long run well being in this paper we focus on shocks that occur at the very beginning of life we ask how sensi tive long run individual well being is to environmental conditions around the time of birth in particular we examine the effect of weather shocks around the time of birth on the adult health education and socioeconomic outcomes of indonesian women and men born between 1953 and 1974 in addition we attempt to shed light on the intervening pathways connecting early life rainfall to adult outcomes illuminating the roles of health and educational attainment in deter mining adult socioeconomic status this investigation has considerable data requirements it necessitates information on weather shocks experienced by individuals several decades earlier as well as detailed current informa tion on adult outcomes we use information in the indonesian family life surveys ifls on an individual s year and location of birth and link each individual in that survey to locality specific rainfall data for their birth year for individuals born in rural areas on whom we focus rainfall variation across space and time should generate corresponding variation in agricultural output and thus household income to deal with measurement error in the rainfall data we run instrumental variables regressions where variables for rainfall measured at slightly more distant rainfall stations serve as instruments for rainfall in the individual s birthplace and birth year we examine the impact of early life rainfall on a range of adult outcomes observed in 2000 we find that higher early life rainfall leads to improved health schooling and socioeconomic status for women women with 20 percent higher rainfall relative to normal local rainfall in their year and location of birth are 3 8 percentage points less likely to self report poor or very poor health they attain 0 57 centimeters greater height attain 0 22 more completed grades of

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

implications of high food prices for poverty in pakistan the study estimates the impacts of rising world food prices on poverty in rural and urban areas of pakistan household income and expenditure data for 2004 2005 is used to estimate compensated and uncompensated price and expenditure elasticities using the linear approximation of the almost ideal demand system taking the unexpected component of higher domestic food prices in 2007 2008 own and cross price compensated elasticities are used to derive the changes in the quantity consumed food expenditure and impacts on poverty assuming the food crisis happened in 2004 2005 the results indicate that poverty increased by 34 8 severely affecting the urban areas where poverty increased by 44 6 as compared to 32 5 in rural areas the estimates show that 2 3 million people are unable to reach even one half of poverty line expenditures while another 13 7 million are just below and 23 9 million are just above the poverty line in the short run it is important to ensure food availability to these people in the long run the policy environment of subsidizing urban food consumers by keeping wheat prices lower than the international price needs to be reconsidered to provide the right incentives to increase food availability

on endogenizing long run growth this assessment of recent theoretical work on endogenous growth identifies three different engines of long run growth i the asymptotic average product of capital is positive ii labor productivity increases as an external effect of capital accumulation iii there are feedback effects on the cost of accumulating knowledge or innovating a general model encompassing all three is considered and then used to review different proposed determinants of long run growth rates the contribution of endogenous growth theory has been to create a framework in which to explain why economic institutions and policies can have long run effects on growth rates

financial crisis health outcomes and aging mexico in the 1980s and 1990s abstract we study the impact of economic crisis on health in mexico there have been four wide scale economic crises in mexico in the past two decades the most recent in 1995 96 we find that mortality rates for the very young and the elderly increase or decline less rapidly in crisis years as compared with non crisis years in the 1995 96 crisis mortality rates were about 5 to 7 percent higher in the crisis years compared to the years just prior to the crisis this translates into a 0 4 percent increase in mortality for the elderly and a 0 06 percent increase in mortality for the very young we find tentative evidence that economic crises affect mortality by reducing incomes and possibly by placing a greater burden on the medical sector but not by forcing less healthy members of the population to work or by forcing primary caregivers to go to work

sri lanka can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study can conditional cash transfer cct programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks conducted the program started in 1997 and still exists today in sri lanka the study observed that income shocks on poor households are known to induce parents to take their children out of school and send them to work when other risk coping instruments are insufficient cct programs where the condition is on school attendance have been shown to be effective in increasing educational achievements and reducing child work shocks are highly prevalent and children have irregular periods of school enrollment children who are taken out of school are less likely to re enroll