sickness and death economic consequences and coping strategies of the urban poor in bangladesh summary we investigate the economic consequences of sickness and death and the manner in which poor urban households in bangladesh respond to such events based on panel data we assess the effects of morbidity and mortality episodes on household income medical spending labor supply and consumption we find that despite maintaining household labor supply serious illness exerts a negative effect on income for the poor however the estimates do not reject consumption smoothing the most prominent responses to finance current needs are increasing household debt through borrowing and depleting productive assets both of which have detrimental effects on future consumption

the role of energy in productivity growth the objective of this paper is to analyze the role of energy in the growth of productivity the special significance of energy in economic growth was first established in the classic study energy and the american economy 1850 1975 by sam schurr and his associates 1960 at resources for the future for the period from 1920 to 1955 schurr noted that energy intensity of production had fallen while both labor and total factor productivity were rising the simultaneous decline in energy intensity and labor intensity of production ruled out the possibility of explaining the growth of productivity solely on the basis of substitution of less expensive energy for more expensive labor since the quantity of both energy and labor inputs required for a given level of output had been reduced technical change is also a critical explanatory factor an alternative explanation for growth of output with declining energy and labor intensity required an examination of the character of technical change this examination was motivated by the fact that from 1920 to 1955 the utilization of electricity had expanded by a factor of more than ten while consumption of all other forms of energy only doubled the two key features of technical change during this period were that the thermal efficiency of conversion of fuels into electricity increased by a factor of three and that the unusual characteristics of electricity had made it possible to perform tasks in altogether different ways than if the fuels had to be used directly schurr 1983 p 3 schurr 1982 has recently extended the analysis of energy and the american economy through 1981 for the period through 1969 his conclusions are as follows although the inverse relationship between total factor productivity and energy intensity virtually disappeared during the 1953 1969 period it is still noteworthy that high rates of improvement in total factor productivity were essentially not associated with increases in energy intensity 1982 p 6 schurr 1982 has analyzed the experience of the u s economy in the aftermath of the oil embargo of 1973 he points out that energy intensity of production has fallen steadily since 1973 and that the rate of decline accelerated sharply after the second oil price shock in 1979 following the iranian revolution he goes on to point out that

household coping in war and peacetime cattle sales in rwanda 1991 2001 abstract the economic literature has given due attention to household coping strategies in peacetime in contrast little is known about such strategies in wartime this paper studies the use of cattle as a buffer stock by rwandan households during 1991 2001 a period characterized by civil war and genocide it is found that the probability of selling cattle increases upon the occurrence of both peacetime and wartime covariant adverse income shocks the peacetime cattle sales are largely explained by shifts in the household asset portfolio in contrast in 1994 the year of the genocide almost half of the cattle sales were motivated by the need to buy food however we argue that the effectiveness of this coping strategy was severely reduced due to the wartime conditions first during the year of ethnic violence cattle prices plummeted to less than half of their pre genocide value second we find that households most targeted in the violence did not sell cattle we discuss several explanations for this latter finding

investment the current account and the relative price of non traded goods in a small open economy abstract this paper incorporates traded and non traded investment expenditure into an infinite horizon setting with optimizing economic agents extending previous research that has incorporated traded and non traded investment into a two period setting the paper analyzes the dynamic adjustment of the relative price of non traded output the market price of capital and the current account following exogenous shocks to the system the exogenous shocks considered by the paper include permanent transitory and anticipated changes in an income tax and an investment subsidy as well as changes in the level of government purchases of traded and non traded output

impact of ethiopia s community based health insurance on household economic welfare in 2011 in an attempt to increase access to health care and reduce household vulnerability to out of pocket health expenditure the government of ethiopia launched a community based health insurance scheme cbhi this paper uses three rounds of household survey data collected before and after the introduction of the cbhi pilot to assess the impact of the scheme on household consumption income indebtedness and livestock holdings we find that enrollment leads to a 5 percentage point or 13 decline in the probability of borrowing and is associated with an increase in household income there is no evidence that enrolling in the scheme affects consumption or livestock holdings our results show that the scheme reduces reliance on potentially harmful coping responses such as borrowing this paper adds to the relatively small body of work that rigorously evaluates the impact of cbhi schemes on economic welfare

child schooling child health and rainfall shocks evidence from rural vietnam abstractwe study the effect of rainfall shocks on child schooling outcomes and on standardised height for age a measure of child health in rural vietnam we find that adverse rainfall shocks during pregnancy adversely affect children s school entry delay and progress through school adverse rainfall shocks in the third year of life adversely affect both schooling and child health these effects differ by region as a result of constraints that reflect regional economic heterogeneity we predict that policies that help rural families smooth income shocks will result in increases in human capital and in substantial cumulative returns over a worker s working life

the effect of prime age adult mortality on household composition and consumption in rural ethiopia abstract using panel data from ethiopia covering 1994 1997 we estimate the impact of prime age adult mortality on household composition household expenditures and dietary diversity we employed propensity score matching with a difference in difference estimator to control for endogeneity of mortality to the outcomes of interest households losing a productive adult did not replenish the lost labor regardless of economic status sex or status of the deceased adult with the exception of non poor households adult mortality resulted in increased dependency ratios but did not adversely affect households expenditure patterns total food and non food expenditures regardless of the sex and position of the deceased and the economic status of the households although food expenditures were protected a decline in dietary diversity especially among the poorest households reflected increased nutrition insecurity associated with adult mortality

extended families and child well being studies of household behavior have established the distribution of resources among household members predicts spending and savings patterns however there is a paucity of evidence on the relationship between the well being of individual family members and the distribution of resources within an extended family including non co resident family members given the central role the family plays in many models of economic behavior this is an important gap in the literature using rich longitudinal survey data from the indonesia family life survey ifls evidence is presented on the relationship between three measures of health and education related human capital of children and the distribution of resources among extended family members ifls is ideally suited for this research since the survey collects detailed information about income and wealth from both coresident and non co resident family members the empirical model is founded on a natural extension of the collective model of household decision making chiappori 1988 1992 to the extended family the model is particularly appealing in this context because it places few restrictions on preferences of individual family members and does not specify a specific bargaining mechanism that underlies negotiations the collective model yields empirical tests of whether the behavior of family members is pareto efficient a special case of the model allows all family members to be completely altruistic which is observationally equivalent to a unitary model of family behavior that special case is rejected by the data however the restrictions of the efficient model are not rejected indicating that non co resident family members are able to co ordinate allocation decisions with respect to child human capital investments in such a way as to make no family member better off without another member being worse off

stature skills and adult life outcomes evidence from indonesia abstractwe investigate the effect of height on earnings occupational choices and a subjective measure of wellbeing among indonesian men we explore the extent to which height captures the effects of endowments set before entry in the labour market physical and cognitive skills co determined with stature early in life do not explain much of the height earnings premium directly yet human capital more broadly including cognition educational attainment and other factors related to childhood conditions explains around half of the height premium and does so through occupational sorting indeed taller workers tend to have more education and educated workers tend to work in more lucrative occupations that require brain and social skills not brawn the unexplained share of the height earnings premium may reflect a specific role of stature on social interaction labour market advantages or self assurance we also find a height premium in happiness half of which simply accounts for the educational and e

autonomous efficiency improvement or income elasticity of energy demand does it matter observations of historical energy consumption energy prices and income growth in industrial economies exhibit a trend in improving energy efficiency even when prices are constant or falling two alternative explanations of this phenomenon are a productivity change that uses less energy and a structural change in the economy in response to rising income it is not possible to distinguish among these from aggregate data and economic energy models for forecasting emissions simulate one as an exogenous time trend or the other as energy demand elasticity with respect to income or both processes for projecting energy demand into the future in this paper we ask whether and how it matters which process one uses for projecting energy demand and carbon emissions we compare two versions of the mit emissions prediction and policy analysis eppa model one using a conventional efficiency time trend approach and the other using an income elasticity approach we demonstrate that while these two versions yield equivalent projections in the near term that they diverge in two important ways long run projections and under uncertainty in future productivity growth we suggest that an income dependent approach may be preferable to the exogenous approach

macroanalysis of the economic and environmental impacts of a 2005 2025 european union bioenergy policy using the gtap model and life cycle assessment abstract this paper describes a new tool to assess the medium and long term economic and environmental impacts of large scale policies the approach macro life cycle assessment m lca is based on life cycle assessment methodology and includes additional elements to model economic externalities and the temporal evolution of background parameters the general equilibrium model gtap was therefore used to simulate the economic consequences of policies in a dynamic framework representing the temporal evolution of macroeconomic and technological parameters environmental impacts expressed via four indicators human health ecosystems global warming and natural resources are computed according to policy life cycle and its indirect economic consequences in order to illustrate the approach two 2005 2025 european union eu energy policies were compared using m lca the first policy the bioenergy policy aims to significantly increase energy generation from biomass and reduce eu energy demand for coal the second policy the baseline policy is a business as usual policy where year 2000 energy policies are extended to 2025 results show that compared to the baseline policy the bioenergy policy generates fewer impacts on three of the four environmental indicators human health global warming and natural resources at the world and eu scales though the results may differ significantly at a regional level the results also highlight the key contribution of economic growth to the total environmental impacts computed for the 2005 2025 period a comparison of the results with a more conventional consequential lca approach illustrates the benefits of m lca when modeling the indirect environmental impacts of large scale policies the sensitivity and uncertainty analysis indicates that the method is quite robust however its robustness must still be evaluated based on the sensitivity and uncertainty of additional parameters including the evolution of economic growth

is the quantity quality trade off a trade off for all none or some abstract although the theoretical trade off between the quantity and quality of children is well established empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship particularly on child health is limited we use two measures of child health to assess the quantity quality trade off across the entire distribution using data from the indonesia family life survey and controlling for the potential endogeneity of child quantity we find modest statistically meaningful evidence of a causal trade off

why children work attend school or stay idle the roles of ability and household wealth abstract this paper offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of child labor schooling and idleness neither work nor school with particular emphasis on the roles of child ability and household wealth in determining these decisions we show theoretically that idleness may be chosen optimally by low income households whose child is of low ability using a rich data set from the philippines we find that while other factors including mother s labor supply the presence of a family business and access to good school quality contribute to these decisions child ability and household wealth are the most important determinants of child idleness and the use of child labor an implication of our findings is that any policy aiming to reduce child labor and increase child schooling should also target improvements in child ability and cognitive development through investments in the nutrition and health of poor children

tariffs and exchange rate dynamics redux abstract this paper builds a two country intertemporal macroeconomic model similar to one developed recently by obstfeld and rogoff imperfectly competitive producer consumers maximize an intertemporal utility function with consumption real money balances and output as arguments we use the framework to examine both the short run and steady state effects of the imposition of a tariff in one of the countries this results in a fall in the tariff imposer s output in both the steady state and in the short run a small tariff may make a country worse off contrary to the usual result under perfect competition spillover effects are also considered

child health and conflict in cote d ivoire we examine the impact of the 2002 07 civil conflict in cote d ivoire on children s health status measured by height for age we use pre and post war survey data coupled with information on the location of violent incidents to capture exposure to the conflict of children born during 1997 2007 our results indicate that children from regions more affected by the conflict suffered significant health setbacks compared with children from less affected regions further household level victimization such as war related economic stress health stress and displacement has a large and negative effect on child health in conflict affected regions

access to water women s work and child outcomes abstractpoor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water do women living in places where more time is needed for water collection tend to participate less in income earning market based activities do the education outcomes of their children tend to be worse we use micro data for nine developing countries to help address these questions our primary aim is to describe the patterns in the data rather than to infer causality although we do treat the household level access to water as endogenous assuming that community level access is exogenous conditional on a wide range of geographic factors better access to water is not found to be associated with greater off farm paid work but is associated with less unpaid work for women in countries where substantial gender gaps in schooling exist both boys and girls enrollments also tend to be better

full insurance in the presence of aggregate uncertainty this paper tests implications of full consumption insurance the object is to determine how much mileage can be obtained from a model with complete markets with such features as private information or liquidity constraints omitted the implication exploited is that individual consumption responds to aggregate risk but not to idiosyncratic risk the test involves regressing the change in household consumption onto the change in aggregate consumption and other right hand side variables such as the change in household income and change in employment status all variables other than the change in aggregate consumption are predicted to be insignificant in explaining the change in household consumption with observations on consumption and income for 10 695 households from the consumer expenditure survey the results are mixed the results for one specification exponential utility are mostly consistent with full consumption insurance the results for the other specification power utility are not

taxation unemployment and growth dynamic welfare effects of green policies abstract this paper analyzes the effects of environmental tax reforms on a small open economy the labor market is characterized by union wage setting the carbon tax acts as an implicit tariff which gives rise to terms of trade gains the terms of trade effect together with the union wage setting leads to a positive relationship between the capital labor ratio and net foreign wealth in the short run the disinvestments in real and financial capital give temporary room for higher consumption and instantaneous utility the long run effect on instantaneous utility is more uncertain a strong double dividend may exist

temporal stability of risk attitudes and the impact of adverse shocks a panel data analysis from thailand and vietnam summary exogenous negative shocks and intrinsic risk attitudes are two important elements characterizing the vicious cycle of poverty associated with rural households in developing countries recent empirical studies suggest that adverse shocks a key driver of poverty can trigger substantial changes in the risk attitudes of poor people leading to decisions that perpetuate their lives in poverty although the temporal variability of risk attitudes is a controversial topic the literature advocating the temporal variability of risk attitudes suggests that covariate shocks such as natural disasters alter risk attitudes over time whereas idiosyncratic shocks show no such significant impact this paper aims to test the temporal stability of risk attitudes in rural households in thailand and vietnam to determine whether this pattern covariate shocks that affect risk attitudes and idiosyncratic shocks that do not can be confirmed for these households i use an exogenous measure of shocks to explain temporal variation in risk attitudes thus i estimate variation in consumption using a multilevel model in which variation in consumption at the individual level serves as a proxy for idiosyncratic shocks while variation in consumption at the aggregate level is used to measure covariate shocks my study finds temporal variability in risk attitudes that is driven by covariate shocks in vietnam and in contrast to past research by idiosyncratic shocks in thailand the results suggest that vietnamese respondents may be better in insuring idiosyncratic risks for example through safety nets while mutual insurance across individuals does not seem to work well in thailand in addition results indicate that the mutual insurance problem in thailand seems to increase in wealth the differences that i find between thailand and vietnam and across poverty types correspond to the difference in political systems and consequently the focus of socio political measures thailand s recent political volatility and the growing lack of social cohesion in thai society support these findings

exchange rate pass through and the effects of tariffs on economic performance and welfare abstract we develop a stochastic two country general equilibrium model where prices are determined under conditions of monopolistic competition to examine the macroeconomic and welfare effects of tariffs on the world economy under alternative nominal rigidities producer currency pricing pcp and local currency pricing lcp where the exchange rate pass through is absent we find that the significance of export pricing for the effects of tariffs depends critically upon whether tariffs are anticipated or unanticipated in the former case both pcp and lcp yield the same outcome as do perfectly flexible prices although the mechanism whereby this is achieved is different in the latter case the effects of unanticipated permanent tariffs are highly sensitive to the pricing scheme adopted by exporters leading to a wide range of conflicting outcomes involving tradeoffs among key parameters

universal coverage with supply side reform the impact on medical expenditure risk and utilization in thailand abstract we estimate the impact on out of pocket oop medical expenditure of a major reform in thailand that greatly extended health insurance coverage to achieve universality while implementing supply side measures intended to deliver cost effective care from an increased but modest public health budget difference in differences comparison of groups to whom coverage was extended or deepened with those whose coverage did not change indicates that the reform reduced oop expenditure by 28 on average and by 42 at the 95th percentile of the conditional distribution simulations suggest that exposure to medical expenditure risk was reduced by three fifths on average generating a social welfare gain equivalent to 80 200 of the approximate deadweight loss from financing the reform estimated effects on health care access suggest that the policy managed to reduce households medical expenses while also raising their utilization of both inpatient and ambulatory care

grandmothers and granddaughters this article evaluates the impact of a large cash transfer program in south africa on children s nutritional status and investigates whether the gender of the recipient affects that impact in the early 1990s the benefits and coverage of the south african social pension program were expanded for the black population in 1993 the benefits were about twice the median per capita income in rural areas more than a quarter of black south african children under age five live with a pension recipient estimates suggest that pensions received by women had a large impact on the anthropometric status weight for height and height for age of girls but little effect on that of boys no similar effect is found for pensions received by men this suggests that the efficiency of public transfer programs may depend on the gender of the recipient

the role of savings and credit in coping with idiosyncratic household shocks abstractthis study examines the effect of access to formal banking services on households ability to smooth consumption in response to illness of adult workers the institutional peculiarities of indonesia s largest commercial bank are exploited to separately estimate the effects of access to formal credit from savings the means by which households smooth consumption differs depending on their access to formal services those with access to formal credit increase borrowing from banks while those with access only to formal savings but not credit draw down on savings households without access to formal banking services end up liquidating productive assets

fiscal deficits and relative prices in a growing world economy abstract this paper studies the transmission of fiscal disturbances between countries and the effect of those disturbances on worldwide capital intensity in a context of growth the model developed to address these issues allows for the production of both nontradable and relatively capital intensive tradable goods a central finding is that factor markets can be a major channel for the communication of fiscal policy shocks to world interest rates to private saving decisions and ultimately to global asset supplies and their distribution among countries particular predictions of the model illustrate how changes in public debt ratios and shifts in government spending patterns affect resource allocation and the welfare of various generations both at home and abroad

technology invention and diffusion in residential energy consumption a stochastic frontier approach traditional large appliances absorb a large share of residential electricity consumption and represent important targets of energy policy strategies aimed at achieving energy security despite being characterized by rather mature technologies this group of appliances still offers large potential in terms of efficiency gains due to their pervasive diffusion in this paper we analyse the electricity consumption of a set of four traditional white goods in a panel of ten eu countries observed over 21 years 1990 2010 with the aim of disentangling the amount of technical efficiency from the overall energy saving the technical efficiency trend is modelled through a set of technology components representing both the invention and adoption process by the means of specific patents weighted by production and bilateral import flows which allows to overcome the rigid stochastic frontier framework in modelling the effect of technical change our results show that the derived energy demand and inefficiency trends are both related to changes in the amount of available technology embodied in energy efficient appliances the effect is significant both in its domestic and international components and suggests an active role of innovation and trade policies for achieving efficiency targets which directly impact the amount of electricity consumed by households

the lazarus drug the impact of antiretroviral therapy on economic growth abstract does better population health lead to growth in per capita income theory is ambiguous and empirical evidence is very limited in 2001 a steep fall in antiretroviral arv drug prices triggered rapid and massive expansion of arv therapy coverage in lower income countries exploiting the sharp resultant changes in population health i show that arv therapy coverage expansion led to growth in gdp per capita the positive effects on growth most likely persist for around four years arv therapy coverage expansion could explain around a third of the sub saharan african growth miracle

inequality measurement for ordered response health data because self reported health status srhs is an ordered response variable inequality measurement for srhs data requires a numerical scale for converting individual responses into a summary statistic the choice of scale is however problematic since small variations in the numerical scale may reverse the ordering of a given pair of distributions of srhs data in relation to conventional inequality indices such as the variance this paper introduces a parametric family of inequality indices founded on an inequality ordering proposed by allison and foster allison r a foster j 2004 measuring health inequalities using qualitative data journal of health economics 23 505 524 which satisfy a suitable invariance property with respect to the choice of numerical scale several key members of the parametric family are also derived and an empirical application using data from the swiss health survey illustrates the proposed methodology

international capital mobility shadow prices and the cost of protection this paper studies the welfare losses from tariff protection in a small open economy when some factors are internationally mobile our principal result is that international fictor mobility must raise the cost of protection more specifically the welfare loss resulting from a uniform increase in tariffs in a competitive small open economy is greater when tariff induced international factor movements take place than when factors are internationally immobile by contrast an exogen1ous inflow of factors in the presence of tariffs may increase or reduce the welfare loss associated with protection depending on whether or not the protected commodities use the foreign owned factors intensively relative to domestically owned factors these results are proven for a very general specification of the economy s technology in particular no restrictions are placed on the degree of vertical integration in production on the sectors into which factors are internationally mobile or on the number of goods and factors our main result holds whether or not an increase in tariff rates leads the economy to specialise in addition we show how our results relate to earlier work on immiserising capital inflows and on negative shadow prices for factors of production thus synthesizing a number of recent results within a common framework the paper is organised as follows in section 2 we explain our framework and derive expressions for the welfare effects of tariffs when all factors are domestically owned and when some factors are foreign owned but not internationally

is consumption insured against illness evidence on vulnerability of households to health shocks in rural ethiopia abstract low and volatile incomes and absence of well developed financial markets make consumption smoothing an important issue in low income countries based on the theory of full insurance and using 2 years of panel data this study examines the impact of illness on the consumption of rural households and the capacity of existing risk sharing mechanisms in insuring consumption against health shocks in the rural areas of ethiopia the results show that illness has a statistically significant negative impact on the stability of consumption and the capacity of households or existing intra and interhousehold risk sharing arrangements in insuring consumption against illness varies across different consumption items the regression results show that the hypothesis of consumption insurance cannot be rejected in the case of total food consumption implying that basic items that come from own production and from external sources gifts are better insured and insensitive to the illness of the head however the

coping with shocks in rural ethiopia based on household survey data and event history interviews undertaken in a highly shock prone country this paper investigates which shocks trigger which coping responses and why we find clear differences in terms of coping strategies across shock types the two relatively covariate shocks that is economic and natural shocks are more likely to trigger reductions in savings and in food consumption while the sale of assets and borrowing is less common coping with relatively idiosyncratic health shocks is met by reductions in savings asset sales and especially a far greater reliance on borrowing as compared to other shocks reductions in food consumption a prominent response in the case of natural and economic shocks is notably absent in the case of health shocks across all shock types households do not rely on gifts from family and friends or on enhancing their labour supply as coping approaches the relative insensitivity of food consumption to health shocks based on the shocks coping analysis presented here is consistent with existing work which examines consumption insurance however our analysis leads to a different interpretation we argue that this insensitivity should not be viewed as insurability of food consumption against health shocks but rather as an indication that a reduction in food consumption is not a viable coping response to a health shock as it does not provide cash to meet health care needs

optimal environmental taxation in the presence of other taxes general equilibrium analyses this paper examines the optimal setting of environmental taxes in economies where other distortionary taxes are present we employ analytical and numerical models to explore the degree to which in a second best economy optimal environmental tax rates differ from the rates implied by the pigovian principle according to which the optimal tax rate equals the marginal environmental damages both models indicate contrary to what several analysts have suggested that the optimal tax rate on emissions of a given pollutant is generally less than the rate supported by the pigovian principle moreover the optimal rate is lower the larger are the distortions posed by ordinary taxes numerical results indicate that previous studies may have seriously overstated the size of the optimal carbon tax by disregarding pre existing taxes this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the curse and blessing of fixed specific factors in small open economies abstract this paper investigates how a country s specific factor endowment affects its long run economic performance we build an open economy version of the two sector neoclassical growth model in which we introduce fixed industry specific inputs in both activities we show that differences in input shares between sectors can contribute to explain why nations that seem to have similar factor endowments can show very different income levels in particular under productivity adjusted factor price equalization larger amounts of factors specific to the industry with a lower larger labor share lead the economy to enjoy larger smaller long run income levels the model can also account for overtaking episodes between countries along their development paths

tariffs foreign capital and national welfare with sector specific factors abstract this paper examines the effect on national welfare of an endogenously determined inflow of foreign capital in the context of a well known model with sector specific inputs both for the case of unrestricted international trade and investment and in the presence of a tariff the second best problem of the optimal tax on foreign investment for a given tariff level is also investigated by application of the concept of shadow prices for primary factors in distorted open economies the results obtained are then related to analogous propositions derived previously for the standard heckscher ohlin model

insuring consumption against illness one of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness we investigate the extent to which families are able to insure consumption against major illness using a unique panel data set from indonesia that combines excellent measures of health status with consumption information we find that there are significant economic costs associated with major illness and that there is very imperfect insurance of consumption over illness episodes these estimates suggest that public disability insurance or subsidies for medical care may improve welfare by providing consumption insurance

the impact of chernobyl on health and labour market performance using longitudinal data from ukraine we examine the extent of any long lasting effects of exposure to the chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce variation in the local area level of radiation fallout from the chernobyl accident is considered as a random exogenous shock with which to try to establish its causal impact on poor health labour force participation hours worked and wages there appears to be a significant positive association between local area level radiation dosage and perception of poor health though much weaker associations between local area level dosage and other specific self reported health conditions there is also some evidence to suggest that those who lived in areas more exposed to chernobyl induced radiation have significantly lower levels of labour market performance 20 years on

the implications of the historical decline in us energy intensity for long run co2 emission projections this paper analyzes the influence of the long run decline in us energy intensity on projections of energy use and carbon emissions to the year 2050 we build on our own recent work which decomposes changes in the aggregate us energy gdp ratio into shifts in sectoral composition structural change and adjustments in the energy demand of individual industries intensity change and identifies the impact on the latter of price induced substitution of variable inputs shifts in the composition of capital and embodied and disembodied technical progress we employ a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium cge model of the us economy to analyze the implications of these findings for future energy use and carbon emissions comparison of the simulation results against projections of historical trends in gdp energy use and emissions reveals that the range of values for the rate of autonomous energy efficiency improvement aeei conventionally used in cge models is consistent with the effects of structural changes at the sub sector level rather than disembodied technological change even so our results suggest that us emissions may well grow faster in the future than in the recent past

the labour market impact of body weight in china a semiparametric analysis while a positive wage effect of body mass index bmi is widely observed in low income developing countries a negative wage effect of bmi is often observed in high income developed countries to fill the gap between these previous findings we investigate the relationship between body weight and wages in transition economies we focus on china whose rapid economic growth of the 1990s was followed by a rapid increase in overweight and obesity while still experiencing significant food insecurity and underweight we first use several parametric regression strategies to obtain a consistent estimate of the wage effects of weight second we adopt a semiparametric partially linear model that allows for endogeneity of weight parametric regressions provide mixed results and the sign and magnitude of their estimates are sensitive to the choice of samples and regression strategies semiparametric estimates provide evidence of a wage penalty for very heavy and thin persons among both men and women the wage pena

jevons paradox revisited the evidence for backfire from improved energy efficiency beginning with william stanley jevons in 1865 a number of authors have claimed that economically justified energy efficiency improvements will increase rather than reduce energy consumption jevons paradox is extremely difficult to test empirically but could have profound implications for energy and climate policy this paper summarises and critiques the arguments and evidence that have been cited in support of jevons paradox focusing in particular on the work of len brookes and harry saunders it identifies some empirical and theoretical weaknesses in these arguments highlights the questions they raise for economic orthodoxy and points to some interesting parallels between these arguments and those used by the biophysical school of ecological economics while the evidence in favour of jevons paradox is far from conclusive it does suggest that economy wide rebound effects are larger than is conventionally assumed and that energy plays a more important role in driving productivity improvements and economic growth than is conventionally assumed

income smoothing and consumption smoothing one way that risk averse households protect consumption levels is to borrow and use insurance mechanisms another way common in low income economies is to diversify economic activities and make conservative production and employment choices households thus tend toward limiting exposure only to shocks that can be handled with available credit and insurance typically both types of mechanisms are studied independently but much more can be learned by studying them together first we obtain a more complete picture of risks costs and insurance possibilities second it opens the way to considering biases in standard tests of credit and insurance

technology detail in a multisector cge model transport under climate policy a set of three analytical models is used to study the imbedding of specific transport technologies within a multisector multiregion evaluation of constraints on greenhouse emissions the key parameters of a computable general equilibrium cge model are set to mimic the behavior of a model of modal splits and a market allocation markal model of household and industry transport activities in simulation mode the cge model provides key economic data to an analysis of the details of transport technology under policy restraint results focus on the penetration of new automobile technologies into the vehicle market

trade and protection with multistage production this paper analyses trade in manuf acutured goods that are produced via a vertical production structure with many stages where some value is added at each to an intermediate product to yield a good in process ready for the next stage we consider the stage at which a good is traded to be an economically endogenous variable with comparative advantage determining the pattern of production specialization by stages across countries we study how endowment changes and policy shifts move the margin of comparative advantage which thus provides a channel for resource allocation adjustment that is additional to the usual ones of factor substitution and changes in the quantity of output

consumption insurance an evaluation of risk bearing systems in low income economies the hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems in many contexts idiosyncratic risks are high so credit insurance arrangements could be beneficial statistical tests reveal that households in southern india take advantage of these possibilities villages in cote d ivoire and countries in thailand do not do as well the paper includes an empirical description of the devices used to smooth consumption and a theoretical discussion of private information and incentives on ideal operating systems the full information and mechanism design frameworks provide benchmarks for policy analysis

the growth and welfare consequences of differential tariffs this paper analyzes the impact of differential tariffs on consumption and investment in a specific factors model of a small open economy in which capital is accumulated over time particular attention is devoted to the welfare aspects highlighting the cost of the intertemporal distortions produced by protective trade policies several specific welfare propositions are obtained first tariff protection is shown to create short run benefits but long run costs in welfare second the second best policy for the two tariffs is characterized finally several propositions summarizing the implications of our analysis for tariff reform are derived

drought of opportunities contemporaneous and long term impacts of rainfall shocks on human capital higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production particularly in the developing world we introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age using data on test scores and schooling from rural india we show that higher wages increase human capital investment in early life in utero to age 2 but decrease human capital from age 5 to 16 children switch out of school into productive work when rainfall is higher the opportunity cost of schooling even for fairly young children is an important factor in determining overall human capital investment

current account dynamics in a finite horizon model abstract this paper examines the response of the current account in a small open economy to a permanent change in the price of imported intermediate goods to do so it extends blanchard s 1985 open economy model to incorporate the capital stock with adjustment costs a la hayashi 1982 a price increase in imported intermediate goods can be viewed as a combination of transfer payments abroad and capital taxation the former effect leads to a current account deficit and the latter leads to a current account surplus the overall effect depends on the relative magnitude of these effects

us long term energy intensity backcast and projection energy intensity of the economy is often modeled as being determined by the combined effect of a fixed price elasticity of demand and an exogenously specified fixed technical change parameter denoted as the autonomous energy efficiency improvement aeei typically the aeei rate is set to 0 5 1 5 improvement per annum here we study historic aggregate energy intensity trends for the us from 1954 to 1994 we show that the historic trends are inconsistent with an autonomous model of improved energy efficiency especially when the model is used to inform policies that impact energy prices as an alternative we propose a model of price induced efficiency in which aggregate energy intensity trends respond to changes in energy prices beyond price elasticity of demand e our exercise reveals that the aggregate price elasticity of energy demand of the us economy has declined by roughly 15 over the past four decades but beyond this decline bringing our simulations and historical data into close correspondence requires to change sign before and after 1974 before 1974 after accounting for price elasticity of demand the economy was growing less energy efficient after 1974 after accounting for the price elasticity of demand the economy was growing more energy efficient furthermore since 1984 the rate of energy efficiency gain has been declining when projections of long term energy use are compared those with a price induced energy efficiency formulation generate significantly more price sensitive energy use and emissions trajectories when in the business as usual scenario energy prices are expected to be rising climate policies involve lower shadow carbon prices with than with aeei formulations in scenarios where energy prices are relatively flat energy intensity rises leading to co2 emissions far higher than standard business as usual projections utilizing aeei assumptions

the synthesis of bottom up and top down approaches to climate policy modeling electric power technologies and the cost of limiting us co2 emissions abstract in the us the bulk of co 2 abatement induced by carbon taxes comes from electric power this paper incorporates technology detail into the electricity sector of a computable general equilibrium model of the us economy to characterize electric power s technological margins of adjustment to carbon taxes and to elucidate their general equilibrium effects compared to the top down production function representation of the electricity sector the technology rich hybrid specification produces less abatement at a higher welfare cost suggesting that bottom up models do not necessarily generate lower costs of abatement than top down models this result is shown to be sensitive to the elasticity with which technologies generating capacities adjust to relative prices

height skills and labor market outcomes in mexico abstract taller workers are paid higher wages a prominent explanation for this pattern is that physical growth and cognitive development share childhood inputs inducing a correlation between adult height and two productive skills strength and intelligence this paper explores the relative roles of strength and intelligence in explaining the labor market height premium among mexican men while cognitive test scores account for a limited share of the height premium roughly half of the premium can be attributed to the educational and occupational choices of taller workers taller workers obtain more education and sort into occupations with greater intelligence requirements and lower strength requirements suggesting a possible role for cognitive skill

high quality nutrition in childhood body size and wages in early adulthood evidence from guatemalan workers espanolcausalidad entre salud y productividad no resulta directa de establecer por un lado mayores ingresos pueden trasladarse en una dieta de mejor calidad por el otro es probable que un trabajador saludable sea mas productivo este trabajo analiza el efecto del tamano corporal altura e indice de masa corporal como indicadores de nutricion en salarios los datos provienen del estudio longitudinal realizado en guatemala entre 1969 77 y 2002 04 estimaciones sugieren que la elasticidad tamano del cuerpo en relacion al salario aumenta cuando la heterogeneidad no observable es considerada sin embargo los resultados son mas robustos para los hombres adicionalmente la elasticidad estimada presenta algun grado de disparidad entre quantiles de la distribucion condicional del salario englishestablishing a causal relationship between health and productivity is not straightforward on one hand as income grows people invest in better diets on the other a healthier worker is likely to be more productive this paper focuses on the effect of body size height and body mass index as indicators of nutrition upon wages data comes from a longitudinal study conducted in guatemala during 1969 77 and followed up in 2002 04 body size elasticity increases when unobserved heterogeneity is considered although evidence is stronger for males additionally estimated elasticity shows some degree of heterogeneity at different quantiles of the conditional wage distribution

a simple test of consumption insurance are consumers effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth either by formal institutions such as charities private insurance and government programs or by informal mechanisms such as gifts and loans from relatives friends and neighbors under full insurance consumption growth should be cross sectionally independent of idiosyncratic variables that are exogenous to consumers this proposition is tested by cross sectional regressions of consumption growth on a variety of exogenous variables full insurance is rejected for long illness and involuntary job loss but not for spells of unemployment loss of work due to strike and an involuntary move

roads out of poverty assessing the links between aid public investment growth and poverty reduction the authors develop a macroeconomic framework that captures links between aid public investment growth and poverty public investment is disaggregated into education infrastructure and health and affects both aggregate supply and demand dutch disease effects are captured by accounting for changes in the relative price of domestic goods the authors assess the impact of policy shocks on poverty by linking the model to a household survey they calibrate the model for ethiopia and simulate the changes in the allocation of aid and public investment the authors also calculate the amount by which foreign aid should increase to reach the poverty targets of the millennium development goals

income productivity in china on the role of health this study provides empirical evidence regarding the income productivity of health human capital in china we appeal to concepts from human capital theory to support a basic model that treats health as a form of human capital in the income production process our model examines the economic return at the household level from the health of its individual members we estimate this with a longitudinal sample drawn from the china health and nutrition survey chns allowing us to exploit within variation in health and income to address possible unobservables biasing estimates of the impact of health on income in the simple cross sectional setting household income is strongly influenced by the health of its members particularly in rural areas these findings could have important implications for health and economic policy making aimed at reducing the long standing urban rural economic gap and more comprehensively insuring the rural population against health and economic risk

the impact of poor health on total factor productivity a number of recent studies have illustrated the link between health and economic growth this paper argues that a key mechanism through which health affects growth is via total factor productivity tfp we first estimate tfp based on a production function and then estimate the determinants of tfp paying particular attention to three indicators of health that are particularly problematic in developing regions malnutrition malaria and water borne diseases we find the impact of poor health on tfp to be negative significant and robust across a wide variety of specifications

mitigating the consequences of a health condition the role of intra and interhousehold assistance the behavior of noncoresident family members motivates much of the literature on consumption smoothing risk sharing and informal networks yet little is known empirically on the topic due to a lack of data simultaneously observing multiple households in an extended family this study utilizes genealogically linked longitudinal data to examine how extended family networks insure against financial risks from severely limiting health conditions we find that nonhealth consumption of unmarried households declines in response to worsening health whereas married households smooth expenditures in a way that is consistent with full insurance families mitigate losses by reallocating home production drawing down home equity holding formal health insurance collecting social security and receiving transfers from noncoresident relatives we illustrate that the costs of health shocks are transmitted throughout family networks and that noncoresident children draw down their assets and consumption when responding to a parent s health decline

impact of income on nutrient intakes implications for undernourishment and obesity the relationship between income and nutrient intake is explored nonparametric panel and quantile regressions are used engle curves for calories fat and protein are approximately linear in logs with carbohydrate intakes exhibiting diminishing elasticities as incomes increase elasticities range from 0 10 to 0 25 with fat having the highest elasticities countries in higher quantiles have lower elasticities than those in lower quantiles results predict significant cumulative increases in calorie consumption which are increasingly composed of fats though policies aimed at poverty alleviation and economic growth may assuage hunger and malnutrition they may also exacerbate problems associated with obesity

decomposing intergenerational income elasticity the gender differentiated contribution of capital transmission in rural philippines summary using longitudinal data from rural philippines we decompose intergenerational income elasticity ige into five distinct pathways intergenerational transmissions of health education land and spouse education capital plus residual correlation in productivity intergenerational human capital transmissions from mothers are stronger than those from fathers maternal education is the parental capital most strongly associated with ige while naive ige estimates are indistinguishable for sons and daughters the pathways that generate these results differ strikingly for sons ige is entirely explained by parent to child capital transmission by contrast strong income correlation exists between daughters and parents even after controlling for parent and child capital endowments

what happens to diet and child health when migration splits households evidence from a migration lottery program the impact of migration on food security and child health is likely to differ depending on whether children themselves migrate or whether they remain behind while other household members migrate however existing studies have not been able to examine how impacts differ in these two scenarios because parallel data are required for both the sending and receiving country moreover self selection into migration makes unbiased estimation of either impact difficult we overcome these problems by using a unique survey of tongan households that applied to migrate to new zealand through a migrant quota which selects households through a random ballot this survey covers both migrant children in new zealand and non migrant children in tonga with the migration policy rules providing a source of exogenous variation for identifying impacts our estimates of short run impacts show that diets diverge upon migration children who migrate experience improvements while diets worsen for children who remain there is also suggestive evidence of a divergence in health outcomes with increases in weight for age and height for age found for migrant children and decreases found for children who remain behind while other household members migrate

measuring the value of induced technological change in this paper we analyze the value of induced technological change itc for cutting the costs of reaching climate stabilization targets using techniques from the tax burden literature first itc is valuable as it increases the elasticity of emissions with respect to carbon prices and thereby it decreases the burden associated with an enforced emission reduction second under itc emission abatement may generate a positive learning dividend when the social value of the induced change in learning exceeds its costs we discuss under which assumptions we expect itc to turn out a valuable feature or not we also carry out a numerical analysis with two models one focusing on energy savings the other focusing on energy transition the models suggest that both the decreased carbon tax burden and the learning dividend gain can be substantial compared to the costs of abatement without itc

environment health and human capital in this review we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well being first in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior particularly in the form of residential sorting can lead to nonrandom assignment of pollution economists have employed a wide range of quasi experimental techniques to develop causal estimates of the effect of pollution second economic research has placed a considerable focus on the role of avoidance behavior which is an important component for understanding the difference between biological and behavioral effects of pollution and for proper welfare calculations lastly economic research has expanded the focus of analysis beyond traditional health outcomes to include measures of human capital including labor supply productivity and cognition our review of the quasi experimental evidence on this topic suggests that pollution does indeed have a wide range of effects on individual well being even at levels well below current regulatory standards given the importance of health and human capital as an engine for economic growth these findings underscore the role of environmental conditions as an important factor of production jel i12 i31 j24 q51 q53

malnutrition and child labor in pre industrial and developing economies it is common to find i entire families including children working together in family farms or urban factories and ii a positive link between a person s consumption and her productivity this paper argues that there is a natural reason for the concurrence of i and ii as a rule households are characterized by intra household altruism an increase in the income of an individual increases the consumption of all household members hence when an employer pays an adult worker a high wage to enhance her productivity part of it ends up augmenting her children s consumption and productivity one way for the employer to prevent this leakage and internalize the externality is to employ the children as well this explains the higher incidence of family labor in poor societies where ii is more likely to be true

international effects of government expenditure in interdependent economies a dynamic analysis of the international transmission of government expenditure shocks under alternative methods of finance is presented the benchmark case of lump sum tax financing yields an expansion in both the short run and the long run levels of domestic activity while crowding out domestic consumption activity abroad declines in the short run and while it is stimulated during the transition long run activity abroad also declines with capital income tax financing the accompanying distortion outweighs the direct expenditure effects so that all these responses are reversed financing with a tax on labour produces ambiguous responses the welfare implications of these policies are also examined

trade imbalance and domestic market competition policy this study investigates the effect of a country s suppression of competition in its market for nontradables it assumes that the initial equilibrium is stationary and demonstrates that if competition is suppressed in a small country the country s trade surplus increases in the short run in the large country case the same change creates an excess demand for future tradables and affects the relative price between present and future tradables using a two country model the study shows that this price change redistributes real wealth from the country with a trade deficit to the country with a trade surplus

tariff protection and taxation of foreign capital the welfare implications for a small country abstract this paper extends recent studies by deriving sufficient conditions for tariff immiserization in a small country in the presence of internationally mobile sector specific capital the returns of which are taxed or subsidized necessary conditions for a welfare augmenting tariff are also discussed and the analysis is extended to the welfare implications of changes in the tax or subsidy rate on the earnings of migrating capital

worker absence and productivity evidence from teaching a significant amount of work time is lost each year due to worker absence but evidence on the productivity losses from absenteeism remains scant due to difficulties with identification we use uniquely detailed data on the timing duration and cause of absences among teachers to address many of the potential biases from the endogeneity of worker absence our analysis indicates that worker absences have large negative impacts the expected loss in daily productivity from employing a temporary substitute is on par with replacing a regular worker of average productivity with one at the 10th 20th percentile of productivity

catastrophic medical expenditure risk we propose a measure of household exposure to particularly onerous medical expenses the measure can be decomposed into the probability that medical expenditure exceeds a threshold the loss due to predictably low consumption of other goods if it does and the further loss arising from the volatility of medical expenses above the threshold depending on the choice of threshold the measure is consistent with a model of reference dependent utility with loss aversion unlike the risk premium the measure is only sensitive to particularly high expenses and can identify households that expect to incur such expenses and would benefit from subsidised but not actuarially fair insurance an empirical illustration using data from seven asian countries demonstrates the importance of taking account of informal insurance and reveals clear differences in catastrophic medical expenditure risk across and within countries in general risk is higher among poorer rural and chronically ill populations

village banking and maternal and child health evidence from ecuador and honduras abstract many microcredit institutions bundle credit with health education or other programs this paper reviews arguments on such tie ins and concludes that net benefits are possible but requires empirical testing quasi experimental data from project hope s health banks and credit only village banks are then examined the paper presents evidence that health practices do not improve automatically with greater wealth in honduras results show that health bank participation is robustly associated with reduced subsequent conditional child diarrhea probability but in no specification does credit only bank participation have this effect in ecuador results suggest a larger effect of credit only banks in both countries health bank participation significantly raises subsequent healthcare over credit only participation and at least reduces the tendency to switch from breast feeding to bottle feeding as income rises effects on expenditures are ambiguous there is no clear link between tie ins and bank performance

can drought increase total calorie availability the impact of drought on food consumption and the mitigating effects of a conditional cash transfer program abstract this study uses the panel data of a randomized experiment from the mexican progresa program to evaluate the impact of drought on total calorie availability and the mitigating effects of progresa on food consumption in periods of drought drought reduced total expenditures and total food expenditures but increased the total availability of calories this paradox can be explained by the impact of drought on the composition of calories that is it reduced the consumption of expensive calories in such foods as vegetables fruits and animal products but increased calories consumed from cheaper sources such as grains this study finds that progresa can completely mitigate the negative effects of drought on calorie availability from vegetables fruits and other sources however progresa cannot mitigate the impact of drought on calories available from grains the analysis also shows that during drought households who increase their consumption of grains get them mainly from purchased sources rathe

consumption smoothing and hiv aids the case of two communities in south africa abstract hiv aids threatens to overstretch the already frail informal safety nets in countries heavily affected by the epidemic potentially making it difficult for households with hiv positive members to keep up appropriate consumption levels when experiencing shocks these households may in addition face exclusion from informal insurance networks because of widespread stigmatization surprisingly the resilience of informal networks to hiv related shocks and their uncertain worth for afflicted households in particular have not been empirically tested to date using 3 years of a novel panel data set from two poor south african communities experiencing hiv related illnesses and deaths we investigate the ability of households to insure their consumption we find little evidence that affected households show an extra propensity to consume out of income changes which indicates that these households can rely on informal insurance to the same degree as their nonaffected peers however on the basis of the

social protection 2 0 exploring issues evidence and debates in a globalizing world abstract this paper reviews the growing literature on social protection while not new the concept evolved remarkably in recent years it is approached from a multitude of perspectives and intersects with broader bodies of literature particularly around public policy pro poor growth rights humanitarian strategies and aid effectiveness as well as feeding into specific programmatic issues e g conditionality targeting and transfer selection this blend of challenges and approaches has often made debates elusive and polarized the paper examines the evolution and definitions of social protection and unbundles critical policy institutional and implementation quandaries taken together these considerations shape a set of context specific models of social protection the paper s five core conclusions may help chart future directions for social protection research and practice

the long term impact of health on economic growth in latin america abstract growth regressions adapted as granger type causality tests give strong evidence of 30 year causality from health to income in 18 latin american countries the health indicator is probability of survival by age and gender groups for 1950 90 a permanent increment of between 0 8 and 1 5 annual income is associated with typical adult and surprisingly old age health improvements the channels of causation from health to income are diverse and need to be identified in microeconomic studies that should however include a wide variety long term phenomena to account for the economic effects of health

risk sharing within the extended family evidence from the indonesia family life survey abstractin recent years there has been an increase in the availability of longitudinal household surveys in developing countries that allow the researchers to construct linkages between households with familial ties this type of data allows researchers to look at whether some household outcomes are influenced by decisions made at the extended family level this article utilizes data from two waves of the indonesia family life survey 1997 and 2000 to construct a panel of extended families in order to focus on one particular example of such outcome whether consumption risk sharing occurs among households within the extended family the findings show that after controlling for the extended family fixed effects changes in the household s own income still matter for changes in its consumption rejecting full consumption risk insurance however the coefficients on household own income are small indicating significant degrees of risk sharing results from a set of reduced form estimations suggest that ho

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

alcohol consumption smoking and wages the good health of an individual is a combination of uncontrollable factors that includes genetics and random events and controllable factors through the regulation of activities such as smoking and drinking since the work of grossman in the 1970s a significant relationship between health and earnings has been predicted in this present paper the 1995 australian national health survey is used to examine simultaneously the effects of drinking and smoking on wages to model the interaction of smoking with alcohol consumption separate models are fitted for smokers and nonsmokers these models account for potential selectivity bias resulting from the decision to smoke and endogeneity arising from a potential causal relationship between earnings and alcohol consumption

why growth is not enough household poverty dynamics in northeast gujarat india despite high growth rates in gujarat exceeding 9 per cent per year over the decade of the 1990s poverty in 36 villages located in the northeastern part of this state has changed hardly at all in these villages 9 5 per cent of households escaped from poverty over the past 25 years but 6 3 per cent of households became poor at the same time escape and descent are not symmetric different reasons account for escaping poverty than those for declining into poverty growth alone is hardly sufficient to achieve poverty reduction on any significant scale public policies will be needed to address directly the separate causes for descent into poverty

real interest rates home goods and optimal external borrowing the paper investigates the optimal time path of consumption and external borrowing in the dependent economy model the small country faces given world prices and a given world real interest rate the presence of a home goods sector implies that the relevant real interest rate appropriate to consumption decisions depends on the rate of change of the real price of home goods the paper shows how transitory disturbances in output or in the world real interest rate affect the time profile of consumption and the trade balance in particular it is shown that the presence of a home goods sector dampens the consumption effects of changes in the world interest rate

the welfare cost of factor taxation in a perfect foresight model this paper examines the marginal efficiency cost of various factor taxes in a dynamic general equilibrium model the au thor solves for the excess burden of anticipated and unanticipated t emporary and permanent tax policies using a range of estimates for taste and technology parameters he finds excess burdens larger than those indicated by previous studies that use static models these exc ess burdens are sensitive to parameter values and timing however th e rankings of alternative tax policies turn out to be insensitive to structural parameter values copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

accounting for the effect of health on economic growth i use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on gdp per capita i employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health which i combine with cross country and historical data on height adult survival rates and age at menarche using my preferred estimate eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log gdp per worker by 9 9 percent and reduce the ratio of gdp per worker at the 90th percentile to gdp per worker at the loth percentile from 20 5 to 17 9 while this effect is economically significant it is also substantially smaller than estimates of the effect of health on economic growth that are derived from cross country regressions

health shocks and consumption smoothing in rural households does microcredit have a role to play abstract this paper estimates using a large panel data set from rural bangladesh the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households response to such shocks households appear to be fairly well insured against health shocks our results suggest that households sell livestock in response to health shocks and short term insurance is therefore attained at a significant long term cost however microcredit has a significant mitigating effect households that have access to microcredit do not need to sell livestock in order to insure consumption microcredit organizations and microcredit therefore have an insurance role to play an aspect that has not been analyzed previously