calories conflict and correlates redistributive food security in post conflict iraq war torn iraq manifests itself as an ideal laboratory for food policy experimentation due to availability of unique data surrounding intra household calorie consumption and the presence of selected correlates including but not restricted to substantial disruptions to social infrastructure and fundamental public policy intervention among other findings expenditure elasticities are mostly positive and dramatically curvilinear with respect to wealth and lump sum redistribution of the iraqi public distribution system emerges as a feasible policy intervention extensions are discussed

food preferences and nutrition in rural bangladesh t he dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance in many countries such as bangladesh national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods however little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake the design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross price elasticities for both target and non target groups the net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption in this study demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5 750 rural bangladeshi households estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis such as household size occupation and employment status that are typically lost in aggregation there is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data this is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest moreover the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters previous econometric analysis of income class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory pinstrup anderson de londono and hoover 1976 estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using frisch s scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid alderman and timmer 1980 who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in indonesia the inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income i the formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section ii below section iii presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables section iv summarizes our findings

economic growth comparative advantage and gender differences in schooling outcomes evidence from the birthweight differences of chinese twins abstract data from two surveys of twins in china are used to contribute to an improved understanding of the role of economic development in affecting gender differences in the trends in levels of and returns to schooling observed in china and in many developing countries in recent decades in particular we explore the hypothesis that these phenomena reflect differences in comparative advantage with respect to skill and brawn between men and women in the context of changes in incomes returns to skill and or nutritional improvements that are the result of economic development and growth

intergenerational transfers in philippine rice villages gender differences in traditional inheritance customs abstract this paper examines education land and nonland asset transfers from parents to children in five rice villages in the philippines a model with family fixed effects explains transfers better than either individual heterogeneity or observed parent and child characteristics without family fixed effects families facing different land constraints exhibit significantly different patterns of educational investment in children in a subsample with completed inheritance daughters receive less education land and total inheritance but are compensated with nonland assets parents also exhibit preferential behavior towards children of the same gender daughters of better educated mothers receive more land nonland assets and total inheritance better educated fathers give land preferentially to sons but favor daughters in education

infant health and the labor supply of mothers this study examines the association between maternal employment and infant feeding and the health of children and the role of prices wages and other exogenous factors in influencing the association in the philippines data were obtained from the 1983 86 cebu longitudinal health and nutrition survey of 2868 women who were permanent residents of the sample areas and had given birth to a single live child in metro cebu during 1983 84 analysis is based on the conceptual framework in which infant feeding and labor supply are jointly chosen to maximize the utility subject to time budget and health production function constraints findings indicate that the labor supply of the mother had little direct effect on infant health when prices wages and other exogenous factors are taken into account maternal wage rates and prices of key foods affected labor supply and infant feeding and care women with better wage offers were more likely to work and to have healthier infants maternal labor supply only had statistically significant effects on infant health when occupation was accounted for it is suggested that women in developing countries should not be discouraged from working womens earnings increase their ability to pay for food and breast milk substitutes that contribute to healthy infants the authors suggest that other health outcomes such as infant morbidity and mortality could be examined or substitutions for other feeding patterns and child care options

alcohol availability prenatal conditions and long term economic outcomes this study examines how a policy that sharply increased alcohol availability during 8 5 months affected the labor productivity of those exposed to it in utero compared to the surrounding cohorts the prenatally exposed children have substantially worse labor market and educational outcomes and lower cognitive and noncognitive ability effects on earnings are found throughout the distribution but are largest below the median males are more affected than females consistent with growing evidence that boys are less resilient to early environmental insults the long term effects seem primarily driven by changes in prenatal health rather than changes in the childhood environment

stature and the standard of living research on the standard of living now emphasizes alternatives or supplements to the national income accounts this paper reviews the results of two decades of research using stature as a measure of health aspects of human welfare after comparing and contrasting stature with per capita income i consider height patterns discovered by economic historians that challenge traditional beliefs about the past including long term trends cycles in heights and the dreadfully small stature of slave children that was followed by catch up growth the paper concludes with comparisons to work in development economics and suggestions for research

endowments at birth and parents investments in children do parents invest more in higher quality children or do they compensate for lower quality by giving more to children with lower endowments we answer this question in the context of a large scale iodine supplementation programme in tanzania we find that children with higher programme exposure were more likely to receive necessary vaccines and were breastfed for longer siblings of treated children were also more likely to be immunised fertility behavior and investments at the time of birth were unaffected

input choices in agriculture is there a gender bias summary this paper examines evidence of gender biases in the decisions of agricultural households utilizing data from international crops research institute for the semi arid tropics s village level studies in india 1975 85 the main empirical finding is that households with a high proportion of boys tend to use some agricultural inputs including fertilizers and irrigation services more intensively than households with girls this pattern is more pronounced among wealthier households but does not appear to be driven solely by bequest motives or male child labor productivity

the impact of changes in common property resource management on intrahousehold allocation abstract in developing countries common property resources cprs can be an important source of income for certain individuals within households this paper demonstrates that if changes in the management of cprs impose fixed costs on them or cause a decline in the prices of goods produced from it the intrahousehold allocation of resources may alter in a manner detrimental to those individuals the paper also shows that the assumption of a unitary household model causes the detrimental effects of certain cpr policy interventions to be overlooked although the model is narrowly conceived the results can be generalised to examples where households have members who specialise in different economic activities outside the home

health enterprise and labor complementarity in the household we study the role of household enterprise as a coping mechanism after health shocks using variation in the cost of traveling to formal sector health facilities to predict recovery from acute illness in tanzania we show that individuals with prolonged illness switch from farm labor to enterprise activity this response occurs along both the extensive entry and intensive capital stock and labor supply margins family members who are not ill exhibit exactly the same pattern of responses deriving a simple extension to the canonical agricultural household model we show that our results suggest complementarities in household labor

is it better to be a boy a disaggregated outlay equivalent analysis of gender bias in papua new guinea the demographic evidence of gender bias in many countries has provided an impetus for finding ways to study the status of women in developing countries because of the lack of accurate intra household data deaton 1989 introduced a method for using household expenditure data to infer discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls few studies of discrimination using the method however have detected bias even though alternative indicators suggest it is a serious problem in this paper we study the case of papua new guinea a country in which there are many indicators of severe gender bias discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls within households in papua new guinea is examined using deaton s outlay equivalent ratio method adding a boy to the household reduces expenditure on adult goods by as much as would a nine tenths reduction in total outlay per member but girls have no effect on adult goods expenditure the hypothesis of haddad and reardon 1993 that

productivity health and inequality in the intrahousehold distribution of food in low income countries a model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition labor market productivity health heterogeneity and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy empirical results based on a sample of households from bangladesh indicate that despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption households are averse to inequality furthermore consistent with the model the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status copyright 1990 by american economic association

health shocks and natural resource management evidence from western kenya poverty and altered planning horizons brought on by the hiv aids epidemic can change individual discount rates altering incentives to conserve natural resources using longitudinal household survey data from western kenya we estimate the effects of health status on investments in soil quality as indicated by households agricultural land fallowing decisions we first show that this effect is theoretically ambiguous while health improvements lower discount rates and thus increase incentives to conserve natural resources they also increase labor productivity and make it more likely that households can engage in labor intensive resource extraction activities we find that household size and composition are predictors of whether the effect of health improvements on discount rates dominates the productivity effect or vice versa since households with more and younger members are better able to reallocate labor to cope with productivity shocks the discount rate effect dominates for these households and health improvements lead to greater levels of conservation in smaller families with less substitutable labor the productivity effect dominates and health improvements lead to greater environmental degradation

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

the effect of income on demand for food in poor countries are our food consumption databases giving us reliable estimates abstract cross section estimates of income elasticities for food staples in the aggregate based on quantity information from household food expenditure surveys are often in the 0 3 0 6 range it is shown that differences in per capita calorie intakes across income groups implied by these income elasticities are grossly inconsistent with observed differences in bodyweights moreover time series data frequently indicate that national per capita consumption of food staples in the aggregate remains constant even as per capita gross national product rises substantially cross section income elasticity estimates are biased upwards due to the failure of food expenditure surveys to undertake an accurate accounting of food transfers from high to low income groups biases which are not generated by survey techniques which record food intakes directly

the contribution of female health to economic development we analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health we do this through developing and calibrating a novel micro founded dynamic general equilibrium model in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for health related gender differences in productivity we show that better female health speeds up the demographic transition and thereby the take off toward sustained economic growth by contrast male health improvements delay the transition and take off because ceteris paribus they raise fertility investing in female health is therefore a potent lever for promoting development

fairness concepts and the intrahousehold allocation of resources abstract how do parents allocate scarce resources among their children while much research has focused on investment strategies parents preferences for equity may also play a role in the household allocation of resources while the studies that incorporate equity define it in limited terms in this paper several fairness concepts are applied to the problem of intrahousehold distribution comparing food allocations and health outcomes across fairness concepts indicates that each concept results in a different allocation of food and a different health outcome the implications of this result for empirical studies of intrahousehold distribution and policy interventions are discussed

women s income and boy girl anthropometric status in the cote d ivoire abstract this paper examines the effects of the intrahousehold distribution of income on children s anthropometric status in the c te d ivoire we find that increases in the proportion of cash income accruing to women increases boys height for age relative to girls and that this effect is statistically significant we suggest that this result may reflect efficiency and equity concerns which in this case reinforce each other

wage and labor supply effects of illness in cote d ivoire and ghana instrumental variable estimates for days disabled abstract sickness should make individuals less productive but there are problems in measuring this effect first how is adult morbidity measured in a household survey second how is the impact or morbidity on productivity inferred if earning is partly used to improve health self reported functional activity limitation due to illness is considered an indicator of morbidity for wage earners and self employed people to deal with both the measurement and joint determination problems an instrumental variable estimation approach is used where local food prices and health services instrument for disability days that reduce wages by at least 10 and hours by 3 or more

arsenic mitigation in bangladesh a household labor market approach rural families in bangladesh one of the poorest countries in the world face financial risks from major illness both from the cost of medical care and from the loss of income associated with reduced labor supply and productivity chronic exposure to arsenic in drinking water has often been associated with the development of skin cancers and internal cancers especially of the bladder liver and lungs and a wide variety of other health conditions such as diabetes respiratory problems cardiovascular diseases hyperpigmentation hypopigmentation and keratosis a condition in which painful nodules grow on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet most of the economic work on arsenic contamination in bangladesh has had an epidemiological focus that has tried to effectively monetize a dose response relation using either a cost of illness or a willingness to pay approach

parental preference heterogeneity and human capital inequality abstract in this article i provide an empirical account of the human capital investment behavior of parents in the face of endowment differences among siblings the data set used contains a three wave panel of 4 030 individuals the article presents a rare case in which endowments are measured explicitly health endowments are estimated from dynamic health production functions while educational endowments are obtained from test scores the simple score of the standard raven s colored progressive matrix cpm test is used to measure educational endowments i use estimation procedures that combine an instrumental variables method with panel data estimators to control for endogeneity and heterogeneity the results suggest that parents compensate for initial differences in health but reinforce initial educational differences among siblings hence an educational subsidy aimed at reducing inequality may end up reinforcing the inequality that might exist in the absence of such subsidy when parents invest mor

nutrition labour productivity and labour supply of men and women in ghana ghana s population is expected to increase from 14 1 million in 1990 to 18 7 million in 2000 bumb et al 1994 this growth in population along with growth in per capita income and urbanisation will create increased demand for food before the launching of the economic reform programme in 1983 ghana s food production had fallen to an abysmally low level in response to the general deterioration in the economy output of food and cash crops declined at a rate of 0 3 percent per year between 1970 and 1980 cereal production which exceeded domestic demand by some 200 000 tonnes in 1971 73 registered a deficit of over 300 000 tonnes in 1981 83 production of starchy staples fell from 7 9 million tonnes to 4 1 million tonnes between 1974 and 1981 as a result of declining food output combined with a rising population per capita food availability in 1981 83 was 30 percent lower than it was in 1975 efforts made under the economic recovery programme have improved the food supply situation in the country although food production levels still remain low output levels of cocoyam and plantain have not reached their average levels in the early 1970 s table 9 1

who benefits more from higher household consumption the intra household allocation of nutrients in china abstract previous studies find that human capital investments in boys are less income elastic than investments in girls attributing this result to favoritism toward boys i show theoretically that it is plausible for more productive or favored household members to have higher income elasticities i then investigate this question empirically utilizing panel data on individual nutrient intake from the china health and nutrition survey chns to analyze how changes in household per capita nutrient intake affect the intra household allocation of nutrients to deal with potential biases due to omitted variables and simultaneity i use measures of rainfall variation as instruments i find that nutritional intakes are more elastic for males especially prime age men than for females and significantly less elastic for the elderly

whose fast and whose feast intrahousehold asymmetries in dietary diversity response among east african pastoralists thisarticleexploresintrahouseholddietarydiversityallocationwithinpastoralisthouseholdsineastern africa we estimate income elasticities of dietary diversity for demographic cohorts allowing asymmetric behavior depending on household circumstances we find that household heads disproportionately bear the nutritional burden when household income is below mean while other cohorts disproportionately enjoy the nutritional gains when it is above mean the commonly assumed symmetric framework masks this intrahousehold behavior and produces biased elasticity estimates stochastic dominance tests show adult daughters as better off than other household members in their dietary diversity sons as worse off and little difference between male heads and their wives nutritional welfare is an individual not household characteristic while the average nutrient intake and dietary quality of the household can be one of the largest determinants of the well being of its members nutritional well being is individually experienced therefore development policies targeting nutrition are typically more concerned with their possible implications for individual welfare than for household community or national level aggregates the household though may be one of the most important institutions influencing individual nutritional welfare consequently in order to evaluate income generation and pricing policies it is essential to understand both how households allocate resources to individual members as well as how allocations

food aid and adult nutrition in rural ethiopia insight into the role of safety nets that contribute to adult nutrition is an important component to understanding the dynamics of poverty in developing countries this article uses panel data from rural ethiopia on individual nutritional status to test for an effect of public transfers on adult body mass index bmi results show that among adult household members male members are the primary beneficiaries of food aid as male and female aid recipients tend to invest aid receipts in male household members these results are consistent with a theory in which additional resources are allocated to members of the household whose market returns are higher or those who engage in activities that expend higher levels of energy for high asset households female household members benefit if the aid recipient is a female women in low asset households appear to be adversely affected by aid receipts and evidence suggests that women with little bargaining power suffer the most the results suggest that aid receipts are useful in mitigating fluctuations in adult bmi over a short time period

investments in the schooling and health of women and men quantities and returns this paper surveys the evidence on recent trends in the growth of human capital investments in women that raised womens productivity in thus century in most countries patterns in school investments in men and women across regions and across birth cohorts within countries indicate that expected years of school enrollment is converging between low and high income countries to where the gaps have closed from about seven years in 1950 to five years in 1985 women today are receiving nearly as many years of education as men in industrially advanced high income countries latin america south east and east asia are relatively similar to the high income countries at the other extreme in most of the countries of south and west asia and north and sub saharan africa women receive about two fifths to three fourths the number of years of schooling as men do in every region however the ratio of female to male expected years of enrollment increased from 1950 to 1985 gender differences in mortality and nutritional status reveal that there has been a dramatic but largely unexplained advance in female longevity relative to male in the 20th century in most countries with the exception of certain countries in south asia this development is associated with the shift of populations from dependence on agriculture to working in urban areas these changes are a major source of decreasing inequality within and between countries in this century market failure could be responsible for families investing less than the socially efficient amount in girls than boys there are problems in measuring without bias these private and social return empirical patterns across countries in estimated returns to schooling illustrate that private returns at the primary secondary and higher education levels can vary for women and men

does contingent repayment in microfinance help the poor during natural disasters abstract microfinances in bangladesh introduced a contingent repayment system beginning in 2002 which allowed rescheduling of savings and installments during natural disasters for affected members this paper is one of the first attempts to evaluate the system employing a unique dataset in using evidence from a flood in 2004 the author found that rescheduling plays the role of a safety net by decreasing the probability that people skip meals during negative shocks by 5 1 per cent this effect is even higher on the landless and females this study attempts to contribute to the issue regarding the poverty reduction effect of microfinances

savings and nutrition at low incomes while many development theorists assume saving propensities vary among different groups there has been limited theoretical justification for this view this paper analyzes two complementary theories stressing the effect on saving of physiological consequences of poor nutrition at low incomes one influence is on the probability of survival another is on workers productivity either effect means that the average propensity to save can rise with income issues considered include annuities exogenous changes in survival and efficiency implications for the efficiency wage theory of unemployment and distinctions between wage and nonwage income implications of nutritional effects for econometric specification of saving functions are stressed

explaining the duration of exchange rate pegs abstract this paper is an empirical investigation of the duration of exchange rate pegs in 16 latin american countries and jamaica we identify factors that influence peg duration using logit analysis the real exchange rate and the level of international liquidity are significant determinants of the monthly likelihood of devaluation structural variables such as the openness of an economy and its geographical trade concentration and political variables such as changes in the executive also significantly affect the likelihood of a devaluation there is some evidence that the likelihood of a devaluation first rises and subsequently declines during the first year of a peg

gender and poverty issues and policies with special reference to asian developing countries abstract recent years saw the outpouring of a theoretical and empirical literature exploring the nexus between gender and poverty in developing countries this paper which provides a critical review of the literature examines the conceptual basis for a gender focused approach to poverty alleviation reviews the relevant empirical studies and data drawn principally but not exclusively from asian developing countries and explores the role of public policies to redress gender disparity the present review argues that the conceptual basis for many gender focused policies is far from well established the empirical foundations of many conventional wisdoms as well as of popular policies remain fragile due to the dearth of reliable gender segregated data and rigorous empirical studies the paper underscores the need for more careful empirical analyses as an input to formulating sound public policy with regard to gender and poverty

land inheritance and schooling in matrilineal societies evidence from sumatra abstract this paper explores statistically the implications of the shift from communal to individualized tenure on the distribution of land and schooling between sons and daughters in matrilineal societies based on a sumatra case study the inheritance system is evolving from a strictly matrilineal system to a more egalitarian system in which sons and daughters inherit the type of land which is more intensive in their respective work effort while gender bias is either non existent or small in land inheritance daughters tend to be disadvantaged with respect to schooling the gender gap in schooling however appears to be closing for the generation of younger children

evaluating familial support for the elderly the intrahousehold allocation of medical expenditures in rural pakistan introduction in this article i examine the determinants of medical expenditures on the elderly in rural pakistani households analyzing in particular the dependence of such expenditures on the economic contribution of the elderly to household income the results for older males are contrasted with those for younger males improved life expectancies in the south asian economies as in other developing economies have generated new policy interest in the economic status of the elderly there is however little empirical evidence on this topic while the scant research on the elderly in south asia undoubtedly reflects the fact that they represent one of the smallest demographic groups in these economies it also reflects the widespread belief that they are well provided for by the intergenerational households where the vast majority of them reside with their adult children however this assumption has been questioned by a number of scholars who find that medical expenditures on the elderly are closely correlated with the elderly s individual incomes and wealth household data from pakistan support such claims data on individual medical expenditures and days of illness are available from two household surveys a panel data set collected by the international food policy research institute ifpri and from the pakistan living standards measurement survey lsms both data sets reveal a strong correlation between the number of days of illness reported by adult males and age leading one to expect a similarly strong correlation between medical expenditures and age instead the ifpri data yield a correlation that is less than one would expect given the relationship between illness and age the lsms data set which provides information on many more

human capital investment and the gender division of labor in a brawn based economy we use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments these include the higher return to and level of schooling the small effect of healthiness on wages and the large effect of healthiness on schooling for females relative to males the model incorporates gender differences in the level and responsiveness of brawn to nutrition in a roy economy setting in which activities reward skill and brawn differentially empirical evidence from rural bangladesh provides support for the model and the importance of the distribution of brawn

gender headship and intrahousehold resource allocation abstract household head as reported in household surveys may not always identify the main economic provider and decision maker within the household research based on this definition of headship may lead to misleading conclusions on the link between gender and poverty treating female headed households as a homogenous group can also be inappropriate results from jamaica show that it is not female headedness per se that is associated with child welfare but the absence of a potential female decision maker within the household

information learning and wage rates in low income rural areas in this essay we present evidence that employers in rural areas of developing countries have imperfect information with regard to the productivity of heterogeneous workers in addition to obtaining direct measures of the completeness of employer information we consider the implications of information asymmetries for the structure of casual labor markets we then evaluate the extent to which casual labor markets do in fact exhibit these attributes we find that 1 there is adverse selection out of the time rate labor market 2 employers discriminate statistically given two workers with different observed characteristics but the same actual productivity the worker from the group with the higher average productivity will have a higher wage 3 employers exhibit learning over time the extent of employer ignorance is negatively related to labor market exposure on the part of the workers and 4 calorie consumption affects productivity but is not rewarded in the time rate labor market in concluding we argue that an analysis of wage and employment patterns and the implications of these patterns for human capital investment in rural areas of developing countries that ignored the role of information problems could yield misleading conclusions

does better nutrition raise farm productivity household level data from sierra leone are used to test whether higher caloric intake enhances family farm labor productivity this is the notion behind the efficiency wages hypothesis which has found only weak empirical support a farm production function is estimated accounting for the simultaneity in input and calorie choice instruments include prices household demographic characteristics and farm assets the latter two sets of instruments are later dropped to explore the robustness of the results to different specifications of exogeneity the exercise shows a highly significant effect of caloric intake on labor productivity providing solid support for the nutrition productivity hypothesis the marginal effect on productivity falls drastically as calorie consumption rises but remains positive at moderately high levels of intake one result is a fall in the effective price of food a decline that is larger for households that consumer fewer calories

educational choice families and young people s earnings this paper presents two optimizing models of educational choice discusses issues of identification estimates earnings equations in the context of these models and presents conditions under which we can test one against the other the estimates indicate that education is endogenous for young people s earnings creating a downward bias in estimated returns from education that assume exogeneity identification and estimation relies on family background information from a special sample from the british household panel study 1991 95 which matches mothers and their young adult children our estimates favor a family model over an individual model and they suggest that parents allocate resources to education to compensate for differences in their children s earnings endowments

the theory and econometrics of health information in cross sectional nutrient demand analysis understanding the role of health information in food and nutrient demand has become an important issue over the last decade endogeneity and measurement error are two empirical problems that are inherent in this type of analysis while some type of instrumental variables estimation would appear the obvious solution this article provides several theoretical and empirical reasons why this is not the case in cross sectional analysis an alternative estimation strategy is pursued an empirical example is given and the implications are discussed copyright 2001 oxford university press

women work and weil being in the middle east an outline of the relevant literature there is now an extensive literature on the role of women in economic development and the impact of development on their lives this article concentrates on the economic literature and discusses its importance for policies aimed at working women in the middle east it identifies the important strands and places the discussion within the wider context of women in the labour market in both developing and developed countries the general conclusion is that we are very far from having sufficient knowledge to implement effective policy or even to evaluate existing policies

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

pesticides productivity and farmer health a philippine case study health is recognized as one of the most important components of the human capital of rural people in developing countries there is a growing body of literature showing the productivity effects of health associated with nutrition e g bliss and stern 1978 strauss 1986 deolalikar 1988 pitt rosenzweig and hassan 1990 in this literature the productivity effects of health are inferred either by correlating health indicators with wages or by including health indicators in an agricultural production function the human capital literature also has demonstrated that farmer education plays an important role in the allocative and technical efficiency of farmers welch 1970 schultz 1975

estimating the average treatment effect of social safety net programmes in bangladesh since the famine in 1974 the bangladesh government and some national and international agencies have been providing food or cash or both to poor households through the social safety net programmes i seek to estimate how much these programmes affect the well being of poor households most previous studies have estimated impacts of these programmes on calorie consumption simply computing the raw differential however both observed and unobserved characteristics bias this treatment effect using fuzzy regression discontinuity rd design i control for these selection effects

the economic rationale for investing in nutrition in developing countries abstract studies of experimental and socioeconomic survey data on the direct productivity effects of nutrition indicate growing though qualified evidence of positive direct effects of nutrition on labor productivity of poorer individuals in developing countries greater productivity effects for nutrition than for formal schooling studies on the indirect productivity effects of nutrition through cognitive achievement schooling and preschool ability also indicate positive productivity effects through these channels therefore for productivity reasons alone policies that favor better nutrition among the poorer members of society merit serious consideration that productivity and equity concerns are in harmony is an important plus

college choice and wages estimates using data on female twins the authors assess the impact of college quality on women s earnings and the influence of family and individual endowments on college choice using new data from a survey of identical and nonidentical twins born in minnesota the estimates reject models that ignore school choice the statistically preferred estimates suggest that ph d granting private universities with well paid senior faculty and smaller enrollments produce students who have significantly higher earnings later in life both the quantity of schooling and the quality of schooling resources are allocated to higher endowed individuals which exacerbates preexisting inequality in human capital and biases conventional estimates of school quality effects copyright 1996 by mit press

endowments and the allocation of schooling in the family and in the marriage market the twins experiment 03 we show how comparisons between the within twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 42 percent of the variance in log earnings obesity is due to variability in individual specific endowments allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments and individual specific earnings endowments of men and their wives schooling are negatively associated

shocks and their consequences across and within households in rural zimbabwe abstract increasing attention is now being paid to poverty dynamics in developing countries this work links the extent to which households smooth consumption or smooth assets given income shocks the empirical evidence on the churning of households in and out of poverty and the possibility that temporary shocks can have permanent consequences using longitudinal data from rural zimbabwe this paper extends the discussion of these issues by disaggregating the impact of shocks by levels of asset holdings by disaggregating the impact of shocks on individual level welfare and by assessing the extent to which such shocks have permanent consequences by doing so it assesses the validity of distinguishing between asset and consumption smoothing and provides insights into whether poverty dynamics assessed at the household level provide an adequate picture of dynamics at the individual level

women headed households and household welfare an empirical deconstruction for uganda abstract analysis of the first nationally representative household survey of uganda shows that women headed households are not poorer when assessed by consumption or income nor do they appear consistently disadvantaged on social indicators some subgroups of women headed households do have lower economic welfare including those headed by widows and those in urban areas gender inequalities in educational attainment appears to be the major source of what economic disadvantage such women headed households do face high remittances receipts play a key role in maintaining economic parity between women and men headed households

implications for minimum wage policies of an s shaped labor supply curve abstract a model of family labor supply provides a rationale for raising minimum wages when the labor supply response is negative at low wages under those circumstances the labor market can be caught in a malthusian poverty trap of excess supply unemployment overextended workdays child labor and falling wages raising minimum wages may therefore help resorb this excess supply and stabilize the labor market setting a virtuous cycle in motion in a two sector context such a policy would increase wages in both the covered and uncovered sectors evidence from a study of costa rica in particular is consistent with those conclusions

early health shocks intra household resource allocation and child outcomes an open question in the literature is whether families compensate or reinforce the impact of child health shocks discussions usually focus on one dimension of child investment this paper examines multiple dimensions using household survey data on chinese child twins whose average age is 11 we find that compared with a twin sibling who did not suffer from negative early health shocks at ages 0 3 the other twin sibling who did suffer negative health shocks received rmb 305 more in terms of health investments but received rmb 182 less in terms of educational investments in the 12 months prior to the survey in terms of financial transfers over all dimensions of investment the family acts as a net equalizer in response to early health shocks for children we estimate a human capital production function and establish that for this sample early health shocks negatively affect child human capital including health education and socioemotional skills compensating investments in health as measured by bmi reduce the adverse effects of health shocks by 50 but exacerbate the adverse impact of shocks on educational attainment by 30

the effects of human capital on wages and the determinants of labor supply in a developing country abstract the heckman procedure is used to correct for sample selection bias in estimating wage offer and net labor market supply equations the findings show that wages are affected by education and experience in addition the wage offer is influenced by other genetic and environmental influences captured in the wage of one s father calories as predicted by exogenous instruments are also shown to influence the wage offer suggesting that better nutrition increases labor productivity the probability of market labor participation as well as the amount of net market labor supply declined with the size of paddy landholding in addition to the net market supply elasticity increasing with the amount of land owned and being lower for urban than rural workers

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

induced technical change in centrally planned economies abstract it has generally been assumed that the inferences of the induced technical change model with respect to the direction of technical change could not be expected to hold for the centrally planned economies in this paper we test three hypotheses generated from the induced technical change hypotheses against the experience of centrally planned economies a if land becomes increasingly scarce new technology will be biased in a land saving direction b if labor becomes increasingly scarce new technology will be biased in a labor saving direction and c changes in the land labor ratio have been induced by changes in relative factor endowments the results suggest a bias toward mechanical and against biological technology regardless of factor endowments this is consistent with the well known ideological or policy bias in a number of centrally planned economies toward a capital intensive development strategy

gender bias investments in children and bequests the impacts of pure sex preference and differential earnings opportunities by gender on investments in children are modelled with altruism if bequest constraints do not bind human investments are privately efficient with the higher earning gender receiving more education education does not depend on parental wealth the gender differential in bequests is ambiguous however even in this case when bequest constraints bind education may depend on wealth and it is also possible for the gender with better earnings opportunities to get less education the model is tested with data from philippine villages where bequest constraints are generally nonbinding the schooling differential slightly favors daughters estimated bequest behavior however reflects pure sex preference in terms of our model copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

work intensity gender and sustainable development abstract is labour intensive employment compatible with social justice and environmental sustainability this paper examines the question of how far small scale intermediate technology based on energy intensive human work which is central to prescriptions for poverty alleviation and sustainable development is compatible with development objectives emphasizing gender equity work intensity is a neglected characteristic of labour but significant in the determination of human well being and in the intra household distribution of welfare the intensification of energy expenditure does not affect men and women in a uniform way and needs to be gender disaggregated in order to reveal potential trade offs between development strategies based on labour intensive growth and the well being of men and women the paper draws upon the experience with treadle pumps for irrigation in bangladesh as an illustration of such potential trade offs and argues for more rigorous analyses of gender divisions of labour which include work intensity in combination with time allocation

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

do agricultural outputs of partly autarkic peasants affect their health and nutrition evidence from rwanda abstract in rural areas of less developed countries because of market imperfections the health and nutritional status of peasants may directly depend on the production levels of specific agricultural goods rather than solely on income levels this channel of health and nutrition determination has never been studied in order to assess and test the empirical possibility of this channel we estimate the responses of health and nutritional status of autarkic agricultural households in rwanda with respect to differences in socio demographic characteristics and the main agricultural outputs and inputs while controlling for local environment and sampling scheme several food outputs are found to have a positive influence on health and nutrition whereas the production of traditional beers has a negative impact moreover greater land negatively affects health and nutrition conditionally on agricultural production perhaps because of a larger relative workload for households who have a large farm an alternative interpretation of the estimates is that they inform on the validity of the common hypothesis of perfect agricultural input output markets with no effect of agricultural inputs outputs on health and nutrition status this hypothesis is rejected

in times of sickness intra household labour substitution in rural indonesian households abstractin many developing countries households with ill adults suffer not only from diminished labour supply but also from an inability to borrow against future labour income intra household labour substitution may be an important coping strategy for these households using information about individual health status provided by indonesia family life survey this study finds some evidence that indonesian farm households cope with chronic illnesses of male adults through intra household labour substitution yet the results show that this strategy is not effective in the case of severe health shocks and that these households are unable to keep their family farm profits stable

differences in food insecurity between adults and children in zimbabwe food insecurity is a serious challenge facing millions of households across africa within these households distinguishing the incidence of food insecurity between adults and children is often difficult because most surveys rely on the reports of adults in this paper we address this shortcoming of previous work by using a survey from over 6000 households in zimbabwe where interviews were conducted with both an adult caregiver and a child using two measures of food insecurity we find that reports of adults and children differ within households with lower reports of food insecurity among children with children in the youngest age groups particularly being protected from food shortages an exception to this general rule though is in better off households where children are often more likely to be food insecure than adults findings also demonstrate the need for multiple measures to comprehensively capture the full picture of food insecurity in the household