does microcredit increase household welfare in the absence of microinsurance summary this study answers the question does a combination of microcredit and microinsurance improve the wellbeing of low income households we examine this challenge through heckman sample selection instrumental variable and treatment effect models the findings indicate that households using microcredit in combination with microinsurance derive significant gains in terms of welfare improvement microcredit may be good but its benefit to the poor is enhanced and sustained if the poverty trapping risks are covered with microinsurance to this extent combining microcredit with microinsurance will empower the poor to make a sustainable exit from poverty

fiscal windfall curse abstract we study the impact of a one off exogenous fiscal windfall on local public finances in the canton of zurich in switzerland in contrast to much of the literature of resource windfalls the windfall occurred in a stable democracy with strong fiscal institutions it was due to the ipo of glencore on the london stock exchange in 2011 as a result its ceo paid an extraordinary tax bill of approximately chf 360 million about chf 238 million of that extra tax revenue entered the municipal resource equalization scheme and rained down on the municipalities of the canton of zurich this quasi experimental setup and our unusually rich dataset allow us to estimate the causal effect of this one off windfall on all municipal accounting positions we show that it triggered large permanent expenditure increases targeting specific groups mostly public employees at the same time as general tax cuts and user charge hikes the resulting imbalances caused a 7 5 fold increase in gross debt relative to the windfall this massive overreaction hints at a substantial fiscal windfall curse even with strong fiscal institutions 178 words

does microfinance reduce poverty in bangladesh new evidence from household panel data abstract the study examines whether loans from microfinance institutions mfi reduce poverty in bangladesh drawing upon the nationally representative household panel with four rounds from 1997 to 2004 the effects of general microfinance loans and loans for productive purposes on income food consumption and women s body mass index are estimated overall effects of mfi loans on income and food consumption were positive and the purpose of the loan is important in predicting which household welfare indicator is improved alternative estimation methods confirm a positive impact of mfi loans on food consumption growth which supports the poverty reducing effects of microfinance in bangladesh

is trade good or bad for the environment sorting out the causality we seek to contribute to the debate over globalization and the environment by asking what is the effect of trade on a country s environment for a given level of gdp we take specific account of the endogeneity of trade using exogenous geographic determinants of trade as instrumental variables we find that trade tends to reduce three measures of air pollution statistical significance is high for concentrations of so2 moderate for no2 and lacking for particulate matter although results for other environmental measures are not as encouraging there is little evidence that trade has a detrimental effect on the environment

the impact of group lending in northeast thailand abstract much of the literature on group lending focuses on its high repayment rates rather than its goal of promoting borrower welfare most studies that attempt to measure the impact of group lending neglect the issues of self selection and endogenous program placement thus leading to biased estimates of impact one reason for this neglect is the lack of data that would allow for identification of impact this paper surmounts these problems by using data from a quasi experiment conducted in northeast thailand in 1995 1996 program participants were identified in six control villages 1 year prior to receiving loans surveys were then conducted of these control members treatment members in eight older program villages and nonmembers in both types of village this survey design allows for straightforward estimation of impact the results indicate that program loans are having little impact although naive estimates of impact that fail to account for self selection and endogenous program placement significantly overestimate impact

poverty comparisons over time and across countries in africa abstract we use demographic and health surveys dhs to compare poverty at two or more points in time within and between african countries our welfare measure is an index resulting from a factor analysis of various household characteristics durables and household heads education an advantage of this measure is that for intertemporal and intraregional comparisons we need not rely on suspect price deflators and currency conversion factors the wide availability and similarity of questionnaires of the dhs facilitate comparisons over both time and countries our results generally show declines in poverty during the previous decade largely due to improvements in rural areas

microfinance and poverty evidence using panel data from bangladesh micro finance supports mainly informal activities that often have low market demand it may be thus hypothesized that the aggregate poverty impact of micro finance in an economy with low economic growth is modest or nonexistent the observed borrower level poverty impact is then a result of income redistribution or short run income generation the author addresses these questions using household level panel data from bangladesh the findings confirm that micro finance benefits the poorest and has sustained impact in reducing poverty among program participants it also has positive spillover impact reducing poverty at the village level but the effect is more pronounced in reducing extreme rather than moderate poverty

endogenous federal grants and crowd out of state government spending theory and evidence from the federal highway aid program contrary to simple theoretical predictions existing evidence suggests that federal grants do not crowd out state government spending a legislative bargaining model with endogenous grants documents a positive correlation between grant receipts and preferences for public goods this correlation has likely biased existing work against measuring crowd out to correct for such endogeneity the model motivates instruments based on the political power of state congressional delegations exploiting this exogenous variation in grants the instrumental variables estimator reports crowd out that is statistically and economically significant this endogeneity may explain the flypaper effect a nonequivalence between grant receipts and private income jel d70 h40 h77

the flypaper effect and the deadweight loss from taxation abstract the difference in the effects on public expenditure by local governments of consumer s incomes and intergovernmental grants is shown to be consistent with the maximization of a representative consumer s utility by a local government increasing marginal deadweight loss of taxation accounts for the result explanations of the flypaper effect do not therefore require models of strategic bureaucratic behavior or voter misperceptions

miracles and debacles in defence of trade openness the central theme of this paper is that sustained rapid growth cannot be achieved without rapid growth in trade a review of the experience during the past four decades offers virtually no examples of countries achieving sustained rapid growth called miracles in this paper without simultaneously experiencing sustained rapid growth in trade in the presence of low or high but declining barriers to trade simultaneously the claim that opening to trade leads to sustained income losses is unfounded a review of the experience of the countries that have faced stagnation or declining per capita incomes on a long term basis called debacles in this paper reveals no connection to a sustained surge in imports

microfinance and poverty a macro perspective we test the hypothesis that microfinance reduces poverty at the macro level using cross country and panel data which are constructed by the microfinance information exchange data on microfinance institutions mfis and the world bank data taking account of the endogeneity associated with mfis loans we show that a country with higher mfis gross loan portfolio per capita tends to have lower levels of poverty indices contrary to recent micro evidence our results suggest that microfinance significantly reduces poverty at macro level and thus reinforce the case for channeling funds from development finance institutions and governments of developing countries into mfis

unsticking the flypaper effect in an uncertain world abstract we provide a novel explanation for the flypaper effect based on insurance arguments in our model the flypaper effect arises due to the differential response of precautionary savings to private income or fiscal transfers shocks in an uncertain world with incomplete markets the model generates two testable implications i the flypaper effect is a decreasing function of the correlation between fiscal transfers and private income and ii such relationship is stronger the higher is the volatility of fiscal transfers and or private income an empirical analysis of argentinean provinces for the period 1963 2006 finds strong support for the model s implications

openness and inflation a new assessment romer 1993 uses a barro gordon type model to argue that openness puts a check on the government s incentive to engage in unanticipated inflation because of induced exchange rate depreciation 2 therefore in the absence of precommitment in monetary policy more open economies will tend to have lower inflation rates romer finds that empirically over a large sample of countries and over a broad time frame average inflation rates are lower in smaller more open economies this relationship is significant quantitatively large and robust moreover these findings suggest that models in which the absence of precommitment in monetary policy leads to inefficiently high average levels of inflation are essential to understanding inflation in most of the world this comment suggests that the negative link between inflation and openness romer found may be largely driven by the responses of severely indebted countries sics to the debt crisis of the 1980s figures i and ii show the scatterplots of the logarithms of average inflation and openness for the subperiods 1973 to 1981 predebt crisis and 1982 to 1990 the debt crisis period different groups of countries are separated according to their indebtedness level 3 the solid lines in the figures represent the predicted value of inflation obtained from a regression of openness on inflation for the countries in each group as the scatterplots show there is indeed a strong negative relation between openness and inflation among sics during the debt crisis

a reexamination of the role of income for the trade and environment debate recent work on the relationship between international trade and the environment has found small but negative effects of increased openness on measures of pollution for the average country on a panel of 128 countries it is shown that like previous studies the trade intensity effect is negative and significant for the average country for emissions of four localized pollutants so2 nox co and vocs however trade intensity effects are not uniform across countries of different income levels in fact a strong non monotonicity exists in trade intensity elasticities it is found that countries with relative world incomes less than 0 5 or greater than 2 5 tend to have positive trade intensity elasticities while countries with relative world incomes between 0 5 and 2 5 tend to have negative trade intensity elasticities the results imply that both factor abundance and pollution haven effects may be at work but that the dominance of one effect over the other depends on a country s level of development

the flypaper effect what happens to a state s spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government the standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes or roughly 5 10 percent for most states in contrast numerous empirical analyses have found that spending increases by much more with some estimates near 100 percent this result is known as the flypaper effect since the money appears to stick where it hits the authors review this evidence as well as other studies that find similar behavior in firms

a predictive index for the flypaper effect abstract it is well established that lump sum public grants boost local government spending more than an equivalent increase in private income the flypaper effect one shortcoming of the related literature is that it presumes all communities have an identical propensity to consume from an intergovernmental grant this paper is one attempt to allow for a heterogeneous response the working conjecture is that government expenditure on administrative overhead is a gauge of voter control over fiscal decisions high overhead spending implies a lower provision of public services and a stronger role for revenue maximizing forces in the budget setting process as such the flypaper effect should be more marked in high overhead communities an overhead index is applied to a sample of pennsylvania communities in the philadelphia metropolitan area it is difficult to understand these governments spending propensities from various windfall revenues without the help of the overhead index supportive evidence for this approach because overhead data is widely available the technique here can be used to address important policy questions such as predicting variations in state government responses to the recently created lump sum welfare grants

trade openness and environmental quality international evidence we examine the relationship between trade openness and the environment in a cross country panel using the emission of particulate matter pm10 as the basic indicator of environmental quality the panel cointegration test results show a long run relationship between particulate matter emissions trade openness and economic growth we find that increased trade openness leads to environmental degradation for the global sample however the results differ according to the income of countries trade openness has a benign effect on the environment in high income countries but a harmful effect in middle and low income countries these results are generally robust to different measures of trade openness and environmental quality interestingly and significantly the results are consistent with the popular notion that rich countries dump their pollution on poor countries finally we find evidence of a feedback effect between trade openness and particulate matter emissions for the global sample as well as different income groups of countries

can commercially oriented microfinance help meet the millennium development goals evidence from pakistan summary the current emphasis in the microfinance industry is a shift from donor funded to commercially sustainable operations this article evaluates the impact of access to microloans from the khushhali bank pakistan s first and largest microfinance bank which operates on commercial principles using primary data from a detailed household survey of nearly 3 000 borrower and non borrower households a difference in difference approach is used to test for the impact of access to loans once the results are disaggregated between rural and urban areas there is a positive impact in rural areas on food expenditure and on some social indicators such as the health of children and female empowerment these impacts are observed even in very poor households these findings suggest that commercially oriented microfinance and the millennium development goals are not incompatible given a supportive environment

impact of microfinance on schooling evidence from poor rural households in bolivia summary channels for the influence of microfinance programs on a rural household s demand for schooling are identified income growth risk management child labor demand gender empowerment and parent information within a random utility framework a model of household consumption investment in education and borrowing suggests determinants at the individual household and regional levels of the probability of schooling gaps using data from two surveys of households of clients of microfinance organizations in bolivia regression models examine determinants of schooling gaps inferences about otherwise positive microfinance impacts identify potential negative effects of increased child labor demand which challenge usual assumptions and pose dilemmas for policymakers

microenterprise credit programs deja vu abstract microenterprises in low income countries are the target of an increasing number of credit programs these efforts resemble earlier problematic attempts to assist operators of small farms with credit similarities discussed include target group definition assumptions policies and project justifications authors go on to list a dozen lessons from the experience with small farmer credit that might apply to microenterprise credit efforts authors then conclude that debt is not an effective tool for helping most poor people to enchance their economic conditions be they operators of small farms or microenterprises

fiscal federalism and procyclical spending the cases of argentina and brazil este trabajo estudia las fuentes de la prociclicalidad del gasto para gobiernos subnacionales en argentina y brasil encontramos que los esquemas de coparticipacion de los impuestos explican solo una parte menor de la prociclicalidad de los recursos de las entidades subnacionales siendo la mayor parte explicada por la prociclicalidad de los propios recursos esto es especialmente visible cuando esa prociclicalidad se mide relativa al producto de cada entidad subnacional usando evidencia de corte transversal para distintas jurisdicciones podemos concluir que a su vez la prociclicalidad del gasto resulta de la prociclicalidad de los recursos mediante el llamado voracity effect la conclusion es que el debate sobre la prociclicalidad del gasto de entidades subnacionales debiera concentrarse mucho mas en mejorar los sistemas impositivos locales que en cambiar los regimenes de coparticipacion

openness inflation and the phillips curve a puzzle models of open economies with nominal rigidities are often thought to predict a correlation between openness to trade and the slope of the output inflation trade off or phillips curve using a variety of measures of the trade off and a standard measure of openness this paper argues that the direct evidence for a correlation is not strong in turn this calls into question the usual explanation for the negative correlation between openness and inflation that was documented by romer 1993 the paper considers some alternative explanations for the romer evidence

microfinance and household poverty reduction new evidence from india the objective of the present study is to examine whether household access to microfinance reduces poverty using national household data from india treatment effects model is employed to estimate the poverty reducing effects of micro finance institutions mfis loans for productive purposes such as investment in agriculture or non farm businesses on household poverty levels these models take into account the endogenous binary treatment effects and sample selection bias associated with access to mfis despite some limitations such as those arising from potential unobservable important determinants of access to mfis significant positive effect of mfi productive loans on multidimensional welfare indicator has been confirmed the significance of treatment effects coefficients has been verified by both tobit and propensity score matching psm models in addition we found that loans for productive purposes were more important for poverty reduction in rural than in urban areas however in urban areas simple access to mfis has larger average poverty reducing effects than the access to loans from mfis for productive purposes this leads to exploring service delivery opportunities that provide an additional avenue to monitor the usage of loans to enhance the outreach

using an asset index to assess trends in poverty in seven sub saharan african countries summary using comparable nationally representative surveys and extending the work of sahn d e stifel d c 2000 poverty comparisons over time and across countries in africa world development 28 12 2123 2155 an asset index is used to investigate changes in poverty in seven african countries poverty declined in five of the seven countries improvements in the asset index are driven by progress in the accumulation of private assets while access to public services has deteriorated however the method has some shortcomings assets are slow changing and discrete the index therefore may not capture changes in well being accurately the poor discrimination ability of the index at the lower end of the scale also makes it an inappropriate tool for studying ultra poverty

mental accounting of public funds the flypaper effect in the lab abstract we report evidence from a series of laboratory experiments that focus on mental accounting of public funds groups of three players decide upon how much to redistribute within the group we measure the preference to redistribute when transfers are made either out of individual accounts the players own money or out of a common account the group s money since the common account is dissolved after each round and paid out to individuals its size should not affect the decision to redistribute the experiment is designed to control for anchoring as a potential confounding effect we find that the size of the common account significantly affects redistribution behavior specifically the transfer increases in the size of the common account this effect is significantly more pronounced when the transfer is paid out of the common account instead of the individual account we interpret these findings as evidence for a flypaper effect due to mental accounting

the mystery of the vanishing benefits an introduction to impact evaluation this article provides an introduction to the concepts and methods of impact evaluation the author provides an intuitive explanation in the context of a concrete application the article takes the form of a short story about a fictional character s on the job training in evaluation ms speedy analyst is an economist in the ministry of finance in the fictional country of labas in the process of figuring out how to evaluate a human resource program targeted to the poor ms analyst learns the strengths and weaknesses of the main methods of ex post impact evaluation

asymmetric information and agenda control the bases of monopoly power in public spending abstract a pervasive empirical finding widely known as the flypaper effect is that lump sum intergovernmental grants generate considerably greater public spending by the recipient jurisdiction than would be predicted by equivalent shifts in personal income in that jurisdiction moreover such observations are inconsistent with standard median voter models of the political process we posit a model in which it is in the interest of suppliers of a collectively provided good not to generate full information to voters about outside aid the empirical results are consistent with flypaper and suggest that voters are very poorly informed about outside grants

legislative representation bargaining power and the distribution of federal funds evidence from the us congress this article investigates the relationship between representation in legislatures and the geographic distribution of federal funds in a legislative bargaining model we demonstrate that funds are concentrated in high representation areas and two channels underlie this result the proposal power channel reflects the role of representation in committee assignments and the vote cost channel reflects the role of representation in coalition formation in our empirical analysis we find that small states relative to large states receive more funding in the us senate relative to the house we also find empirical support for the two channels underlying this relationship throughout the history of federations and international organisations a key consti tutional design question involves how jurisdictions of different sizes are represented in legislative bodies and how their votes will ultimately be weighted large jurisdictions typically argue for delegation sizes or voting weights that are roughly proportional to population whereas small jurisdictions typically argue for an equal number of delegates or votes for each jurisdiction this conflict over representation is presumably driven at least in part by a belief that increased representation strengthens bargaining power in the battle over the geographic distribution of funds authorised by these legislative bodies in this article i analyse the relationship between legislative representation bar gaining power and the geographic distribution of federal funds from both a theoretical and empirical perspective in addition to investigating the existence of a relationship between representation and federal funds i also explore the underlying mechanisms that is i ask which political institutions such as agenda control provided to commit tees and the formation of coalitions under majority rule shape the bargaining power of jurisdictions in central legislatures and thus facilitate the relationship between repre sentation and the distribution of federal spending to provide a framework for analysing these issues i begin by developing a simple theoretical model of a central legislature that determines the crossjurisdiction distri bution of local public goods which are financed by a national tax base both delegation sizes and population are variable allowing me to consider a variety of institutional arrangements for jurisdictional representation legislators represent local interests and given the common pool problem associated with concentrated benefits and dis persed tax costs attempt to increase ownjurisdiction spending but to restrain spending elsewhere the model follows a recent literature on legislative bargaining in which a proposer must secure a majority of votes in order to pass legislation and due to the

the flypaper effect and other anomalies abstract i develop a model in which income both in its own right and as a proxy for other socioeconomic characteristics is an input in the production function for local public services the most obvious example is education though there are other applications as well the comparative statics results from this model yield the following results 1 the observed flypaper effect the tendency for local government to spend a higher fraction of unrestricted grants than income of residents may be due at least in part to the fact that own income but not grants is a substitute for purchased inputs in the technology hence the propensity to spend on purchased inputs out of own income is lower than out of grants 2 the income elasticity of demand for public sector output may be higher than the observed income elasticity of demand for purchased inputs 3 equalization of educational opportunity via wealth neutrality as suggested by feldstein requires major changes in education finance once we recognice the distinction between purchased inputs and output

global estimates of pro poor growth summary the main objective of the present paper is to present a cross country analysis of pro poor growth in 80 countries in 237 growth spells during the period 1984 2001 to achieve this objective the paper proposes a new measure of pro poor growth that captures gains and losses of growth rates due to changes in the distribution of consumption the gains imply pro poor growth while the losses imply anti poor growth the statistical test carried out in the paper shows that regional location of countries has a significant association with the pro poorness of growth the paper also attempts to test for the association between growth patterns and certain variables that the literature has identified as significant determinants of growth and inequality out of many variables the paper focuses on four namely inflation the share of agriculture in gdp openness to trade and the rule of law

trade openness foreign direct investment and child labor summary the skeptics of globalization argue that increased trade openness and foreign direct investment induce developing countries to keep labor costs low for example by letting children work this article argues that there are good theoretical reasons why globalization might actually have the opposite effect we test this with various measures of child labor and provide the first analysis of foreign investment in addition to trade we present evidence that countries that are more open to trade and or have a higher stock of foreign direct investment also have a lower incidence of child labor this holds for the labor force participation rate of 10 14 year old children the secondary school nonattendance rate and a count measure of economic sectors with child labor incidence as the dependent variables globalization is associated with less not more child labor

poverty status and the impact of formal credit on technology use and wellbeing among ethiopian smallholders summary this paper examines the impact of formal credit largely microfinance on the use of improved technology and on consumption and asset growth across households in different degrees of asset poverty using data from rural ethiopia the analysis finds no relationship between participation in microfinance programs and the use of technologies or consumption growth among the poorest households even though the use of certain technologies like fertilizer contributes to their asset accumulation over time for other households microfinance has positive effects on both consumption and asset growth as well as on the use of improved technology the findings imply variation in constraints faced by different classes of poor households and suggest the value of asset based poverty classifications in identifying target groups for poverty interventions

do federal grants boost school spending evidence from title i abstract one of the federal government s main elementary and secondary education programs is title i which allocates money for compensatory education to school districts based on child poverty i use sharp changes in per pupil grant amounts surrounding the release of decennial census data to identify effects of title i on state and local education revenue and how much the program ultimately increases spending by recipient school districts i find that state and local revenue efforts initially are unaffected by title i changes but that local governments substantially and significantly crowd out changes in title i within in a 3 year period

the environmental consequences of trade evidence from subnational trade flows abstract the debate over the environmental consequences of free trade is not only quite heated but also entails significant policy ramifications recently cross sectional analysis at the country level has made use of exogenous determinants of trade to identify the causal effect of trade on the environment finding moderate evidence of a beneficial impact of expanded trade on environmental quality given the stakes involved we revisit this finding using subnational data on trade flows across us states and several measures of pollution not only does the analysis shed further light on the debate at the international level but also addresses a heretofore unexamined question does greater inter regional commerce at the subnational level harm the environment our findings are striking providing further evidence against a negative environmental impact of trade for the majority of measures analyzed however several sources of heterogeneity arise that are noteworthy

the impact of group based credit programs on poor households in bangladesh does the gender of participants matter this paper estimates the impact of participation by gender in the grameen bank and two other group based micro credit programs in bangladesh on labor supply schooling household expenditure and assets the empirical method uses a quasi experimental survey design to correct for the bias from unobserved individual and village level heterogeneity we find that program credit has a larger effect on the behavior of poor households in bangladesh when women are the program participants for example annual household consumption expenditure increases 18 taka for every 100 additional taka borrowed by women from these credit programs compared with 11 taka for men

trade reform with quotas partial rent retention and tariffs quotas are the predominant means of protection in developed countries with quota rents commonly shared between exporter and importer this paper derives shadow prices appropriate to evaluating trade reform under these circumstances and provides a number of useful sufficient conditions for welfare improving piecemeal reform in doing so the authors apply the distorted quantity constrained expenditure function and use implicit separability to derive more powerful results than have previously been available

a new measure of trade openness trade openness popularly measured as x m gdp in the hundreds of studies published to date consistently considers the world s biggest trading countries such as the usa the uk japan and germany to be closed economies irrespective of the data set used this study suggests a composite trade share measure that more completely reflects reality by combining two important dimensions of trade openness trade share and the relative importance of a country s trade level to total world trade robustness tests support the new proposed measure in lieu of the conventional measure of openness and suggest that the latter may not only be incomplete but may also overstate the impact of trade on such things as income and the environment

empowering women with micro finance evidence from bangladesh abstract this article examines the effects of men s and women s participation in micro credit programs on various indicators of women s empowerment using data from a special survey carried out in rural bangladesh these credit programs are well suited to studying how gender specific resources alter intrahousehold allocations because they induce differential participation by gender through the requirement that only one adult member per household can participate in any micro credit program empowerment is formalized as an unobserved latent variable reflecting common components of qualitative responses to a large set of questions pertaining to women s autonomy and decision making power the empirical methods are attentive to various sources of endogeneity and the results are consistent with the view that women s participation in micro credit programs helps to increase women s empowerment the effects of male credit on women s empowerment were generally negative

repayment performance in group based credit programs in bangladesh an empirical analysis abstract this paper analyzes the repayment rates of 128 credit groups belonging to three group based credit programs in bangladesh the association for social advancement asa the bangladesh rural advancement committee brac and the rangpur dinajpur rural service rdrs using tobit analysis specific tests are performed on the following hypothesized determinants group size size of loans degree of loan rationing enterprise mix within groups demographic characteristics social ties and status and occurrence of idiosyncratic shocks the paper concludes that if basic principles of prudential banking are adhered to repayment rates can be good even in poor and remote communities the important thing for financial institutions is to tailor services such that it becomes worthwhile for the poor to establish a profitable long term association in addition more freedom to members in the process of group formation is recommended

trade liberalization in a multinational dominated industry abstract existing theoretical models in the trade industrial organization literature assume almost exclusively that firms are national enterprises so that there is no international coordination by multinational firms we develop a model in which multinationals compete among themselves but coordinate production pricing and sales decisions across multiple plants and markets free entry and exit is assumed and cases in which the multinationals can and cannot segment markets are considered the model is simulated using data from the north american auto industry results are compared with a counter factual model calibrated to the same data which assumes national ownership of firms

the impact of microfinance in sub saharan africa a systematic review of the evidence microfinance is seen as a key development tool and despite the current deepening crisis within the industry it continues to grow in sub saharan africa we systematically reviewed the evidence of the impacts of micro credit and micro savings on poor people in sub saharan africa we considered impacts on income savings expenditure and the accumulation of assets as well as non financial outcomes including health nutrition food security education child labor women s empowerment housing job creation and social cohesion the available evidence shows that microfinance does harm as well as good to the livelihoods of the poor

rethinking the effects of microcredit on household welfare in cambodia abstractthis article analyses the effects of microcredit on household welfare in terms of household expenditure per capita in cambodia with data from the cambodia socio economic survey carried out in 2014 the analysis describes the effects via formal and informal lending sectors accounting for endogenous selection bias arising from unobserved factors and for structural differences between borrowers and non borrowers in terms of expenditure functions the findings suggest that microcredit in both sectors reduces household expenditure

a time frequency analysis of trade openness and co2 emissions in france abstract the paper explores the comovement between trade openness and carbon dioxide co2 emissions in france over the period 1960 2013 by using the wavelet tool the investigation offers detailed information about this interaction for different sub periods of time and frequencies it also reveals the lead lag nexus between variables under cyclical and anti cyclical shocks the main findings reveal no comovement at high frequency between trade openness and gas emissions confirming the neutral hypothesis on short term the co2 emissions positively drive the trade openness at medium frequency hence on medium term the inexistence of strong environmental rules stimulate the international trade especially the exports obtained based on pollutant capacities curiously the trade openness positively runs the gas emissions at low frequency herein on long term the interaction between trade and co2 emissions is driven by the business cycle