benefit incidence public spending reforms and the timing of program capture assessments of the distributional effects of public spending reforms have generally been based on average rates of program participation by income or expenditure group this practice can be deceptive because the socioeconomic composition of participants can change as a social program expands or contracts the geographic variation found in 1993 94 household survey data for rural india is used to estimate the marginal odds of participating in schooling and antipoverty programs the results suggest early capture of these programs by the non poor it is shown that conventional methods for assessing benefit incidence underestimate the gains to the poor from higher public outlays and underestimate the losses from cuts

the glass of milk subsidy program and malnutrition in peru this study of the vaso de leche glass of milk feeding program in peru looks for evidence that this in kind transfer program aimed at young children furthers nutritional objectives the study links public expenditure data with household survey data to substantiate the targeting and to model the determinants of nutritional outcomes it confirms that the social transfer program targets poor households and households with low nutritional status nevertheless the study fails to find econometric evidence that the nutritional objectives are being achieved

co monotonicity toward a utility function capturing envy abstract envy affects economic decisions and can lead to monotonicity violation we introduce co monotonicity a generalization of monotonicity expected to hold even in the presence of envy experimental results and implications for the form of possible utility functions are discussed

marginal benefit incidence of public health spending evidence from indonesian sub national data we examine the marginal effects of decentralized public health spending by incorporating estimates of behavioural responses to changes in health spending in benefit incidence analysis the analysis is based on a panel dataset of 207 indonesian districts over the period from 2001 to 2004 we show that district public health spending is largely driven by central government transfers with an elasticity of around 0 9 we find a positive effect of public health spending on utilization of outpatient care in the public sector for the poorest two quartiles we find no evidence that public expenditures crowd out utilization of private services or household health spending our analysis suggests that increased public health spending improves targeting to the poor as behavioural changes in public health care utilization are pro poor nonetheless most of the benefits of the additional spending accrued to existing users of services as initial utilization shares outweigh the behavioural responses

is workfare cost effective against poverty in a poor labor surplus economy workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries this has seemed an attractive idea for self targeting transfers to poor people this incentive argument does not imply however that workfare is more cost effective against poverty than even poorly targeted options given hidden costs of participation in particular even poor workfare participants in a labor surplus economy can be expected to have some forgone income when they take up such a scheme a survey based method is used to assess the cost effectiveness of india s employment guarantee scheme in bihar participants are found to have forgone earnings although these fall well short of market wages on average factoring in these hidden costs the paper finds that for the same budget workfare has less impact on poverty than either a basic income scheme providing the same transfer to all or uniform transfers based on the government s below poverty line ration cards for workfare to dominate other options it would have to work better in practice reforms would need to reduce the substantial unmet demand for work close the gap between stipulated wages and wages received and ensure that workfare is productive that the assets created are of value to poor people cost effectiveness would need to be reassessed at the implied higher levels of funding

poverty decline agricultural wages and non farm employment in rural india 1983 2004 the authors analyze five rounds of national sample survey data covering 1983 1987 8 1993 4 1999 0 and 2004 5 to explore the relationship between rural diversification and poverty poverty in rural india declined at a modest rate during this period the authors provide region level estimates that illustrate considerable geographic heterogeneity in this progress poverty estimates correlate well with region level data on changes in agricultural wage rates agricultural labor remains the preserve of the uneducated and also to a large extent of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes although agricultural labor grew as a share of total economic activity over the first four rounds it had fallen back to the levels observed at the beginning of the survey period by 2004 this all india trajectory masks widely varying trends across states during this period the rural non farm sector grew modestly mainly between the last two survey rounds regular non farm employment remains largely associated with education levels and social status that are rare among the poor however casual labor and self employment in the non farm sector reveal greater involvement by disadvantaged groups in 2004 than in the preceding rounds the implication for poverty is not immediately clear the poor may be pushed into low return casual non farm activities due to lack of opportunities in the agricultural sector rather than being pulled by high returns offered by the non farm sector econometric estimates reveal that expansion of the non farm sector is associated with falling poverty via two routes a direct impact on poverty that is likely due to a pro poor marginal incidence of non farm employment expansion and an indirect impact attributable to the positive effect of non farm employment growth on agricultural wages the analysis also confirms the important contribution to rural poverty reduction from agricultural productivity availability of land and consumption levels in proximate urban areas

programme evaluation with multiple treatments this paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes which is of high relevance in practice for example active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes employment programmes and wage subsidies similarly sickness rehabilitation policies often offer different vocational as well as non vocational rehabilitation measures first the main identification strategies control for confounding variables difference in difference instrumental variable and regression discontinuity identification are discussed in the multiple programme setting thereafter the different nonparametric matching and weighting estimators of the average treatment effects and their properties are examined download discussion paper pdf 484 kb

globalization and rural poverty as is common in most contentious public debates different people mean different things by globalization some interpret it to mean the global reach of new technology and capital movements some refer to outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries others protest against the tentacles of corporate capitalism or us hegemony economic military or cultural in this chapter i shall limit myself to interpreting globalization simply as openness to foreign trade and long term capital flows i shall ignore here the important issues arising from the devastation caused to fragile economies by billions of dollars of volatile short term capital stampeding around the globe in herd like movements or the substantial poverty reducing potential of international unskilled labour flows from poor to rich countries even if allowed in temporary and regulated doses

the estimation of demand parameters in hedonic price models this paper shows that the econometric problem of estimating hedonic demand parameters is not a standard identification problem caused by demand supply interaction as has been often assumed estimation procedures based on this assumption lead to biased results the hedonic estimation problem is instead caused by the endogeneity of both prices and quantities when households face a nonlinear budget constraint an instrumental variables solution to this problem is suggested using instruments that exogenously shift the budget constraint

do social protection transfers reduce poverty and vulnerability to poverty in pakistan household level evidence from punjab empirical studies in different developing countries have investigated the impact of social protection sp on ex post poverty however few studies analysed the impact of sp on ex ante vulnerability to poverty vtp this paper contributes to the literature by evaluating the impact of sp on vulnerability to poverty vtp and poverty rates among households in the punjab province of pakistan a hierarchical modelling approach is used to analyse the multiple indicator cluster survey mics 2011 data of about 90 000 households matching methods and simultaneous endogenous switching regression are used to control for potential selection bias and estimate average treatment effects our results show that sp has a positive impact in reducing household poverty and vtp but this impact is mainly driven by a short term flood relief cash transfer programme pension of government employees and households regular purchase from utility store network

looking at pro poor growth from an agricultural perspective summary pro poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to accelerate poverty reduction in developing countries the diagnostic pro poor growth toolbox has so far focused on the income dimension as well as key non income achievements in education and health this article contributes to the literature by expanding the toolbox with several new measures that take into account the extraordinary importance of agricultural productivity for poverty reduction in developing countries we distinguish between land productivity and labor productivity and find that the poor identified by low incomes poor education outcomes low land productivity and low labor productivity overlap only to a small degree suggesting that analyses of pro poor growth from these different perspectives are complementary the toolbox is then applied to three comparable household surveys from rwanda eicv data for the years 1999 2001 2005 06 and 2010 11 a country that has experienced impressive economic growth since the genocide in the mid 1990s and that has undertaken considerable efforts to increase agricultural productivity and improve the population s access to social services over the first decade of the 2000s our application shows that the enormous progress made in the income education and health dimension of well being has been pro poor according to most definitions of the concept the new tools reveal that the land productivity poor experienced pro poor growth in the relative and absolute sense while the labor productivity poor increased their labor productivity relatively but not absolutely faster than the labor productivity rich even though the former dispose of considerably lower education levels

transfer benefits from public works employment evidence for rural india current knowledge provides little guidance on one of the key questions in evaluating public employment schemes aimed at directly reducing poverty what are the net income gains to participating workers this paper offers an answer for rural public employment in two villages in the state of maharashtra in india a model of intrahousehold time allocation is proposed and estimates are made using household data over six years the empirical implementation indicates that the projects induce significant behavioral responses transfer benefits are large and are greatly underestimated using prevailing market wage rates for similar work to estimate forgone incomes copyright 1994 by royal economic society

matching the gold standard comparing experimental and nonexperimental evaluation techniques for a geographically targeted program abstract we compare nonexperimental impact estimates based on matching methods with those from a randomized evaluation to determine whether the nonexperimental approach can match the so called gold standard the social experiment we use was carried out to evaluate a geographically targeted conditional cash transfer antipoverty program in nicaragua the outcomes we assess include several components of household expenditure and a variety of children s health outcomes including breast feeding vaccinations and morbidity we find that using each of the following improves performance of matching for these outcomes 1 geographically proximate comparison samples 2 stringent common support requirements and 3 both geographic and household level matching variables even for a geographically targeted program in which the selection is at the geographic rather than at the individual or household level and in which it is not possible to find comparison individuals or households in the program locales m

assessing the welfare impacts of public spending an important objective of public spending is to raise household living standards particularly for the poor but how can final impacts on this objective best be assessed evaluating a policy s impact requires assessing how different things would have been in its absence but the counterfactual of no intervention is tricky to quantify the author surveys the methods most often used to assess the welfare effects of public spending limitations of current practices are studied and implications for future best practices are drawn the methods used to assess welfare impacts broadly fall into two groups benefit incidence studies and behavioral approaches benefit incidence studies ignore behavioral responses and second round effects using the provision cost as a proxy for benefits received behavioral approaches present quite different drawbacks in attempting to represent individual benefits correctly a number of recent studies usefully combine both approaches it is still uncertain whether behaviorally consistent methods actually point to fundamentally different policy recommendations what can be concluded is that we need to diversify and compare results from our evaluation methods and broaden our definition of well being to see how various facets of living standard are affected by public spending

just luck an experimental study of risk taking and fairness choices involving risk significantly affect the distribution of income and wealth in society this paper reports the results of the first experiment to our knowledge to study fairness views about risk taking specifically whether such views are based chiefly on ex ante opportunities or on ex post outcomes we find that even though many participants focus exclusively on ex ante opportunities most favor some redistribution ex post many participants also make a distinction between ex post inequalities that reflect differences in luck and ex post inequalities that reflect differences in choices these findings apply to both stakeholders and impartial spectators

how did workers benefit from bolivia s emergency social fund bolivia s emergency social fund esf was established to cushion the adverse effects on the poor of the economic crisis and subsequent stabilization program in the 1980s and to facilitate transition through the phases of structural adjustment the esf provided temporary employment opportunities by funding small scale labor intensive projects that were proposed by local governmental and nongovernmental organizations this article measures the impact of the esf program on employment and income of workers in the esf projects for the average esf worker hourly wages were 12 8 percent higher the work week was 9 5 hours longer and weekly earnings were 32 percent higher than what they would have been without the esf taking into account the probability that the individual may not have worked without the esf leads to larger gains the greatest benefits from participating in the program were received by those who would have been least well off without it

money burning and rank egalitarianism with random dictators abstract this paper presents the results of an experiment in oxford where relative standing can be improved by randomly chosen dictators only by reducing burning the money of the coplayers at a cost to themselves almost 50 of the subjects engage in money burning and 75 of burners appear rank egalitarian

does welfare enable family expenditures on human capital evidence from china summary using the national china household income project 2007 urban survey data and a propensity score matching method this article investigates whether welfare receipt helped enable low income families to spend more on human capital we find that welfare recipient families prioritized spending in health and education relative to their non recipient peers welfare particularly helped poor families afford medical care medicine tuition and fees for noncompulsory education private tutoring for children and purchasing of textbooks we find some evidence that welfare helped recipient families pay for maintenance fees for their residence but receiving welfare also deterred families from having leisure activities

decentralizing antipoverty program delivery in developing countries we study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program while governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance decentralizing the delivery system promotes cost effectiveness and improves intraregional targeting at low program scales but interregional targeting may deteriorate as central grants to high poverty regions shrink owing to high capture of local governments by local elites in such regions

sugarcane outgrowers in ethiopia forced to remain poor contract farming is often seen as a panacea to many of the challenges faced by agricultural production in developing countries given the large heterogeneity of contract farming arrangements it is debatable whether all kinds of contract farming arrangements offer benefits to participating smallholders we apply matching methods to analyze the effects of a public sugarcane outgrower scheme in ethiopia participation in the outgrower scheme significantly reduces the income and asset stocks of outgrowers who contributed irrigated land to the outgrower scheme while the effect was insignificant for outgrowers who contributed rain fed land we provide several explanations and discuss policy implications

impact of financial crises on poverty in developing world an empirical approach in this paper we adopt a cross country perspective to analyze the short term effects of currency banking and debt crises on poverty we employ multivariate fixed effects panel data analysis in order to examine whether and to what extent different types of financial crises impact the poverty headcount ratio and the poverty gap as measured by the world bank our findings suggest that out of the three categories of financial crises we identify it is currency crises that most significantly exacerbate both the incidence and depth of poverty in the short run we find evidence that banking crises are associated with an increase in the depth of poverty but not the incidence however this effect tends to be short lived while our analysis shows no direct effect of sovereign debt crises on short term poverty

on relative wealth effects and the optimality of growth abstract we present a model of endogenous growth in which a desire for social status lead individuals to care about their relative wealth the growth rate of the economy is socially optimal if the status motive is sufficiently important but the presence of status seeking may also lead to excessive growth

effectiveness of active labor market tools in conditional cash transfers programs evidence for argentina summary this paper examines the impact of the program seguro de capacitacion y empleo sce implemented to provide support in skills upgrading job seeking and job placement to eligible beneficiaries of the argentinian conditional cash transfer program plan jefes the sce is an example of a growing trend observed in latin america where labor activation components have been increasingly included into cash transfers programs to support beneficiaries in finding more stable income opportunities despite this growing trend not enough is known regarding the effectiveness of these components especially on job quality in this context this paper sheds light on whether the provision of a comprehensive package of active labor market measures contributes to a successful labor market integration of cash transfers beneficiaries taking advantage of the panel structure of the permanent household survey and exploiting the time variation in the assignment of the program as identification strategy we apply difference in difference estimators to measure the impact on a number of labor market indicators we find that the program affects positively the job quality of participants by increasing the probability of having a formal job and raising hourly wages moreover the intervention is associated with a lower probability of having a low paid job and working an excessive number of hours these effects are however not homogeneous across all groups of participants while the program is more successful among the younger beneficiaries it does not contribute to an improvement in the labor market conditions of female beneficiaries who in fact are the majority of sce participants our results suggest that reducing dependency on monetary transfers through programs such as the sce that are rich in activation components is beneficial for participants labor market trajectories and therefore it constitutes a satisfactory exit strategy to more universal cash transfer programs

how does public assistance affect family expenditures the case of urban china summary using recent national household survey data and a propensity score matching method this study examines the effects of urban china s primary public assistance program minimum living standard assistance mlsa on family expenditures an important yet understudied indicator of family material well being we find that families receiving mlsa prioritized human capital investment i e paying for education and health rather than making the ends meet e g paying for food clothing rent and utilities the policy implications of these findings are discussed

jump starting self employment evidence among welfare participants in argentina one important concern of governments in developing countries is how to phase out large safety net programs the authors evaluate the short run effects of one possible exit strategy programs that promote self employment in argentina they provide evidence that a small fraction of beneficiaries were attracted by this program overall potential participants to self employment are more likely to be female household heads and more educated beneficiaries relative to the average jefes beneficiaries using nonexperimental methods the authors show that participation in the program does affect the labor supply of participants by reducing the probability of having an outside job especially for males and increasing the total number of hours worked but the intervention fails to produce on average income gains to participating individuals and households in the short run the fact that a small subset of former welfare beneficiaries are attracted to the program coupled with the fact that only a subset of participants younger and more educated beneficiaries and with previous self employment experience benefited from participation has important implications for this intervention to represent a viable exit strategy from welfare

non farm work and food security among farm households in northern ghana this paper examines the impact of non farm work on household income and food security among farm households in the northern region of ghana we analyze the impact by employing propensity score matching method that accounts for self selection bias the matching results show that participation in non farm work exerts a positive and statistically significant effect on household income and food security status supporting the widely held view that income from non farm work is crucial to food security and poverty alleviation in rural areas of developing countries

estimating the demand for the characteristics of housing a hstract estimates of the demand for the characteristics contained in a differentiated product such as housing can be based on hedonic regressions however previous studies have not dealt with several potential problems in such estimation a more appropriate framework for the estimation is provided in this paper also data from a number of cities are used to eliminate the identification problem and the endogeneity of the marginal prices derived from non linear hedonic equations is considered in the estimation the results on own and cross price elasticities expenditure elasticities and the effects of socio economic vafiables accord well with expectations

assisting the transition from workfare to work a randomized experiment randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare dependent region of argentina were given a voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable wage subsidy a second sample also received the option of skill training while a third sample formed the control group the authors analyze the effects of this scheme on participants employment and income using double difference and instrumental variables methods to deal with potential experimental biases including selective compliance with the randomized assignment the authors find that compared with the control group voucher recipients had a significantly higher probability of employment though their current incomes were no higher the impact was largely confined to women and younger workers labor supply effects appear to have been important however training had no significant impact the experiment was cost effective in reducing the government s welfare spending since take up of the subsidy by employers was low

isolation and agricultural productivity this article examines the mechanisms that transmit isolation into productivity in particular we study the effect of isolation and transport infrastructure on welfare and agricultural productivity in the case of madagascar madagascar is a good case study given the bad shape of its infrastructure and therefore the significant variation in isolation based on comprehensive household survey data combined with a census of communes we discover a strong poverty isolation relationship further we find the inverse relationship between agricultural productivity and isolation to be surprisingly strong we isolate the following reasons why productivity might decline with isolation i transportation induced transaction costs ii the inverse relationship between plot size and productivity iii increasing price variability and extensification onto less fertile land and iv insecurity

re evaluating microfinance evidence from propensity score matching this paper evaluates effectiveness of microfinance using propensity score matching psm method applied to data collected in a recent randomized control trial this method allows one to answer an additional set of questions not answered by the original study and provide more nuanced evidence by comparing microfinance institution mfi borrowers to those without any loans and those with prior loans from other sources it is argued that this unique setting with two comparison groups allows us to shed light on the unobservable entrepreneurial spirit bias and provides upper and lower bounds on the true microfinance impact the results suggest that microfinance can make a modest difference for some households in several expenditure categories

hedonic prices and contractual contingencies abstract hedonic models are widely used to analyze markets for differentiated goods this paper examines the appropriate specification of characteristics to be included in the hedonic price function we develop a model that shows that the characteristics of the contract used to transfer a good from the buyer to the seller should also be included in the price function and present an empirical application of the model using data for single family house transactions the results indicate that the market exacts a price for the uncertainties created by contractual contingencies in the way described by the model

the many faces of adjustment the 1980s was a decade of adjustment for much of the third world at an early stage unicef drew attention to the serious human costs of the recession and subsequently to the impact of stabilisation and adjustment measures on vulnerable groups and the need for special policies to counter these costs jolly and cornia 1984 cornia jolly and stewart 1987 in the latter half of the decade there were apparently very major changes in the international financial institutions in these matters in their recognition of the social costs of adjustment and of the need for changes in policies

benefits on the margin observations on marginal benefit incidence benefit incidence analysis has become a popular tool over the past decade especially for researchers at the world bank despite or perhaps because of the popularity of this method recent research has pointed out many of its limitations one of the most common criticisms of benefit incidence analysis is that its description of average participation rates is not necessarily useful in guiding marginal changes in public spending policies this article considers a variety of methods for analyzing the marginal benefit incidence of policy changes a key conceptual point is that despite the fact that the various methods measure marginal incidence they do not measure the same thing nor are they intended to do so there are many possible policy changes and thus many margins of interest each method captures one of these and so is of interest for some analyses and inappropriate for others empirically the precision of the methods differs substantially with those relying on differenced data or aggregations of households yielding standard errors that are quite large relative to the estimated shares

the moral costs of nastiness we introduce two variants of the one shot joy of destruction minigame mini jod two players are endowed with the same amount of money they simultaneously decide whether or not to reduce the payoff of the other player at an own cost in one treatment there was a probability that nature would destroy the opponent s money anyway we test whether this feature reduces the moral costs of being nasty and find that destruction rates rise significantly despite the absence of strategic reasons

are poorer states worse at targeting their poor abstract as a rule the governments of poor states provinces or countries do not seem to be very good at targeting public spending to their poor yet anti poverty programs often target poor states in the hope of reaching poor people should this change

decentralized targeting of an antipoverty program abstract developing country governments often delegate authority over the targeting of antipoverty programs to community organizations while retaining control over how much goes to each community we offer a theoretical characterization of the information structure in such programs and the interconnected behavior of the various players our model motivates an econometric specification for explaining distributional outcomes results for bangladesh s food for education ffe program indicate that within village targeting improved with program size lower land inequality less remoteness fewer shocks and less private redistribution there is no sign that the center took account of village attributes conducive to reaching the poor

estimating the benefit incidence of an antipoverty program by propensity score matching this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled estimating the benefit incidence of an antipoverty program by propensity score matching conducted between 1997 and 1998 in argentina the study observed that the average direct gain to the participant is found to be about half the gross wage over half of the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally and 80 percent are in the poorest quintile the propensity score matching psm estimator is reasonably robust to a number of changes in methodology participants are more likely to be poor than non participants participants are less well educated live in poorer neighborhoods and are more likely to be members of neighborhood associations and political parties average gains are similar between men and women but are higher for younger workers funding for the study derives from the world bank research committee

economic impact of direct marketing and contracts the case of safe vegetable chains in northern vietnam abstract the paper investigates the respective impacts on incomes of contractual arrangements direct sales and spot marketing for safe vegetable farmers in northern vietnam it is based on a survey of 137 peri urban vegetable farmers that was analyzed using different econometric methods to correct selection biases direct sales and contractual arrangements have a significant positive impact on income compared to spot marketing contracts have less impact on income compared to direct sales it is recommended that policies be formulated to stimulate direct dealings between farmers and consumers which enhance consumer confidence in terms of quality and translate into higher farmer income than anonymous exchanges or contracts

targeting at the margin the glass of milk subsidy programme in peru this article evaluates the vaso de leche vl feeding programme in peru in order to illustrate an evaluation methodology based on targeting criteria for a decentralised transfer programme we find that the degree of overall targeting of poor individuals attributable to the central government s choice of districts is greater than that attributable to choice of participants within districts made by the municipalities and the mothers committees however when we use a version of a targeting efficiency measure first introduced by galasso and ravallion 2003 which we modify to be defined on the values of allocations the opposite is the case the community based decision makers appear to be targeting the poor in terms of the values of the transfers

housing vacancy and rental adjustment evidence from hong kong the traditional rental adjustment equation is flawed in that the equilibrium paths for the adjustment of rents and vacancy rates cannot hold simultaneously over time this paper suggests a two equation model of rental adjustments based on adaptive expectations rather than the single equation model presented in the traditional literature and provides empirical tests annual data from the housing market in hong kong during the 1980 96 period are consistent with the adjustment equation the results also show that the rate of change of real rents is neutral with respect to inflation

active labour market programmes in latin america and the caribbean evidence from a meta analysis abstractwe present a systematic review and meta analysis of impact evaluations of active labour market programmes almps in latin america and the caribbean lac we extract 296 impact estimates f

geographical targeting for poverty alleviation an introduction to the special issue in the face of rising public deficits and shrinking public resources geographical targeting may be a viable way to allocate resources for poverty alleviation in developing countries efficiency can be increased and leakage to the non poor reduced substantially by targeting increasingly smaller areas this article and more generally the symposium on geographical targeting for poverty alleviation proposes several techniques for augmenting data to produce more detailed poverty maps it focuses on practical considerations in the design of geographically targeted poverty alleviation programs in particular it assesses the advantages and disadvantages of geographical targeting and describes how geographic information systems can be applied to improve poverty mapping

benefits on the margin benefit incidence analysis has become a popular tool over the past decade especially for researchers at the world bank despite or perhaps because of the popularity of this method recent research has pointed out many of its limitations one of the most common criticisms of benefit incidence analysis is that its description of average participation rates is not necessarily useful in guiding marginal changes in public spending policies this article considers a variety of methods for analyzing the marginal benefit incidence of policy changes a key conceptual point is that despite the fact that the various methods measure marginal incidence they do not measure the same thing nor are they intended to do so there are many possible policy changes and thus many margins of interest each method captures one of these and so is of interest for some analyses and inappropriate for others empirically the precision of the methods differs substantially with those relying on differenced data or aggregations of

should cities go for the gold the long term impacts of hosting the olympics the summer olympics bring hundreds of thousands of visitors and generate upward of 10 billion in spending for the host city this large influx of tourism dollars is only part of the overall impact of hosting the olympic games in order to host the visitors and sporting events cities must make sizable investments in infrastructure such as airports arenas and highways additionally the publicity and international exposure of a host city may benefit international trade and capital flows proponents argue that this investment will pay off through increased economic growth but research confirming these claims is lacking this paper examines whether hosting an olympiad improves a city s long term growth in order to control for the self selection of cities that host olympic games this paper matches olympic host cities with cities that were finalists for the olympic games but were not selected by the international olympic committee a difference in difference estimator examines post olympic impacts for host cities between 1950 and 2005 regression results provide no long term impacts of hosting an olympics on two measures of population real gross domestic product per capita and trade openness jel o18 r11

impact of cooperatives on smallholders commercialization behavior evidence from ethiopia this article examines the impact of marketing cooperatives on smallholder commercialization of cereals using detailed household data in rural ethiopia we use the strong government role in promoting the establishment of cooperatives to justify the use of propensity score matching to compare households that are cooperative members to similar households in comparable areas without cooperatives the analysis reveals that although cooperatives obtain higher prices for their members they are not associated with a significant increase in the overall share of cereal production sold commercially by their members however these average results hide considerable heterogeneity across households in particular we find that smaller farmers tend to reduce their marketed output as a result of higher prices whereas the opposite is true for larger farmers

poverty dominant program reforms the role of targeting and allocation rules we propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs the methods are based on program dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps these curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting dominance curves and allocation dominance ones and can serve to verify whether the assessment of marginal program reforms is sensitive to the choice of poverty lines and poverty measures as well as to differences across programs in revenue sources and incentive effects

the effect of irrigation on poverty reduction asset accumulation and informal insurance evidence from northern mali summary the impact of small scale irrigation investments on household consumption assets and informal insurance is estimated from a panel of northern malian households 1998 2006 access to irrigation increases household consumption by 27 30 relative to water recession and rain fed cultivators the paper also investigates whether irrigation has secondary impacts on risk mitigating strategies by reducing covariate risk and reinforcing informal food sharing networks that allow households to insure against idiosyncratic risk we find that households with irrigation save between 4 5 and 6 4 more tropical livestock units and are 20 more likely to engage in informal food sharing with non irrigators this finding suggests that impact estimates that rely on consumption may underestimate welfare gains by ignoring the household s savings behavior and informal insurance network

the gender dimensions of economic adjustment policies potential interactions and evidence to date abstract many developing countries have implemented stabilization and structural adjustment programs over the last 20 years the success of these programs depends critically on individual level responses to changing economic incentives access to control of and an ability to move productive economic resources between sectors is determined in part by gender if an individual s gender impedes their ability to fully participate in the economic adjustment process by inhibiting resource access control or movement adjustment will be impaired this paper discusses the potential gender dimensions of structural adjustment policies and examines the evidence to dale

estimates of the benefit incidence of workfare workfare has become a central policy in argentina since mid 2002 when the government increased the number of beneficiaries from 100 000 to two million people in a country of thirty nine million in this paper i assess the focalization of the program and estimate its income effects using individual panel data for the period 2000 02 in addition to standard nearest neighbor matching estimators i compute difference in differences estimators and allow for nonpositive income effects i find that only 55 percent of the participants were in the poorest quintile of the income per capita distribution the estimated average income effect of the program during participation was about one third of the average benefit handed out by the program while there is some evidence that the program had a higher benefit for the poor for a large number of relatively wealthier individuals the program did not make a big difference these results appear to be driven at least partly by weak enforcement of work requirements and eligibility conditions these findings question the efficacy of this program as an effective tool for addressing poverty

data watch the world bank s living standards measurement study household surveys since 1985 the world bank has been collecting household survey data in developing countries that provide a rich source of information for assessing household welfare understanding household behavior and evaluating the impact of government policies this article describes these household surveys known as living standards measurement study lsms surveys and explains how to obtain their data lsms surveys have been implemented in over twenty developing countries and have been used to analyze poverty labor markets health and education pricing policies determinants of school performance savings and consumption smoothing health and nutrition policies and gender and fertility issues

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

aid government expenditure and aggregate welfare summary this paper tests the hypothesis that aid contributes to increasing aggregate welfare measured by infant mortality and the human development index hdi in recipient countries estimation is based on data for 104 countries over the period 1980 2000 and for subsamples of low income and middle income countries fixed effect estimates provide robust evidence that aid is associated with improved values of the welfare indicators and this effect appears to be greater in low income countries aid appears to increase welfare either directly or through the effect on growth and there is no evidence that aid operates through public spending

moving out of poverty in tanzania evidence from kagera abstract this paper uses linked qualitative and quantitative data to explore the growth trajectories of matched households in the kagera region of tanzania finding that agriculture and trade provided the two main routes out of poverty the interplay between initial conditions shocks networks and experiences of life beyond their village determine whether a person moves out of poverty in the following decade

hedonic prices and implicit markets estimating demand and supply functions for differentiated products in choosing the level of quality to purchase the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product hence in general the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers this matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics the paper develops these issues a stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed identification results are presented and estimation procedures are outlined

measuring pro poor growth in non income dimensions current concepts and measurement of pro poor growth is entirely focused on the income dimension of well being this neglects non income dimensions of poverty and the multidimensionality of poverty and wellbeing in this paper we introduce the multidimensionality of poverty into the measurement of pro poor growth measurement by applying the growth incidence curve to non income indicators we develop growth incidence curves and calculate the associated ravallion chen pro poor growth measures for a range of non income indicators such as education mortality vaccinations stunting and a multidimensional wellbeing measure and are thereby able to study improvements in these dimensions of well being at various points of the distribution of those indicators as well as at various points of the income distribution this way we can determine whether improvements in non income indicators were pro poor in an absolute or relative sense we illustrate this empirically for bolivia between 1989 and 1998 and find that growth was relatively pro poor in the non income dimension results for absolute improvements are less clear

the impact of a food security program on household food consumption in northwestern ethiopia a matching estimator approach abstract with the financial support from various development partners ethiopia has designed and implemented several programs to improve household food security yet food insecurity is still a major challenge to several millions of people in the country and it is questionable whether the different food security programs implemented over the past years have been successful using a propensity score matching method to control for pre intervention differences this study examined the impact on household food calorie intake of an integrated food security program ifsp which had been implemented in northwestern ethiopia by two non governmental organizations as a case study the estimated results provide evidence that ifsp has a positive and statistically significant effect on food calorie intake in particular ifsp has raised physical food calorie intake by 30 among the beneficiary households however we also found that ifsp has differential impact depending on family size landownership and gender of head of household overall the paper provides evidence that supporting integrated food security programs is important to improve food security in rural areas

fatal fluctuations cyclicality in infant mortality in india this paper investigates the impact of aggregate income shocks on infant mortality in india and investigates likely mechanisms a recent oecd dominated literature reports the provocative finding that mortality at most ages is pro cyclical similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce and both income risk and mortality risk are greater in poor countries this paper uses data and methods designed to avoid some of the specification problems in previous studies and it explores mechanisms and extensions that have not been previously considered it uses individual data on infant mortality for about 150 000 children born in 1970 1997 merged by cohort and state of birth with a state panel containing information on aggregate income identification rests upon comparing the effects of annual deviations in income from trend on the mortality risks of children born at different times to the same mother conditional upon a number of state time varying covariates including rainshocks and state social expenditure rural infant mortality is counter cyclical the elasticity being about 0 33 this is despite the finding that relatively high risk women avert birth or suffer fetal loss in recessions it seems in part related to recessions stimulating distress labor amongst mothers in contrast to the case in richer countries where they discourage labor market participation health care seeking declines in recessions and this appears to be related to the opportunity cost of maternal time disaggregation reveals that the average results are driven by rural households in which the mother is uneducated or had her first birth in teenage and that it is only girls that are at risk boys are protected from income shocks exposure to poor conditions in the fetal and neonatal period appears to have a larger effect on infant mortality than similar exposure in the postneonatal period

evaluating the effects of optimally distributed public programs child health and family planning interventions this paper develops and tests an optimizing model determining the distribution of family planning and health subsidies across heterogeneous households and assesses the biases in cross area estimates of the health effects of such subsidies due to public resource optimization the model incorporates both health externalities and the endogenous response of the size of the recipient population to program subsidies longitudinal data describing child health and publicly provided family planning and health programs in 20 barrios in laguna province in the philippines are used to estimate the effects of such programs on child health and the relationships between the distribution of the programs and preprogram health levels the impact of a program on a particular childs health status is viewed as dependent upon the childs length of exposure to the program a basic feature of the model is the presence of health externalities which is shown to be sufficient along with plausible features of household behavior to make selective subsidization of fertility control either alone or in combination with health investment subsidies pareto efficient the model suggests that subsidization of fertility control is likely to be pareto efficient in the presence of health or human capital externalities when human capital and family size are gross substitutes and or when any per child human capital subsidies may substitute for direct subsidies to health investment and an equalizing distribution of the subsidies the highest family planning subsidies to the lowest health recipient households is efficient when both health and family planning subsidies are used fertility control subsidies minimize the subsidy burden for donors and are highest when total subsidy expenditures per child are greatest