the gender asset gap land in latin america summary the gender asset gap in latin america with respect to ownership of land is significant in few countries do women constitute even one quarter of the landowners gender inequality in land ownership is related to male preference in inheritance male privilege in marriage male bias in community and state programs of land distribution as well as gender bias in the land market with women less likely than men to be successful buyers but there are also important di erences by gender in how land is acquired inheritance is the primary means by which most women become landowners men are much more likely than women to acquire land through its distribution by communities or the state and via the market factors contributing toward a trend toward greater gender equity in land inheritance and in recent state programs are highlighted 2003 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

regional variation in earnings inequality in reform era urban china this article studies the regional variation in earnings inequality in contemporary urban china focusing on the relationship between the pace of economic reforms and earning determination through

consumption vulnerability to risk in rural pakistan abstract as one of the dimensions of vulnerability this paper empirically investigates the inability of rural dwellers to cope with negative income shocks a variable coefficient regression model is applied to a two period household panel dataset collected in the north west frontier province pakistan an area with high incidence of income poverty and low human development the empirical model allows for a different ability to smooth consumption approximated by a linear function of households attributes and controls for the endogeneity of observed changes in income using qualitative information on subjective risk assessment estimation results show that the ability to cope with negative income shocks is lower for households that are aged landless and do not receive remittances regularly

child labor and agricultural shocks this paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor in particular we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household asset holdings mitigate the effects of these shocks using data from a household panel survey in tanzania we find that both relationships are significant we investigate mechanisms that could account for these results including buffer stocks and borrowing

economic transformation and income inequality in urban china evidence from panel data using panel data of 4 730 urban residents drawn from 20 cities in china this article examines changes in income determinants between the prereform and reform eras to guide this empirical study a conceptual model is developed that emphasizes the coevolution of politics and markets to synthesize theoretical ideas in the recent debate on the transformation of state socialist societies the findings show significant changes in returns to education and in the rise of private hybrid firms in the reform era there is also strong evidence of institutional persistence in returns to positional power and in the organizational hierarchy these findings reveal multifaceted processes of transformation that call for more sophisticated theoretical models and in depth institutional analyses

foreign direct investment and wage inequality evidence from china summary this study provides micro level evidence on the close link between foreign participation and wage inequality we investigate the wage premium and the wage spillover effect of foreign invested enterprises in the chinese manufacturing sector the results indicate a significant foreign premium in both wage and non wage compensation the presence of foreign and hong kong macao and taiwan hmt investment results in a significantly negative spillover in terms the wage level in domestic firms and discourages wage growth in such firms overall the evidence suggests that exposure to foreign investment increases inter enterprise wage inequality

shocks consumption and income diversification in rural ethiopia abstract we present new evidence that households are unable to protect themselves from rainfall failure that occurs on average every five years in rural ethiopia however other less extreme rainfall variation and idiosyncratic shocks such as illness and crop pests do not impact significantly on consumption agricultural shocks impact negatively on farm income as expected however they also stimulate non agricultural earnings by an equivalent amount in the case of a covariate shock such as severe rainfall failure this smoothing mechanism may be ineffective and rainfall insurance or drought triggered safety nets could provide further protection

do land revenue windfalls create a political resource curse evidence from china abstract by analyzing a panel on the political turnovers of 4390 county leaders in china during 1999 2008 we find that the revenue windfalls accrued to these officials from land sales have undermined the effectiveness of the promotion system for government officials instead of rewarding efforts made to boost gdp growth promotion is positively correlated with signaling efforts and with corruption the robust positive relationship between land revenue windfalls and political turnover or specifically promotion suggests that those who are politically connected to their superiors and those beyond the prime age for promotion are the primary beneficiaries the case for corruption is substantiated by the evidence inferred from anti corruption crackdowns which reveals that the additional effect of land revenue on political turnover and size of bureaucracy a proxy for corruption decreases significantly in crackdowns but that land revenue has no effect on city construction expenditure a proxy for signaling

market expansion state intervention and wage differentials between economic sectors in urban china a multilevel analysis the rising earnings inequality in china has sparked a heated debate on the socioeconomic outcomes of market transformation while a large body of literature has focussed on the temporal trend of wage inequality during the reform period much less attention has been devoted to the structural causes of regional variations in sectoral wage differentials using a micro data sample from the 2005 one percent population sample survey and multilevel methods this article examines the geographic variability of wage differentials between economic sectors in urban china with a particular focus on the combination effects of market expansion and state intervention the results indicate that sectoral wage differentials vary substantially across regions and that market expansion interacts with state intervention to reconfigure earnings outcomes specifically prefectures located in the interior region tend to exhibit a large wage premium for the state sectors while prefectures located in the coastal region tend to di

women empowerment and economic development women empowerment and economic development are closely related in one direction development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women in the other direction empowering women may benefit development does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion this paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment development nexus and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak to be self sustaining and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women

mobile money remittances and household welfare panel evidence from rural uganda access to financial services is crucial for development as it enhances resource mobilization needed for productive investment and facilitates consumption smoothing with a vast majority of adult ugandans having no access to formal financial services mobile money is expected to bridge this gap especially in rural areas this financial product allows users to make financial transactions using their mobile phones within five years of its inception in uganda since 2009 the mobile money service has been used by over 35 of the adult population and the rate of penetration is rapidly increasing we investigate its impact on household welfare using panel data covering 846 rural households using a combination of household fixed effects instrumental variable and propensity score matching methods we find a positive and significant effect of mobile money access on household welfare measured by real per capita consumption the mechanism of this impact is the facilitation of remittances user households are more likely to receive remittances receive remittances more frequently and the total value received is significantly higher than that of non user households we attribute this impact on the reduction in transaction transport and time costs associated with mobile phone based financial transactions our results are robust to changes in model specifications and alternative explanations

a feminization of vulnerability female headship poverty and vulnerability in thailand and vietnam summary this article investigates whether heterogeneous subgroups of female headed households are worse off than households headed by men it analyzes the correlates of consumption shock exposure and severity as well as vulnerability to poverty using panel data of over 4000 rural households from thailand and vietnam strong evidence of heterogeneity among subgroups of female headed households are found in particular in comparison with male headed households de facto female headed ones are found to be richer in thailand but prone to more severe shocks in both countries furthermore our results suggest that in thailand single female headed households are less vulnerable to poverty than households headed by men however in vietnam these households are particularly poor and vulnerable to poverty we show that this is mostly due to their greater poverty rather than their higher risk exposure our findings suggest that differentiation by subgroups of headship is important for policy development and targeting as well as future research

weather risk wages in kind and the off farm labor supply of agricultural households in a developing country this article investigates the effects of weather risk on the off farm labor supply of agricultural households in a developing country distinguishing different types of off farm labor markets a multivariate two limit tobit model is applied to data from india the regression results show that the share of the off farm labor supply increases with weather risk the increase is much larger in the case of nonagricultural work than in the case of agricultural wage work and the increase is much larger in the case of agricultural wages paid in kind than in the cash wage case suggesting farmers considerations of food security copyright 2007 oxford university press

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

an evaluation of the swedish system of active labour market programmes in the 1990s we investigate the presence of short and long term effects from joining a swedish labor market program vis a vis more intense job search in open unemployment overall the impact of the program system is found to have been mixed joining a program has increased employment rates among participants a result robust to a misclassification problem in the data on the other hand it has also allowed participants to remain significantly longer on unemployment benefits and more generally in the unemployment system this being particularly the case for those entitled individuals entering a program around the time of their unemployment benefits exhaustion

weather shocks and urban livelihood strategies the gender dimension of household vulnerability in the kumi district of uganda abstractthe teso sub region of uganda suffered numerous weather shocks in the past with devastating food security consequences using household fixed effects and propensity score matching methods we analyse the impact of exposure to drought flood and severe incidence of pests and diseases on household consumption expenditure per adult equivalent for a random sample of households from kumi town council we find that weather shocks reduce consumption by 17 per cent and that the consumption decline is significantly larger among female headed households we also find a higher likelihood of non farm employment borrowing and receiving remittances in order to cope with the shocks

gender weather shocks and welfare evidence from malawi this paper explores the gender differentiated effects of weather shocks on households welfare in malawi using panel data aligned with climatic records results show that temperature shocks severely affect household welfare reducing consumption food consumption and daily caloric intake the negative welfare effects are more severe for households where land is solely managed by women a finding that sheds light on the gender unequal impact of temperature shocks our evidence also suggests that women s vulnerability to temperature shocks is linked to women s land tenure security as temperature shocks impact significantly women s welfare only in patrilineal districts where statistics show that investment in agricultural technologies is lower

smoothing consumption by smoothing income hours of work responses to idiosyncratic agricultural shocks in rural india while research has demonstrated that farm households in developing economies are able to protect consumption from idiosyncratic crop shocks little evidence shows how this is achieved this paper examines the extent to which labor markets allow households to shift labor from farm to off farm employment and the extent to which such a shift explains the observed lack of correlation between consumption and idiosyncratic crop shocks the empirical analysis uses a novel measure of the idiosyncratic crop income shock which utilizes information on start of season cropping choices to more accurately estimate household expectations of weather

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

risk sharing and transactions costs evidence from kenya s mobile money revolution we explore the impact of reduced transaction costs on risk sharing by estimating the effects of a mobile money innovation on consumption in our panel sample adoption of the innovation increased from 43 to 70 percent we find that while shocks reduce consumption by 7 percent for nonusers the consumption of user households is unaffected the mechanisms underlying these consumption effects are increases in remittances received and the diversity of senders we report robustness checks supporting these results and use the four fold expansion of the mobile money agent network as a source of exogenous variation in access to the innovation jel e42 g22 o16 o17 z13 in developing countries informal networks provide an important means by which individuals and households share risk though the insurance they provide is often incomplete economists have proposed a number of reasons for this incompleteness including information asymmetries which manifest in problems of moral hazard and limited commitment both of which induce positive correlations between realized income and consumption in this article we emphasize a complementary source of incompleteness transaction costs literally the costs of transferring resources between individuals we test the impact of transaction costs on risk sharing by analyzing data from a large panel household survey that we designed and administered in kenya over a three year period to capture the expansion of mobile money this financial innovation has allowed individuals to transfer purchasing power by simple short messaging service sms technology and has dramatically reduced the cost of sending money across large distances mobile money is a recent innovation in developing economies one of the first and most successful examples to date is kenya s m pesa 1 in just four years after its