rafmacalaba/data-use-mentions-extended huggingface dataset:
|5.Regulatory<br>Heterogeneity|5. Economies of scale|5.Inter-governmental<br>cooperation<br>fostering<br>regulatoryconvergence through negotiation|
|---|---|---|

# **4.2.1 Information costs**

Seen from a Mode 3 perspective, information costs include obstacles that firms confront in finding optimal locations and developing sustained ties with competitive local suppliers. This may also include costs incurred in acquiring information about local market characteristics and tastes; information relating to land lease or purchases, compliance with domestic regulatory, tax and technical requirements; as well as regulatory risks and risk mitigation strategies.

Information asymmetries are pervasive in cross-border investment activity, a reality that has long been recognized by investment policy makers. In addressing such a market failure, an increasing number of host countries have established or expanded the substantive remit of investment promotion agencies, which among other functions, provide information services to investors considering investments in a particular host country.

As information asymmetries between host countries and potential foreign investors constitute a significant obstacle to cross-border investment activity, an important policy question is what aspiring FDI destinations can do to reduce such obstacles or their perception by would-be foreign investors? Harding and Javorcik (2011) collected data on 124 countries to examine the effects of investment promotion on FDI inflows. They tested whether sectors explicitly targeted by investment promotion agencies in their efforts to attract FDI received more investment in the post-targeting period, relative to the pre-targeting period and to non-targeted sectors. Their research offered conclusive evidence that investment promotion efforts decreased information asymmetries and led to higher FDI inflows to developing countries. No such link was found for industrialized countries, where relevant information was more readily available, leaving investment promotion agencies in these countries with a lesser role to play in this regard. Harding and Javorcik (2011) also found that, under certain circumstances, investment promotion efforts could be reasonably cost-effective.<sup>38</sup> While information asymmetries are seen as a
, investment in soil fertility and labor mobility (Deininger and Jin 2006; Pender and Fafchamps 2006; Dillon and Voena 2015).

Nonetheless, the best available evidence from SSA still indicates a strong inverse relationship between farm size and crop yields (Barrett, Bellemare and Hou 2010; Carletto, Savastano and Zezza 2013; Larson _et al._ 2014; Bevis and Barrett 2016). While this is not evidence of intrinsic superiority of smaller farms per se—it may well be the endogenous outcome of the various factor market imperfections or behavioral phenomena that generate these patterns<sup>10</sup> --the historical evidence from Asia (Ravallion and Chen, 2007), and more recently also from densely populated African countries such as Ethiopia and Rwanda (World Bank, 2015a,b), shows that increasing smallholder productivity can induce rapid poverty reduction, at least in the initial stages. Studying land rental markets in six African countries, Deininger, Savastano and Xia (2016) also find that, despite significant inefficiencies, land rentals are already occurring, transferring land to land-poor and labor-rich producers. Proper land certification is in some cases also having positive impacts for smallholders, inducing them to maintain soils, make productive investments, and enhance land productivity (Holden _et al._ 2008).

Second, **_<u>water resources</u>_** are sharply limiting in most of the region. The aggregate abundance of water in the equatorial region, from Sierra Leone to Uganda, where countries average between 20 - 100,000 m<sup>3</sup> of renewable freshwater resource per capita per annum, stands in sharp contrast to the 70 percent of SSA countries that receive on average an order of magnitude less (World Bank World Development Indicators). Indeed, FAO data classify 43 percent of the SSA land mass as semi-arid to hyper-arid. Even within the arid states, rain and water resources tend to be concentrated, leaving some subregions particularly arid and hence vulnerable
# **1. Introduction**

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a human rights violation and one of the world’s leading public health problems. Worldwide, nearly one-third (30%) of all women who have been in a relationship have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by their intimate partner (WHO 2013). According to the same report, lifetime prevalence of physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence in Africa is 36.6, one of the highest regional rates (WHO 2013). Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) show similar rates, with 32% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa ever having experienced emotional and physical (including sexual) violence. And 25% of women reported being subject to such abuse during the last 12 months alone (Cools and Kotsadam 2017). Understanding the underlying drivers of IPV so that effective solutions can be formulated and implemented is a pressing policy priority.

A number of theories have been offered to explain when and why husbands perpetrate IPV, with varying empirical support. We categorize these into four broad groups, each with a different focus including: (1) the role of individual beliefs and attitudes in justifying IPV as an acceptable behavior, (2) the misalignment of preferences between husband and wife, with IPV used as a disciplinary tool to ensure the wife does not stray from the husband’s wishes, (3) marital capital (such as number of children and years in the relationship) as a factor increasing the cost of exiting the relationship, and (4) IPV as a function of bargaining power within the household.

A fifth, underexplored driver of IPV in the theoretical literature is the level of shared responsibility within couples, which we analyze by considering the mode of decision making within households. We analyze whether decisions are made alone or together, by whom, and whether husband and wife agree on who decides. This is distinct from bargaining power since what is emphasized is the _jointness_ of the process 2
2011) and Ecuador (Calero, Bedi, and Sparrow 2009).

# **5 Financial capital and entrepreneurship**

Temporary migration is also linked to increased investment and entrepreneurship back in the home country. While there are studies on the increase in investment in assets, such as land in Pakistan (Adams Jr 1998) and El Salvador (Damon 2010), most papers focus on the link between temporary migration and entrepreneurship. Seeking self-employment and entrepreneurship opportunities after return has been argued to be among the main drivers of temporary migration: in the presence of credit constraints at home, temporary migration allows individuals to accumulate savings faster and to engage in self-employment activities when they return (Dustmann and Kirchkamp 2002; Rapoport 2002; Djaji ́c 2010; Bossavie, Gorlach, Ozden, and Wang 2021). This motive is especially relevant in developing economies where credit constraints to entrepreneurship can be quite restrictive. Temporary migration can thus allow to overcome the institutional void of missing capital markets in origin countries to accelerate business creation (Bossavie, Gorlach, Ozden, and Wang 2022).

Empirical evidence from various countries is consistent with the entrepreneurship channel. A first set of descriptive studies examine the relationship between temporary migration and self-employment after return. Savings levels have been found to be a significant factor in the choice of self-employment over waged employment among return migrants in Pakistan (Ilahi 1999) and Egypt (McCormick and Wahba 2001). In Tunisia, the majority of entrepreneurial projects started by returnees were totally financed through overseas savings (Mesnard et al. 2004). In Turkey, more than half of returnees from Germany are economically active and engaged in entrepreneurial activities (Dustmann and Kirchkamp 2002).<sup>17</sup> Using historical data on return migrants to Norway from the United States, Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson (2019) also show that return migrants to rural Norway back in the late 1800s and early 1900s were more likely to become owner occupier farmers although they came from poorer backgrounds than non-migrants. Similarly,
<mark>therefore be interpreted based on a score of 1 (largest level of concern) to 5 (lowest level of concern). Full set of results available upon request.</mark>

# **6. Discussion and Next Steps**

Cash transfers have been established as a consumption support measure in traditional social protection programming. The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted that paradigm to a certain degree by introducing cash-based measures to support vulnerable workers in the informal sector on a one-off or punctual basis. This paper assessed the potential impact of one-such measure on subsequent labor market, economic security, and subjective psychological well-being for vulnerable self-employed households in Sierra Leone. While the ECT was found to have positive association with various measures of well-being in the short run, some of the positive relationship dissipated in the medium run. In this section, we discuss four areas that have implications on the analysis conducted in this paper and suggest areas for future research.

Because of lack of experimental data, we use a quasi-experimental approach to create a control group for our analysis. This approach uses two main steps to allow the identification of a potential impact of the ECT on households. First, we construct a proxy LPMT and uses administrative data to choose the threshold that will best allow to identify a relevant control group. The 10 LPMT questions used to assess eligibility for the ECT program, and the questions captured in the CIMS surveys had some notable differences. We were able to proxy for two out three of the questions that were missing from the CIMS survey. Moreover, we use administrative data to determine the eligibility cutoff that strikes the balance between minimizing both the exclusion and inclusion errors. We use the cutoff of 4 out of 10 to identify the treated and the control group and note the margin of inclusion error given this identification design. While we show that the cutoff of 4 successfully identifies program recipients from non-recipients, there 24
- Chicoine, L. (2019). Schooling with Learning: The Effect of Free Primary Education and Mother Tongue Instruction Reforms in Ethiopia. _Economics of Education Review_ , 69(April):94–2017.

- Clark, D. and Bono, E. D. (2016). The Long-run Effects of Attending an Elite School: Evidence from the United Kingdom. _American Economic Journal: Applied Economics_ , 8(1):150–176.

- Croicu, M. and Sundberg, R. (2015). UCDP GED Codebook version 2.0. Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University.

- Finlay, K., Magnusson, L., and Schaffer, M. E. (2013). WEAKIV: Stata Module to Perform Weak-instrumentrobust Tests and Confidence Intervals for Instrumental-variable (IV) Estimation of Linear, Probit and Tobit Models.

- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO GeoNetwork. (2015). Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL).

- Fort, M., Schneeweis, N., and Winter-Ebmer, R. (2016). Is Education Always Reducing Fertility? Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Reforms. _Economic Journal_ , 126(595):1823–1855.

- Garcia Hombrados, J. (2018). Child Marriage and Infant Mortality: Evidence from Ethiopia. Working Paper No. 1317. Department of Economics, University of Sussex.

- Geruso, M. and Royer, H. (2018). The Impact of Education on Family Formation: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the UK. NBER Working Paper No. 24332.

- Heugh, D. K., Benson, C., Bogale, B., and Yohannes, M. A. G. (2007). Study on Medium of Instruction in Primary Schools in Ethiopia. Final Report. Commissioned by the Ministry of Education.

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The second potential threat to validity depends on the existence of general equilibrium effects on local labor markets.<sup>9</sup> Our data suggest that these effects are not likely at play. We do not observe any trend in the control group’s search for employment or employment activity across the different survey waves. The control group’s median income from selfemployment is similar at midline and endline, thereby suggesting that no shifts occurred in economic behavior due to anticipation of the program. In addition, given that the casual labor markets in Djibouti are segmented by gender and virtually absent for women, general equilibrium effects on the local labor market are unlikely.

# **4. Empirical Approach**

## **4.1. Data sources**

A baseline household survey was administered to eligible households in the first quarter of 2014, immediately before the public works program rolled out for group A. Two more rounds of surveys were conducted at staggered times based on timing of the rollout of the public works (Figure A1). Midline surveys were administered over the course of three weeks while the public works were taking place. This survey included a weekly questionnaire on employment and intra-household transfers with a rotating set of modules on time use (week 1 and 3), expenditures (week 2), and food security (week 3). The endline surveys were conducted over three consecutive weeks nine months after the households completed the public works program. In terms of specific calendar dates, the timing of the midline and endline surveys varied by group. In addition, administrative data, including program data on payments and transactions obtained from the financial institution responsible for paying the program beneficiaries, was used to complement the survey data.

Each treatment group was interviewed with its corresponding randomized control group both at midline and at endline—that is, group A was interviewed with group C, and group B was interviewed with group D. The endline survey for a treatment group and its corresponding control group took place
a unique feature of our setting is the structure embedded within national personal tax identifiers, which can be used to infer gender. Following methodological guidance from our team, the municipality’s staff utilized this structural feature to infer the gender assigned at birth and the owners’ ages for over 100,000 properties annually.

Our analysis reveals significant gender disparities in residential property ownership, primarily at the higher end of the property value distribution, where women own a smaller share than men. At the lower end of the property value distribution, up to the 40th percentile, ownership is fairly balanced, with women, men, and co-owned properties each accounting for about onethird of the residences. However, this balance shifts markedly as property values rise. While men’s ownership share remains relatively stable throughout the distribution, women’s share declines sharply for higher-value properties. This disparity is most pronounced in the top 1% of property values, where co-owned properties account for 50%, men own about 30%, and women’s 1
whole country. A village was randomly selected from each commune, and about 15 households were selected randomly from the village.

The large-sample VHLSSs have a sample size of about 46,000 households that are designed to be representative at the provincial level. While these large-sample surveys only collect income data, a sub-sample of the VHLSSs (the small-sample VHLSSs of around 9,000 households) collect data on both income and expenditure. Since policy discourse in the country is typically based on poverty and inequality analysis using expenditure data, we mostly analyze such data in this paper. We obtain the province-level expenditure using Elbers _et al._ ’s (2003) small area (poverty-map) estimation method (see Appendix B for more detailed description for the data). For robustness checks, we also provide some alternate estimates using per capita income in Appendix A, which offer qualitatively similar results.

# **2.2. Overall trends in economic growth, inequality, and poverty**

We provide in Table 1 the country trends in (real) per capita income, expenditure, poverty, and inequality. Between 2002 and 2020, per capita incomes increased significantly from 4,565 thousand (Vietnamese) dong to 15,156 thousand dong.<sup>3</sup> Similarly, real per capita expenditure more than tripled from 3,476 thousand dong in 2002 to 14,251 thousand dong in 2020.<sup>4</sup> This rapid economic growth has been widely attributed to important policy changes that took place in Viet Nam in the last two decades (see, e.g., Justino and Litchfield, 2014, Benjamin _et al._ , 2017 for a

> 3 On average, slightly more than 18,000 Vietnamese dong equals one US dollar in this period (World Bank, 2018a). 4 There is a large difference in income and expenditure values between the 2008 and the 2010 VHLSS (Table 1). This difference is mainly because of a change in the recall
empirical literature has established that global (push) and domestic (pull) factors are important drivers of capital flows—see, for instance, Calvo, Leiderman, and Reinhart (1993); Fernandez-Arias and Montiel (1996); and Chuhan, Claessens, and Mamingi (1998).

# **3. Estimation Technique and Data**

To estimate the determinants of gross capital inflows, we use an instrumental variable method for panel data which poses two main challenges. The presence of unobserved period- and country-specific effects is our first challenge. Therefore, we include country and time effects in the regression. The second challenge is that capital flows are likely to be jointly endogenous with shocks to pull factors in domestic markets, therefore, we need to control for the biases due to simultaneous or reverse causality in the regression. Consequently, we control for the endogeneity of domestic growth with instrumental variables such as the commodity terms of trade and lagged economic growth. Our baseline regression equation of capital flows presents the following specification: Ω�� �μ� �η� �α<sup>�</sup> Χ�� �ε�� where the dependent variable Ω�� is the ratio of capital flows to GDP. The dependent variable is proxied by the ratio of gross capital inflows to GDP as well as that of FDI, portfolio investments or other investments to GDP for country _i_ in period _t_ . Furthermore, μ� is a country effect and η� is a time effect. The matrix Χ�� contains information on our pull and/or push factors while α� is its coefficient vector. Finally, ε� captures the residuals.

The database for the empirical analysis comprises annual information on gross capital inflows for 45 SubSaharan African countries from 1980 to 2017. It gathers information for total gross inflows as well as its components, such as foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, and other investment from the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) Balance of Payments Statistics BPM 6
_<mark>Consumption Expenditures.</mark>_ <mark>Ruiz, I., & Vargas-Silva, C. (2013). The economics of forced migration.</mark> _<mark>The Journal of Development Studies</mark>_ <mark>,</mark> _<mark>49</mark>_ <mark>(6), 772-784.</mark> <mark>Rutstein, S. O. (2015). Steps to constructing the new DHS Wealth Index.</mark> _<mark>Rockville, MD: ICF International</mark>_ <mark>.</mark> <mark>Taylor, J. E., Filipski, M. J., Alloush, M., Gupta, A., Valdes, R. I. R., & Gonzalez-Estrada, E. (2016). Economic impact of refugees.</mark> _<mark>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</mark>_ <mark>,</mark> _<mark>113</mark>_ <mark>(27), 7449-7453.</mark> <mark>UNHCR. (2018).</mark> _<mark>UNHCR Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018.</mark>_ <mark>Geneva: UNHCR.</mark> <mark>Verme, P., & Schuettler, K. (2021). The impact of forced displacement on host communities: A review of the empirical literature in economics.</mark> _<mark>Journal of Development Economics</mark>_ <mark>, 102606.</mark> World Bank Group, & UNHCR. _(2015). Forced Displacement and Mixed Migration in the Horn of Africa._ World Bank. (2018). _Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle_ . Washington, DC
Policy Research Working Paper 9207

# **Abstract**

As utility services expand throughout the developing world, providers must grapple with how to set prices to recover average costs. Data from a multi-year randomized pricing experiment among nearly 1500 recently-connected piped water customers in Vietnam reveal month-to-month demand persistence. Based on structural demand estimation, the authors document how endogenous preferences, if unaccounted for, can lead to low take-up and thereby threaten the financial viability of the new water utility. They also show that such demand persistence, while distinct from credit constraints, calls for pricing schemes that similarly defer payment, effectively allowing future consumers to subsidize their present selves.

This paper is a product of the Development Research Group, Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at abonfield@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
.062***|0.042***|-0.004|0.039***|0.068***|0.004|0.060***|
|_emae_|[3.36]|[2.75]|[-0.28]|[5.05]|[3.73]|[0.23]|[6.16]|

<u>Notes:</u> (1) The sample is comprised of individuals 18 and older, and of those involved in agriculture. The results are from linear probability models, weighted by the response weight. ***=p<0.01, **=p<0.05, *=p<0.10. T-statistics are presented in brackets, and account for clustering at the enumeration area level.

(2) SDG owner is equal to 1 1 if the individual is a documented owner of any parcel or has the rights to sell or bequeath any parcel, and 0 otherwise.

Aside from differences in survey design, one potential reason for higher exclusive ownership among men in the business-as-usual approach may be due to the association between headship and land ownership/rights. Among all age-eligible adults, men having ownership or rights across survey approaches are almost always household heads (Figure 4), in contrast to women with ownership/rights whose household status is more varied. And, as discussed earlier, the share of male household heads overall is significantly higher in the IHS4 sample. Among the “most knowledgeable” respondents in the IHS4 parcel data who reported on household members’ land ownership under the business-as-usual approach, 96 percent of men respondents were household heads, compared to 49 percent of women respondents (Appendix Table A3a). Appendix Table A3b also presents OLS regressions on correlates of the “most knowledgeable” respondent, showing that household headship is highly correlated with being the selected respondent in T1, across both