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  • McKenzie, David  (72)
  • Kilic, Talip  (44)
  • Washington, D.C : The World Bank  (116)
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  • 1
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Are Unit Values Reliable Proxies for Prices? : Implications of Better Price Data for Household Consumption Measurement in a Low-Income Context (2024)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (52 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Alimi, Omoniyi Babatunde Are Unit Values Reliable Proxies for Prices? Implications of Better Price Data for Household Consumption Measurement in a Low-Income Context
    Keywords: Commodity Group Price ; Household Consumption And Expenditure ; Household Survey ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Nominal Consumption Aggregate ; Poverty Line ; Poverty Monitoring and Analysis ; Poverty Reduction ; Separability Assumption ; Unit Values
    Abstract: Household Consumption and Expenditure Surveys are key to consumption-based monetary poverty measurement. In the absence of market price surveys that are linked to Household Consumption and Expenditure Surveys, unit values are used as proxies for market prices in estimating nominal consumption aggregates, price deflators, poverty lines, and poverty statistics. This practice relies on the Hicksian separability assumption: within-commodity group relative prices are constant across space and the price of a single good is an accurate proxy for the commodity group price. To test, for the first time in a low-income context, whether Hicksian separability holds, this paper uses the price data collected for an extensive list of food items, including several variety/quality-differentiated products for specific items, in a national market survey that was conducted in Malawi in sync with the Household Consumption and Expenditure Survey that is the source of official poverty statistics. The analysis demonstrates that Hicksian separability fails to hold across space and time and that unit values are biased proxies for prices. Integrating the Household Consumption and Expenditure Survey and market survey data based on location and timing of fieldwork permits an assessment of consumption and poverty estimation based on market prices versus unit values. Relative to unit values, using market prices leads to higher food and overall consumption expenditures--both in nominal and real terms--while generating higher poverty lines and higher food and overall poverty rates. Compared to their counterparts based on unit values, spatially-disaggregated poverty estimates based on market prices exhibit a stronger correlation with nightlights --an objective proxy for living standards
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10698
    URL: Deutschlandweit zugänglich
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    MPI Ethno. Forsch.
  • 2
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Breadwinners and Caregivers : Examining the Global Relationship between Gender Norms and Economic Behavior (2024)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (70 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Gonzalez Martinez, Paula Lorena Breadwinners and Caregivers: Examining the Global Relationship between Gender Norms and Economic Behavior
    Keywords: Division of Labor ; Gender ; Gender and Employment ; Gender Gap ; Gender Gap in The Workforce ; Gender Informatics ; Gender Monitoring and Evaluation ; Household Maintenance
    Abstract: Gender norms are often emphasized to help explain gender gaps in the labor market. This paper examines global patterns of gender attitudes and norms toward the stereotypical gender roles of the male breadwinner and female caregiver, and broad support for gender equality in opportunities, and studies their relationship with economic behavior. Using data collected via Facebook from 150,000 individuals across 111 countries the paper explores how gender beliefs and norms are related to labor supply, household production, and intrahousehold decision-making power within a country. The paper provides descriptive evidence that the more gender equitable or counter-stereotypical are beliefs and norms, the more likely women are to work, the more time men spend on household chores, and the higher the likelihood of joint decision-making among couples. The findings suggest an underestimation of the support for gender equality globally and the extent of underestimation varies by gender and region. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential entry points for policy to help address gender norms
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10692
    URL: Deutschlandweit zugänglich
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  • 3
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    Online Resource
    Using Survey-to-Survey Imputation to Fill Poverty Data Gaps at a Low Cost : Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment (2024)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (78 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Dang, Hai-Anh Using Survey-to-Survey Imputation to Fill Poverty Data Gaps at a Low Cost: Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment
    Keywords: Consumption ; Household Surveys ; Information and Communication Technologies ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Poverty ; Poverty Diagnostics ; Poverty Reduction ; Survey-To-Survey Imputation
    Abstract: Survey data on household consumption are often unavailable or incomparable over time in many low- and middle-income countries. Based on a unique randomized survey experiment implemented in Tanzania, this study offers new and rigorous evidence demonstrating that survey-to-survey imputation can fill consumption data gaps and provide low-cost and reliable poverty estimates. Basic imputation models featuring utility expenditures, together with a modest set of predictors on demographics, employment, household assets, and housing, yield accurate predictions. Imputation accuracy is robust to varying the survey questionnaire length, the choice of base surveys for estimating the imputation model, different poverty lines, and alternative (quarterly or monthly) Consumer Price Index deflators. The proposed approach to imputation also performs better than multiple imputation and a range of machine learning techniques. In the case of a target survey with modified (shortened or aggregated) food or non-food consumption modules, imputation models including food or non-food consumption as predictors do well only if the distributions of the predictors are standardized vis-a-vis the base survey. For the best-performing models to reach acceptable levels of accuracy, the minimum required sample size should be 1,000 for both the base and target surveys. The discussion expands on the implications of the findings for the design of future surveys
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10738
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  • 4
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    Online Resource
    Recording the Time Divide : A Comparative Study of Smartphone- and Recall-Based Approaches to Time Use Measurement (2024)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (47 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Kilic, Talip Recording the Time Divide: A Comparative Study of Smartphone- and Recall-Based Approaches to Time Use Measurement
    Keywords: Cellular Phones ; Commercial Recall ; Consumption ; Household Survey ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Telecommunications ; Usage Monitoring
    Abstract: Based on a randomized survey experiment in Malawi, this study examines how innovative techniques in time use data collection could sidestep measurement concerns with traditional recall-based time use measurement. The experiment assigns random samples of households, and adult men and women within, to one of two treatment arms on time use measurement: a traditional 24-hour recall time use diary, and a self-administered smartphone-based pictorial time diary, known as the TimeTracker app, for real-time data collection. Compared to the recall arm, participation in employment and unpaid domestic and care work is shown to be higher in the smartphone arm for both men and women. The resulting estimates of gender gaps, while continuing to be large, are narrower in the smartphone arm, except for care work where the estimated gender gap increases. The recall treatment leads to substantial underreporting of activities after 6 pm, which otherwise accounts for nearly 30 percent of daily reported time in the smartphone arm. Likewise, the extent of simultaneous activities, particularly among women, is markedly lower in the recall arm. The overall reported time is, however, higher in the recall arm due to the minimum 15-minute duration that was used for recording activities the 24-hour recall diary, while over one-third of activities lasted less than 15 minutes in the smartphone arm. The analysis also shows that using stylized time use questions with a 7-day recall, as opposed to a 24-hour recall diary, results in an even greater overestimation of reported time in employment and unpaid work
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10695
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  • 5
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Using Paradata to Assess Respondent Burden and Interviewer Effects in Household Surveys : Evidence from Low- and Middle-Income Countries (2023)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (39 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Hasanbasri, Ardina Using Paradata to Assess Respondent Burden and Interviewer Effects in Household Surveys: Evidence from Low- and Middle-Income Countries
    Keywords: Computer-Assisted Interviewing ; Household Surveys ; Interviewer Effects ; Paradata ; Poverty Reduction ; Respondent Burden ; Social Analysis ; Social Development ; Survey Methodology
    Abstract: Over the past decade, national statistical offices in low- and middle-income countries have increasingly transitioned to computer-assisted personal interviewing and computer-assisted telephone interviewing for the implementation of household surveys. The byproducts of these types of data collection are survey paradata, which can unlock objective, module- and question-specific, actionable insights on respondent burden, survey costs, and interviewer effects. This study does precisely that, using paradata generated by the Survey Solutions computer-assisted personal interviewing platform in recent national household surveys implemented by the national statistical offices in Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Across countries, the average household interview, based on a socioeconomic household questionnaire, ranges from 82 to 120 minutes, while the average interview with an adult household member, based on a multi-topic individual questionnaire, takes between 13 to 25 minutes. Using a multilevel model that is estimated for each household and individual questionnaire module, the paper shows that interviewer effects on module duration are significantly larger than the estimates from high-income contexts. Food consumption, household roster, and non-farm enterprises consistently emerge among the top five household questionnaire modules in terms of total variance in duration, with 5 to 50 percent of the variability being attributable to interviewers. Similarly, labor, health, and land ownership appear among the top five individual questionnaire modules in terms of total variance in duration, with 6 to 50 percent of the variability being attributable to interviewers. These findings, particularly by module, point to where additional interviewer training, fieldwork supervision, and data quality monitoring may be needed in future surveys
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10456
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  • 6
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    Economic Sentiments and Expectations in Sub-Saharan Africa in a Time of Multiple Shocks (2023)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (40 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Wollburg, Philip Economic Sentiments and Expectations in Sub-Saharan Africa in a Time of Multiple Shocks
    Keywords: Economic Insecurity ; Economic Sentiment ; Expectations ; Living Standards ; Living Standards Measurement Survey Data ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Phone Survey ; Poverty Reduction ; Quality of Life and Leisure ; Schocks ; Social Development ; Uncertainty
    Abstract: Against the background of high inflation, climate shocks, and concerns about rising food insecurity, this study documents the state of economic sentiments and expectations of households in five African countries--Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda--that are home to 36 percent of the Sub-Saharan African population. Leveraging nationally representative phone survey data, 57 percent of households across the five countries report that their financial situation and their country's economic situation have worsened significantly in the past 12 months. While expectations for the future are more positive, there are marked differences across countries that suggest uneven recovery prospects and nonnegligible uncertainty about the future. Households overwhelmingly report prices to have increased considerably over the past 12 months and expect prices to increase faster, or at the same rate, over the next 12 months. Close to 54 percent of households--home to 206 million individuals--further expect that climate shocks will have adverse impacts on their finances in the next year. Economic sentiments are closely related to livelihood outcomes such as food insecurity, lack of access to staple foods, income loss, and unemployment, and sentiments about the household financial situation, country economic situation, price increases, and climate shocks are also interdependent. Households whose financial situation has worsened in the past year are consistently more pessimistic about their financial future. Food insecure households, in particular, are not only more likely to report a worsening financial situation in the recent past and pessimism about the future, but also more likely to expect to be adversely impacted by climate shocks
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10604
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  • 7
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    Bayesian Impact Evaluation with Informative Priors : An Application to a Colombian Management and Export Improvement Program (2023)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (68 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Iacovone, Leonardo Bayesian Impact Evaluation with Informative Priors: An Application to a Colombian Management and Export Improvement Program
    Keywords: Bayesian Impact Evaluation ; Competition Policy ; Competitiveness and Competition Policy ; Economic Theory and Research ; Export Competitiveness ; International Economics and Trade ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Management ; Prior Elicitation ; Private Sector Development ; Randomized Experiment ; Social Policy Evaluation Method
    Abstract: Policymakers often test expensive new programs on relatively small samples. Formally incorporating informative Bayesian priors into impact evaluation offers the promise to learn more from these experiments. A Colombian government program which aimed to increase exporting was trialed experimentally on 200 firms with this goal in mind. Priors were elicited from academics, policymakers, and firms. Contrary to these priors, frequentist estimation can not reject 0 effects in 2019, and finds some negative impacts in 2020. For binary outcomes like whether firms export, frequentist estimates are relatively precise, and Bayesian credible posterior intervals update to overlap almost completely with standard confidence intervals. For outcomes like increasing export variety, where the priors align with the data, the value of these priors is seen in posterior intervals that are considerably narrower than frequentist confidence intervals. Finally, for noisy outcomes like export value, posterior intervals show almost no updating from the priors, highlighting how uninformative the data are about such outcomes
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10274
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  • 8
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    Is there Still a Role for Direct Government Support to Firms in Developing Countries? (2023)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (12 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David Is there Still a Role for Direct Government Support to Firms in Developing Countries?
    Keywords: Development Economics and Aid Effectiveness ; Firm Support ; Green Growth Agenda ; Impact Evaluation ; Industrial Economics ; Industrial Policy ; Industry ; Macroeconomic Policy ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Subsidized Loans
    Abstract: Should governments in developing countries directly support firms with policies such as grants, subsidized loans, and training and consulting programs, or should they instead just aim to enact sensible regulatory and macroeconomic policies and not attempt to engage in industrial policy While industrial policy has gained renewed attention in developed economies, it faces considerable skepticism in developing countries scarred by previous experiences and facing limited fiscal space. This paper discusses the rationale for government involvement, and then lessons from a recent research agenda in development economics on how to target these programs, on whether they induce firms to undertake additional activities, on avoiding political capture, and on how these interact with competition. This work shows that these policies can deliver some of their promised benefits, but that there is still much to learn and the need for systematic and serious attempts at prospective impact evaluation as new policies are launched
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10628
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  • 9
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    Migration, Families, and Counterfactual Families (2023)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (53 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Bertoli, Simone Migration, Families, and Counterfactual Families
    Keywords: Counterfactual Reasoning ; Family Formation ; Human Rights ; International Economics and Trade ; International Migration ; Law and Development ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Migrant Policy ; Migrants Families ; Migration ; Remittances ; Status Quo Bias
    Abstract: Migration changes how families form and dissolve, and how one should conceptualize the family. This has implications for thinking about how the migration decision is modelled when individuals are unable to picture the counterfactual families they may have. Differences in marital status can induce two otherwise identical individuals to make different migration decisions. It also has implications for attempts to causally estimate impacts of migration, when the family composition changes with the migration decision itself. This paper shows empirically that changing marital status after migration is widespread, and that the traditional model of a fixed family sending off a migrant who remains part of that same family only describes a minority of migrants moving from developing countries to the U.S. The authors draw out lessons from thinking about counterfactual families for empirical research and for migration policy
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10626
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  • 10
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    Capacity Building as a Route to Export Market Expansion : A Six-Country Experiment in the Western Balkans (2022)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (33 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Ana P., Cusolito Capacity Building as a Route to Export Market Expansion: A Six-Country Experiment in the Western Balkans
    Keywords: Broadcast and Media ; Consulting ; Customer Acquisition ; Digital Presence ; Export Competitiveness ; Export Market Expansion ; Information and Communication Technologies ; International Economics and Trade ; Marketing Training ; Private Sector Development ; Skills Development and Labor Force Training ; Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) ; Small and Medium Size Enterprises ; Training
    Abstract: The limited market size of many small emerging economies is a key constraint to the growth of innovative small and medium enterprises. Exporting offers a potential solution, but firms may struggle to locate and appeal to foreign buyers. A six-country randomized experiment was conducted with 225 firms in the Western Balkans to test the effectiveness of 30 hours of live group-based training and 5 hours of one-on-one remote consulting in overcoming these constraints. Treated firms used techniques such as search engine optimization and improved Facebook content to increase their digital presence and better reach foreign customers. A year later, positive and significant impacts are found on the number of customers, and a significant intensive margin increase in export sales. Qualitative interviews suggest this improvement came from a combination of sector-specific advice on market expansion, and through an encouragement effect which gave entrepreneurs the confidence to try new sales strategies
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10256
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  • 11
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    Field and Natural Experiments in Migration (2022)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
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    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (42 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David Field and Natural Experiments in Migration
    Keywords: Difference-In-Differences ; Economic Growth ; Experimental Methods ; Instrumental Variables ; Migration Experiments ; Natural Experiment ; Regression Discontinuity ; Social Protection and Labor
    Abstract: Many research and policy questions surrounding migration are causal questions. What causes people to migrate? What are the consequences of migration for the migrants, their families, and their communities? Answering these questions requires dealing with the self-selection inherent in migration choices. Field and natural experiments offer methodological approaches that enable answering these causal questions. This paper discusses the key conceptual and logistical issues that face applied researchers when applying these methods to the study of migration, as well as providing guidance for practitioners and policymakers in assessing the credibility of causal claims. For randomized experiments, this includes providing a framework for thinking through what can be randomized; discussing key measurement and design issues that arise from issues such as migration being a rare event, and in measuring welfare changes when people change locations; as well as discussing ethical issues that can arise. The paper then outlines what makes for a good natural experiment in the context of migration, and discusses the implications of recent econometric work for the use of difference-indifferences, instrumental variables (and especially shift-share instruments), and regression discontinuity methods in migration research. A key lesson from this recent work is that it is not meaningful to talk about ?the? impact of migration, but rather impacts are likely to be heterogeneous, affecting both the validity and interpretation of causal estimates
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10250
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  • 12
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    Individual Wealth Inequality : Measurement and Evidence from Low- and Middle-Income Countries (2022)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (51 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Hasanbasri, Ardina Individual Wealth Inequality: Measurement and Evidence from Low- and Middle-Income Countries
    Keywords: Access To Finance ; Asset Ownership ; Economic Gender Differences ; Economic Insecurity ; Economic Opportunity ; Finance and Financial Sector Development ; Gender ; Gender and Economic Policy ; Gender and Economics ; Gender and Wealth ; Income Inequality ; Individual Income In Developing Countries ; Individual Wealth ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Wealth Inequality Study
    Abstract: The accumulation of personal wealth, stemming from ownership and control of assets, plays a critical role in advancing women's and men's economic opportunities. Yet, it is an understudied dimension of inequality across the developing world. To study individual-level wealth inequality and gender differences in wealth, this paper leverages unique data from nationally representative, multi-topic household surveys that were conducted in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania and that interviewed men and women in private regarding their personal ownership and valuation of physical and financial assets. The analysis documents substantial gender inequalities in asset ownership and wealth, overall and for specific asset classes. Individual-level wealth inequality measures are substantially higher vis-a-vis comparators based on per capita household consumption expenditures and per capita household wealth, and intrahousehold wealth inequality has a substantial role in explaining overall wealth inequality. While land is a key contributor to wealth inequality across countries, there is cross-country heterogeneity in the relative contributions of asset classes. Self-reporting on asset ownership and valuation, the internationally-recommended best practice, is also shown to lead to higher inequality estimates compared to the business-as-usual survey practice of interviewing a single, most-knowledgeable household member to identify intrahousehold asset owners and values. The discussion expands on the implications of the findings for future surveys and methodological research
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9987
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  • 13
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    Fears and Tears : Should More People be Moving within and from Developing Countries, and what Stops this Movement? (2022)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (28 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David Fears and Tears: Should More People be Moving within and from Developing Countries, and what Stops this Movement?
    Keywords: Attachment To Home ; Benefits of Urbanization ; Communities and Human Settlements ; Constraints That Limit Movement ; Economics of Migration ; Health, Nutrition and Population ; Human Migrations and Resettlements ; Internal Relocation ; International Economics and Trade ; International Migration ; Mental Health ; Migration Policy ; Psychological Uncertainty of Relocation ; Wealth and Wellbeing
    Abstract: Only one in seven of the world's population has ever migrated, despite the enormous gains in income possible through international and internal movement. This paper examines the evidence for different explanations given in the economics literature for this lack of movement and their implications for policy. Incorrect information about the gains to migrating, liquidity constraints that prevent poor people paying the costs of moving, and high costs of movement arising from both physical transportation costs and policy barriers all inhibit movement and offer scope for policy efforts to inform, provide credit, and lower moving costs. However, the economics literature has paid less attention to the fears people have when faced with the uncertainty of moving to a new place, and to the reasons behind the tears they shed when moving. While these tears reveal the attachment people have to particular places, this attachment is not fixed, but itself changes with migration experiences. Psychological factors such as a bias toward the status quo and the inability to picture what one is giving up by not migrating can result in people not moving, even when they would benefit from movement and are not constrained by finances or policy barriers from doing so. This suggests new avenues for policy interventions that can help individuals better visualize the opportunity costs of not moving, alleviate their uncertainties, and help shift their default behavior from not migrating
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10128
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  • 14
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    Is Dirt Cheap? : The Economic Costs of Failing to Meet Soil Health Requirements on Smallholder Farms (2022)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
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    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (39 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Gourlay, Sydney Is Dirt Cheap? The Economic Costs of Failing to Meet Soil Health Requirements on Smallholder Farms
    Keywords: Agricultural Growth and Rural Development ; Agricultural Productivity ; Agriculture ; Agriculture and Farming Systems ; Crop Yields ; Household Surveys ; Rural Development ; Smallholders ; Soil ; Sub-Saharan Africa ; Technical Efficiency ; Uganda
    Abstract: Agricultural productivity is hindered in smallholder farming systems due to several factors, including farmers' inability to meet crop-specific soil requirements. This paper focuses on soil suitability for maize production and creates multidimensional soil suitability profiles of smallholder maize plots in Uganda, while quantifying forgone production due to cultivation on less-than-suitable land and identifying groups of farmers that are disproportionately impacted. The analysis leverages the unique socioeconomic data from a subnational survey conducted in Eastern Uganda, inclusive of plot-level, objective measures of maize yields and soil attributes. Stochastic frontier models of maize yields are estimated within each soil suitability class to understand differences in returns to inputs, technical efficiency, and potential yield. Only 13 percent of farmers are cultivating soil that is highly suitable for maize production, while the vast majority are cultivating only moderately suitable plots. Farmers cultivating highly suitable soil have the potential to increase their observed yields by as much as 86 percent, while those at the opposite end of the suitability distribution (with marginally suitable land) operate closer to the production frontier and can only increase yields by up to 59 percent, given the current technology set. There is heterogeneity in potential gains across the wealth distribution, with poorer households facing more heavily constrained potential. Assuming no change in technologies and management practices used by Ugandan farmers, there are limited economic gains tied to closing suitability class-specific productivity gaps, or even at the extreme reaching the average potential productivity levels observed in the high suitability class
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-10108
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  • 15
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    Investment Impacts of Gendered Land Rights in Customary Tenure Systems : Substantive and Methodological Insights from Malawi (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
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    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (28 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Deininger, Klaus Investment Impacts of Gendered Land Rights in Customary Tenure Systems: Substantive and Methodological Insights from Malawi
    Abstract: Compared with the vast literature on the investment and productivity effects of land rights formalization, little attention has been paid to the impact of variation in individuals' tenure security under customary tenure regimes. This is a serious gap not only because most of Africa's rural land is held under informal arrangements, but also because gradual erosion of long-term rights by women and migrants is often an indication of traditional systems coming under stress. Using a unique survey experiment in Malawi, the analysis shows that (i) having long-term land rights of bequest and sale has a significant impact on investment and cash crop adoption; (ii) women's land rights of bequest and sale, joint with local institutional arrangements, can amplify the magnitude of such effects; and (iii) the effects found here can be obscured by measurement error associated with traditional approaches to survey data collection on land ownership and rights
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9520
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  • 16
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    How has COVID-19 Affected the Intention to Migrate via the Backway to Europe and to a Neighboring African Country? : Survey Evidence and a Salience Experiment in the Gambia (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (34 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Bah, Tijan L How has COVID-19 Affected the Intention to Migrate via the Backway to Europe and to a Neighboring African Country? Survey Evidence and a Salience Experiment in the Gambia
    Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in border closures in many countries and a sharp reduction in overall international mobility. However, this disruption of legal pathways to migration has raised concerns that potential migrants may turn to irregular migration routes as a substitute. This paper examines how the pandemic has changed intentions to migrate from The Gambia, the country with the highest pre-pandemic per-capita irregular migration rates in Africa. A large-scale panel survey conducted in 2019 and 2020 is used to compare changes in intentions to migrate to Europe and to neighboring Senegal. The data show that the pandemic has reduced the intention to migrate to both destinations, with approximately one-third of young males expressing less intention to migrate. The largest reductions in migration intentions are for individuals who were unsure of their intent pre-pandemic, and for poorer individuals who are no longer able to afford the costs of migrating at a time when these costs have increased and their remittance income has fallen. This paper also introduces the methodology of priming experiments to the study of migration intentions, by randomly varying the salience of the COVID-19 pandemic before eliciting intentions to migrate. There is no impact of this added salience, which appears to be because knowledge of the virus, while imperfect, was already enough to inform migration decisions. Nevertheless, despite these decreases in intentions, the overall desire to migrate the backway to Europe remains high, highlighting the need for legal migration pathways to support migrants and divert them from the risks of backway migration
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9658
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  • 17
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    Individual Wealth and Time Use : Evidence from Cambodia (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (48 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Hasanbasri, Ardina Individual Wealth and Time Use: Evidence from Cambodia
    Keywords: Asset Ownership ; Employment ; Employment and Unemployment ; Gender ; Gender and Development ; Household Survey ; ICT Economics ; Inequality ; Information and Communication Technologies ; Labor ; Poverty Reduction ; Time Allocation ; Time Use ; Wealth
    Abstract: A better understanding of how individual wealth and time use are linked-across paid, unpaid, and leisure activities-is important for targeting widespread gender inequalities in time allocation, as well as in accessing economic opportunities. The lack of reliable, individual-level data on asset ownership across different subpopulations, however, has limited discussions of these issues in the literature. Using a unique nationally representative survey from Cambodia, this paper shows that individual wealth, as measured through self-reported ownership of physical and financial assets, is significantly associated with time allocation to different activities. The role of asset ownership in time use is also stronger, particularly among women, vis-a-vis the competing proxies for socioeconomic status. Ownership of financial accounts, motorized vehicles, and mobile phones-all of which can improve access to networks, markets, and services-is associated with less time in unpaid work, and in some cases greater time in paid work, specifically among women in off-farm jobs. There are also distinct gender differences in how men and women shift their time away from leisure and childcare, highlighting the importance of social norms in choices over time use. The analysis highlights the utility of integrated, intra-household, individual-disaggregated data collection on asset ownership, time use, and employment in lower-income contexts
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9765
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  • 18
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    Testing Classic Theories of Migration in the Lab (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (49 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Batista, Catia Testing Classic Theories of Migration in the Lab
    Keywords: Destination Choice ; Employment and Unemployment ; International Economics and Trade ; International Migration ; Lab Experiment ; Migrant Selection ; Poverty Reduction ; Social Protections and Labor ; Wages, Compensation and Benefits
    Abstract: The predictions of different classic migration theories are tested by using incentivized laboratory experiments to investigate how potential migrants decide between working in different destinations. First, the authors test theories of income maximization, migrant skill-selection, and multi-destination choice as they vary migration costs, liquidity constraints, risk, social benefits, and incomplete information. The standard income maximization model of migration with selection on observed and unobserved skills leads to a much higher migration rate and more negative skill-selection than is obtained when migration decisions take place under more realistic assumptions. Second, these lab experiments are used to investigate whether the independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption holds. The results show that it holds for most people when decisions just involve wages, costs, and liquidity constraints. However, once the risk of unemployment and incomplete information is added, independence of irrelevant alternatives no longer holds for about 20 percent of the sample
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9751
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  • 19
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    Under what Conditions are Data Valuable for Development? (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (30 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Jolliffe, Dean Under what Conditions are Data Valuable for Development?
    Keywords: Development Data ; Economic Theory and Research ; Information and Communication Technologies ; Information Technology ; Macroeconomics and Economic Growth ; Public Sector Development ; Public Service Delivery ; Statistical and Mathematical Sciences ; Statistics
    Abstract: Data produced by the public sector can have transformational impacts on development outcomes through better targeting of resources, improved service delivery, cost savings in policy implementation, increased accountability, and more. Around the world, the amount of data produced by the public sector is increasing at a rapid pace, yet their transformational impacts have not been realized fully. Why has the full value of these data not been realized yet This paper outlines 12 conditions needed for the production and use of public sector data to generate value for development and presents case studies substantiating these conditions. The conditions are that data need to have adequate spatial and temporal coverage (are complete, frequent, and timely), are of high quality (are accurate, comparable, and granular), are easy to use (are accessible, understandable, and interoperable), and are safe to use (are impartial, confidential, and appropriate)
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9811
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  • 20
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    Estimating the Impact of Weather on Agriculture (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (151 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Michler, Jeffrey D Estimating the Impact of Weather on Agriculture
    Keywords: Agricultural Productivity ; Agricultural Sector Economics ; Agriculture ; Climate and Meteorology ; Climate Change and Agriculture ; Climate Change Impacts ; Crop Yield ; Crops and Crop Management Systems ; Environment ; Precipitation ; Remote Sensing ; Science and Technology Development ; Temperature ; Weather Impacts
    Abstract: This paper quantifies the significance and magnitude of the effect of measurement error in remote sensing weather data in the analysis of smallholder agricultural productivity. The analysis leverages 17 rounds of nationally-representative, panel household survey data from six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. These data are spatially linked with a range of geospatial weather data sources and related metrics. The paper provides systematic evidence on measurement error introduced by (1) different methods used to obfuscate the exact GPS coordinates of households, (2) different metrics used to quantify precipitation and temperature, and (3) different remote sensing measurement technologies. First, the analysis finds no discernible effect of measurement error introduced by different obfuscation methods. Second, it finds that simple weather metrics, such as total seasonal rainfall and mean daily temperature, outperform more complex metrics, such as deviations in rainfall from the long-run average or growing degree days, in a broad range of settings. Finally, the analysis finds substantial amounts of measurement error based on remote sensing products. In extreme cases, the data drawn from different remote sensing products result in opposite signs for coefficients on weather metrics, meaning that precipitation or temperature drawn from one product purportedly increases crop output while the same metrics drawn from a different product purportedly reduces crop output. The paper concludes with a set of six best practices for researchers looking to combine remote sensing weather data with socioeconomic survey data
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9867
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  • 21
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    The Evolving Socioeconomic Impacts of COVID-19 in Four African Countries (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (24 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Furbush, Ann The Evolving Socioeconomic Impacts of COVID-19 in Four African Countries
    Abstract: The paper provides evidence on the evolving socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic among households in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. The data allow estimating the immediate economic impacts of the pandemic, beginning in April 2020, and tracking how the situation evolved through September 2020. Although households have started to see recovery in income, business revenues, and food security, the gains have been relatively modest. Additionally, households have received very little outside assistance and their ability to cope with shocks remains limited. School closures have created a vacuum in education delivery and school-aged children have struggled to receive education services remotely
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9556
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  • 22
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    LSMS+ Program in Sub-Saharan Africa : Findings from Individual-Level Data Collection on Labor and Asset Ownership (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource
    Series Statement: Other Poverty Study
    Abstract: Established in 2016, the World Bank living standards measurement study - plus (LSMS+) program works to enhance the availability and quality of intra-household, self-reported, individual-disaggregated survey data collected in low- and middle-income countries on key dimensions of men's and women's economic opportunities and welfare. This report presents findings on gender differences in labor market outcomes and ownership of physical and financial assets in Sub-Saharan Africa, based on the national surveys that have been implemented by the respective national statistical offices (NSOs) in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania over the period 2016-2020, with support from the LSMS+ program
    DOI: 10.1596/35544
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  • 23
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    Recurrent Climatic Shocks and Humanitarian Aid : Impacts on Livelihood Outcomes in Malawi (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (49 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: McCarthy, Nancy Recurrent Climatic Shocks and Humanitarian Aid: Impacts on Livelihood Outcomes in Malawi
    Abstract: Between 2014 and 2016 unprecedented and consecutive climatic shocks ravaged Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. The largest ever emergency relief operation in the country's history ensued. The pathways and extent to which the humanitarian response protected livelihoods remain under researched. This paper uses a unique data set that combines longitudinal household survey data with GIS-based measures of weather shocks and climate conditions and longitudinal administrative data on the World Food Programme's aid distribution. The paper aims to understand the drivers of humanitarian aid and evaluate the impact of aid and weather shocks on outcomes related to household production and consumption in Malawi. The analysis shows that droughts and floods had consistent negative impacts on a range of welfare outcomes, particularly for households that were subject to sequential shocks. Aid receipt is demonstrated to attenuate such impacts, again particularly for households that experienced the shocks consecutively. Households living in areas subject to a weather shock and with higher World Food Programme aid distribution were more likely to receive food aid, partially explaining the success of aid in mitigating the impacts of shocks. However, there is significant scope for improving the criteria for targeting humanitarian aid beneficiaries
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9666
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  • 24
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    Survey Measurement Errors and the Assessment of the Relationship between Yields and Inputs in Smallholder Farming Systems : Evidence from Mali (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (62 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Yacoubou Djima, Ismael Survey Measurement Errors and the Assessment of the Relationship between Yields and Inputs in Smallholder Farming Systems: Evidence from Mali
    Keywords: Agricultural Input ; Agricultural Productivity ; Agricultural Sector Economics ; Agriculture ; Crop Cutting ; Crop Yield ; Crops and Crop Management Systems ; Household Survey ; Machine Learning ; Measurement Error ; Smallholder Farming
    Abstract: An accurate understanding of how input use affects agricultural productivity in smallholder farming systems is key to designing policies that can improve productivity, food security, and living standards in rural areas. Studies examining the relationships between agricultural productivity and inputs typically rely on land productivity measures, such as crop yields, that are informed by self-reported survey data on crop production. This paper leverages unique survey data from Mali to demonstrate that self-reported crop yields, vis-a-vis (objective) crop cut yields, are subject to non-classical measurement error that in turn biases the estimates of returns to inputs, including land, labor, fertilizer, and seeds. The analysis validates an alternative approach to estimate the relationship between crop yields and agricultural inputs using large-scale surveys, namely a within-survey imputation exercise that derives predicted, otherwise unobserved, objective crop yields that stem from a machine learning model that is estimated with a random subsample of plots for which crop cutting and self-reported yields are both available. Using data from a methodological survey experiment and a nationally representative survey conducted in Mali, the analysis demonstrates that it is possible to obtain predicted objective sorghum yields with attenuated non-classical measurement error, resulting in a less biased assessment of the relationship between yields and agricultural inputs. The discussion expands on the implications of the findings for (i) future research on agricultural intensification, and (ii) the design of future surveys in which objective data collection could be limited to a subsample to save costs, with the intention to apply the suggested machine learning approach
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9841
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  • 25
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    Poverty Imputation in Contexts without Consumption Data : A Revisit with Further Refinements (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (123 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Dang, Hai-Anh H Poverty Imputation in Contexts without Consumption Data: A Revisit with Further Refinements
    Keywords: Asset Wealth ; Demographic and Health Survey ; Educational Achievement ; Employment ; Household Survey ; Inequality ; Living Standards ; Poverty Lines ; Poverty Measurement ; Poverty Reduction ; Survey-To-Survey Imputation
    Abstract: A key challenge with poverty measurement is that household consumption data are often unavailable or infrequently collected or may be incomparable over time. In a development project setting, it is seldom feasible to collect full consumption data for estimating the poverty impacts. While survey-to-survey imputation is a cost-effective approach to address these gaps, its effective use calls for a combination of both ex-ante design choices and ex-post modeling efforts that are anchored in validated protocols. This paper refines various aspects of existing poverty imputation models using 14 multi-topic household surveys conducted over the past decade in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Vietnam. The analysis reveals that including an additional predictor that captures household utility consumption expenditures-as part of a basic imputation model with household-level demographic and employment variables-provides poverty estimates that are not statistically significantly different from the true poverty rates. In many cases, these estimates even fall within one standard error of the true poverty rates. Adding geospatial variables to the imputation model improves imputation accuracy on a cross-country basis. Bringing in additional community-level predictors (available from survey and census data in Vietnam) related to educational achievement, poverty, and asset wealth can further enhance accuracy. Yet, there is within-country spatial heterogeneity in model performance, with certain models performing well for either urban areas or rural areas only. The paper provides operationally-relevant and cost-saving inputs into the design of future surveys implemented with a poverty imputation objective and suggests directions for future research
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9838
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  • 26
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    What Prevents More Small Firms from Using Professional Business Services? : An Information and Quality-Rating Experiment in Nigeria (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (31 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Anderson, Stephen J What Prevents More Small Firms from Using Professional Business Services? An Information and Quality-Rating Experiment in Nigeria
    Abstract: Why do more small firms in developing countries not use the market for professional business services like accounting, marketing, and human resource specialists? Two key reasons may be that firms lack information about the availability of these services, and that they struggle to distinguish the quality of good versus bad providers. A brand recognition exercise finds that most small firms are unaware of most providers in this market, and a survey of service providers reveals that they largely rely on word-of-mouth and informal reputation mechanisms for acquiring customers. This study set up a business services marketplace that contains information about the different providers present in the market and used mystery shopper visits to develop a quality ratings system. A randomized experiment with more than 1,000 firms provided access to this marketplace to the treatment group and randomized whether firms received just information or also quality ratings. The provision of quality ratings information shifts small firms' preferences over which provider they would like to use, increasing the average quality rating of their preferred providers by 0.2 to 0.4 ratings points out of 5. However, neither the provision of information nor these quality ratings had any significant impact on the likelihood that small firms go on to hire a business service provider over the subsequent six months. The results suggest that alleviating information frictions alone is insufficient to increase usage of professional business services
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9614
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  • 27
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    Aspirations and Financial Decisions : Experimental Evidence from the Philippines (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (40 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: McKenzie, David Aspirations and Financial Decisions: Experimental Evidence from the Philippines
    Abstract: A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort, but could also reduce effort if unmet aspirations lead to frustration. Treatment resulted in more ambitious savings goals, but nearly all individuals fell far short of reaching these goals. Two years later, treated individuals had not saved more, and actually had lower borrowing and business investments. Treatment also reduced belief in the amount of control over one's life. Setting aspirations too high can lead to frustration, leading individuals to reduce their economic investments
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9586
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  • 28
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    Representativeness of Individual-Level Data in COVID-19 Phone Surveys : Findings from Sub-Saharan Africa (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (39 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Brubaker, Joshua Representativeness of Individual-Level Data in COVID-19 Phone Surveys: Findings from Sub-Saharan Africa
    Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has created urgent demand for timely data, leading to a surge in mobile phone surveys for tracking the impacts of and responses to the pandemic. This paper assesses, and attempts to mitigate, selection biases in individual-level analyses based on phone survey data. The research uses data from (i) national phone surveys that have been implemented in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda during the pandemic, and (ii) the pre-COVID-19 national face-to-face surveys that served as the sampling frames for the phone surveys. The availability of pre-COVID-19 face-to-face survey data permits comparisons of phone survey respondents with the general adult population. Phone survey respondents are more likely to be household heads or their spouses and non-farm enterprise owners, and on average, are older and better educated vis-a-vis the general adult population. To improve the representativeness of individual-level phone survey data, the household-level phone survey sampling weights are calibrated based on propensity score adjustments that are derived from a model of an individual's likelihood of being interviewed as a function of individual- and household-level attributes. Reweighting improves the representativeness of the estimates for the phone survey respondents, moving them closer to those of the general adult population. This holds for women and men and a range of demographic, education, and labor market outcomes. However, reweighting increases the variance of the estimates and fails to overcome selection biases. Obtaining reliable data on men and women through phone surveys requires random selection of adult interviewees within sampled households
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9660
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  • 29
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    The Distribution of Effort : Physical Activity, Gender Roles, and Bargaining Power in an Agrarian Setting (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (28 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Friedman, Jed The Distribution of Effort: Physical Activity, Gender Roles, and Bargaining Power in an Agrarian Setting
    Abstract: The disutility of work, often summarily described as effort, is a primal component of economic models of worker and consumer behavior. However, empirical applications that measure effort, especially those that assess the distribution of effort across known populations, are historically scarce. This paper explores intra-household differences in physical activity in a rural agrarian setting. Physical activity is captured via wearable accelerometers that provide a proxy for physical effort expended per unit of time. In the study setting of agricultural households in Malawi, men devote significantly more time to sedentary activities than women (38 minutes per day), but also spend more time on moderate-to-vigorous activities (16 minutes). Using standardized energy expenditure as a summary measure for physical effort, women exert marginally higher levels of physical effort than men. However, gender differences in effort among married partners are strongly associated with intra-household differences in bargaining power, with significantly larger husband-wife effort gaps alongside larger differences in age and individual land ownership as well as whether the couple lives as part of a polygamous union. Physical activity - a proxy for physical effort, an understudied dimension of wellbeing - exhibits an unequal distribution across gender in this population
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9634
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  • 30
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    LSMS+ Program in Cambodia : Findings from Individual-Level Data Collection on Labor and Asset Ownership (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource
    Series Statement: Other Poverty Study
    Abstract: Established in 2016, the World Bank living standards measurement study - plus (LSMS+) program works to enhance the availability and quality of intra-household, self-reported, individual-disaggregated survey data collected in low- and middle-income countries on key dimensions of men's and women's economic opportunities and welfare. This report presents findings on gender differences in labor market outcomes and ownership of physical and financial assets in Cambodia, based on a national survey that was implemented by the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) in 2019, with support from the LSMS+ program
    DOI: 10.1596/35543
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  • 31
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    LSMS+ Program : Overview and Recommendations for Improving Individual-Disaggregated Data on Asset Ownership and Labor Outcomes (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource
    Series Statement: Other Poverty Study
    Abstract: Established in 2016, the World Bank living standards measurement study - plus (LSMS+) program works to enhance the availability and quality of intra-household, self-reported, individual-disaggregated survey data collected in low- and middle-income countries on key dimensions of men's and women's economic opportunities and welfare. This report presents an overview of the LSMS+ program and provides operational guidance regarding individual-disaggregated data collection in large-scale household surveys, based on the experience with and analysis of the national surveys that have been implemented by the respective national statistical offices (NSOs) in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania over the period 2016-2020, with support from the LSMS+ program
    DOI: 10.1596/35542
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  • 32
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    Understanding the Requirements for Surveys to Support Satellite-Based Crop Type Mapping : Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (43 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Azzari, George Understanding the Requirements for Surveys to Support Satellite-Based Crop Type Mapping: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
    Abstract: With the surge in publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery, satellite-based monitoring of smallholder agricultural outcomes is gaining momentum. This paper provides recommendations on how large-scale household surveys should be conducted to generate the data needed to train models for satellite-based crop type mapping in smallholder farming systems. The analysis focuses on maize cultivation in Malawi and Ethiopia, and leverages rich, georeferenced plot-level data from national household surveys that were conducted in 2018-20 and that are integrated with Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and complementary geospatial data. To identify the approach to survey data collection that yields optimal data for training remote sensing models, 26,250 in silico experiments are simulated within a machine learning framework. The best model is then applied to map seasonal maize cultivation from 2016 to 2019 at 10-meter resolution in both countries. The analysis reveals that smallholder plots with maize cultivation can be identified with up to 75 percent accuracy. However, the predictive accuracy varies with the approach to georeferencing plot locations and the number of observations in the training data. Collecting full plot boundaries or complete plot corner points provides the best quality of information for model training. Classification performance peaks with slightly less than 60 percent of the training data. Seemingly small erosion in accuracy under less preferable approaches to georeferencing plots results in total area under maize cultivation being overestimated by 0.16 to 0.47 million hectares (8 to 24 percent) in Malawi
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9609
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  • 33
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    Diamonds in the Rough? : Repurposing Multi-Topic Surveys to Estimate Individual-Level Consumption Poverty (2021)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (50 pages)
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Print Version: Bose-Duker, Theophiline Diamonds in the Rough? Repurposing Multi-Topic Surveys to Estimate Individual-Level Consumption Poverty
    Abstract: Traditional per capita measures of poverty assign the same poverty status to individuals living in the same household and overlook differences in living standards within households. There has been a long-standing need for a tool that enables poverty measurement at the individual level, while avoiding overly complex estimation techniques and, if possible, using readily available household survey data. An ordinary least squares-based strategy was recently introduced to estimate individual resource shares. This paper presents the theory behind this approach in an accessible fashion for those interested in individual-level consumption poverty measurement using existing household survey data. The strategy's assumptions are compared with the assumptions of the prevailing per capita approach to deriving poverty estimates. The empirical analysis presents competing individual-level poverty estimates in four diverse countries under the individual resource shares strategy versus the per capita approach. The results suggest that poverty is underestimated under the per capita approach. There is further evidence that women may be poorer than men, and that children and the elderly are disproportionately affected by poverty. However, the pursuit of the individual resource shares approach reveals cross-country heterogeneity in the extent of increase in headcount poverty estimates, and in the direction of change in headcount poverty estimates for men and women. The paper concludes with suggestions for further methodological research in this area
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-9661
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  • 34
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    Could the Debate Be Over? Errors in Farmer-Reported Production and Their Implications for the Inverse Scale-Productivity Relationship in Uganda (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (76 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Gourlay, Sydney Could the Debate Be Over? Errors in Farmer-Reported Production and Their Implications for the Inverse Scale-Productivity Relationship in Uganda
    Abstract: Based on a two-round household panel survey conducted in Eastern Uganda, this study shows that the analysis of the inverse scale-productivity relationship is highly sensitive to how plot-level maize production, hence yield (production divided by GPS-based plot area), is measured. Although farmer-reported production-based plot-level maize yield regressions consistently lend support to the inverse scale-productivity relationship, the comparable regressions estimated with maize yields based on sub-plot crop cutting, full-plot crop cutting, and remote sensing point toward constant returns to scale, at the mean as well as throughout the distributions of objective measures of maize yield. In deriving the much-debated coefficient for GPS-based plot area, the maize yield regressions control for objective measures of soil fertility, maize genetic heterogeneity, and edge effects at the plot level; a rich set of plot, household, and plot manager attributes; as well as time-invariant household- and parcel-level unobserved heterogeneity in select specifications that exploit the panel nature of the data. The core finding is driven by persistent overestimation of farmer-reported maize production and yield vis-a-vis their crop cutting-based counterparts, particularly in the lower half of the plot area distribution. Although the results contribute to a larger, and renewed, body of literature questioning the inverse scale-productivity relationship based on omitted explanatory variables or alternative formulations of the agricultural productivity measure, the paper is among the first documenting how the inverse relationship could be a statistical artifact, driven by errors in farmer-reported survey data on crop production
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-8192
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  • 35
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    Shelter from the Storm? Household-Level Impacts of, and Responses to, the 2015 Floods in Malawi (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (34 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McCarthy, Nancy Shelter from the Storm? Household-Level Impacts of, and Responses to, the 2015 Floods in Malawi
    Abstract: As extreme weather events intensify due to climate change, it becomes ever more critical to understand how vulnerable households are to these events and the mechanisms households can rely on to minimize losses effectively. This paper analyzes the impacts of the floods that occurred during the 2014/15 growing season in Malawi, using a two-period panel data set. The results show that while yields were dramatically lower for households severely affected by the floods, drops in food consumption expenditures and calories per capita were less dramatic. However, dietary quality, as captured by the food consumption score, was significantly lower for flood-affected households. Although access to social safety nets increased food consumption outcomes, particularly for those in moderately-affected areas, the proportion of households with access to certain safety net programs was lower in 2015 compared with 2013. The latter finding suggests that linking these programs more closely to disaster relief efforts could substantially improve welfare outcomes during and after a natural disaster. Finally, risk-coping strategies, including financial account ownership, access to off-farm income sources, and adult children living away from home, were generally ineffective in mitigating the negative impacts of the floods
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-8189
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 36
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    Mission Impossible? Exploring the Promise of Multiple Imputation for Predicting Missing GPS-Based Land Area Measures in Household Surveys (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (23 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Kilic, Talip Mission Impossible? Exploring the Promise of Multiple Imputation for Predicting Missing GPS-Based Land Area Measures in Household Surveys
    Abstract: Research has provided robust evidence for the use of GPS technology to be the scalable gold standard in land area measurement in household surveys. Nonetheless, facing budget constraints, survey agencies often seek to measure with GPS only plots within a given radius of dwelling locations. Subsequently, it is common for significant shares of plots not to be measured, and research has highlighted the selection biases resulting from using incomplete data. This study relies on nationally-representative, multi-topic household survey data from Malawi and Ethiopia that exhibit near-negligible missingness in GPS-based plot areas, and validates the accuracy of a multiple imputation model for predicting missing GPS-based plot areas in household surveys. The analysis (i) randomly creates missingness among plots beyond two operationally relevant distance measures from the dwelling locations; (ii) conducts multiple imputation under each distance scenario for each artificially created data set; and (iii) compares the distributions of the imputed plot-level outcomes, namely, area and agricultural productivity, with the known distributions. In Malawi, multiple imputation can produce imputed yields that are statistically undistinguishable from the true distributions with up to 82 percent missingness in plot areas that are further than 1 kilometer from the dwelling location. The comparable figure in Ethiopia is 56 percent. These rates correspond to overall rates of missingness of 23 percent in Malawi and 13 percent in Ethiopia. The study highlights the promise of multiple imputation for reliably predicting missing GPS-based plot areas, and provides recommendations for optimizing fieldwork activities to capture the minimum required data
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-8138
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  • 37
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    Growing Markets through Business Training for Female Entrepreneurs : A Market-Level Randomized Experiment in Kenya (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (55 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David Growing Markets through Business Training for Female Entrepreneurs: A Market-Level Randomized Experiment in Kenya
    Abstract: A common concern with efforts to directly help some small businesses to grow is that their growth comes at the expense of their unassisted competitors. This study tests this possibility using a two-stage randomized experiment in Kenya. The experiment randomizes business training at the market level, and then within markets to selected businesses. Three years after training, the treated businesses are selling more, earn higher profits, and their owners have higher well-being. There is no evidence of negative spillovers on the competing businesses, and the markets as a whole appear to have grown in terms of number of customers and sales volumes. This market growth appears to come from enhanced customer service and new product introduction, generating more customers and more sales from existing customers. As a result, business growth in underdeveloped markets is possible without taking sales away from nontreated businesses
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7993
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 38
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    Soft Skills for Hard Constraints : Evidence from High-Achieving Female Farmers (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (35 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Montalvao, Joao Soft Skills for Hard Constraints: Evidence from High-Achieving Female Farmers
    Abstract: This paper documents the positive link between the noncognitive skills of women farmers and the adoption of a cash crop. The context is Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, where the majority of rural households practice subsistence farming. The analysis finds that a one standard deviation increase in noncognitive ability related to perseverance is associated with a five percentage point (or 33 percent) increase in the probability of adoption of the main cash crop. This link is not explained by differences across women in education and cognitive skills. It is also not explained by the fact that women with higher noncognitive ability tend to be married to husbands of higher noncognitive ability and education. The effect of female noncognitive skills on adoption is concentrated in patrilocal communities, where women face greater adversity and thus where it would be expected that the returns to such skills would be highest. One main channel through which noncognitive skills seem to work is through the use of productive inputs, including higher levels of labor, fertilizer, and agricultural advice services
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-8095
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  • 39
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    How Effective Are Active Labor Market Policies in Developing Countries? A Critical Review of Recent Evidence (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (32 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David How Effective Are Active Labor Market Policies in Developing Countries? A Critical Review of Recent Evidence
    Abstract: Jobs are the number one policy concern of policy makers in many countries. The global financial crisis, rising demographic pressures, high unemployment rates, and concerns over automation all make it seem imperative that policy makers employ increasingly more active labor market policies. This paper critically examines recent evaluations of labor market policies that have provided vocational training, wage subsidies, job search assistance, and assistance moving to argue that many active labor market policies are much less effective than policymakers typically assume. Many of these evaluations find no significant impacts on either employment or earnings. One reason is that urban labor markets appear to work reasonably well in many cases, with fewer market failures than is often thought. As a result, there is less of a role for many traditional active labor market policies than is common practice. The review then discusses examples of job creation policies that do seem to offer promise, and concludes with lessons for impact evaluation and policy is this area
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-8011
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 40
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    Learning the Impact of Financial Education When Take-Up Is Low (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (38 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Ibarra, Gabriel Lara Learning the Impact of Financial Education When Take-Up Is Low
    Abstract: Financial education programs are increasingly offered by governments, nonprofits, and financial institutions. However, voluntary participation rates in such programs are often very low, posing a severe challenge for randomized experiments attempting to measure their impact. This study uses a large experiment on more than 100,000 credit card clients in Mexico. The study shows how the richness of financial data allows combining nonexperimental methods with the experiment to yield credible measures of impact, even with take-up rates below 1 percent. The findings show that a financial education workshop and personalized coaching result in a higher likelihood of paying credit cards on time, and of making more than the minimum payment, but do not reduce spending, resulting in higher profitability for the bank
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-8238
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 41
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    Measuring Ownership, Control, and Use of Assets (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Doss, Cheryl Measuring Ownership, Control, and Use of Assets
    Abstract: Assets generate and help diversify income, provide collateral to access credit, alleviate liquidity constraints in the face of shocks, and are key inputs into empowerment. Despite the importance of individual-level data on asset ownership and control, and that most assets are owned by individuals, solely or jointly, it is typical for the micro data on asset ownership to be collected at the household level, often from only one respondent per household. Even when the data are collected at the individual level, with identification of reported or documented owners of a given asset within the household, the information is still often solicited from a single respondent. Further, the identification of owners is seldom paired with the identification of individuals who hold various rights to assets, limiting understanding of the interrelationships among ownership and rights, and whether these relationships vary across individuals. Through a review of the existing approaches to data collection and the relevant literature on survey methodology, this paper presents an overview of the current best practices for collecting individual-level data on the ownership and control of assets in household and farm surveys. The paper provides recommendations in three areas: (1) respondent selection; (2) definition and measurement of assess to and ownership and control of assets; and (3) measurement of the quantity, value, and quality of assets. Open methodological questions that can be answered through analysis of existing data or the collection and analysis of new data are identified for future research
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-8146
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 42
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    Stronger Together : Intra-Household Cooperation and Household Welfare in Malawi (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McCarthy, Nancy Stronger Together: Intra-Household Cooperation and Household Welfare in Malawi
    Abstract: It has long been recognized that household decision-making may not result in outcomes consistent with the unitary household model. Within the collective bargaining framework, consumption decisions would be driven by the spouse with greater bargaining power, while the outcomes would still be Pareto efficient. Within the non-cooperative framework, households would not achieve Pareto efficient outcomes, and under the simplest representation, bargaining power would not affect consumption decisions. This paper develops a model that allows consumption patterns and labor supply to be affected by both bargaining power and non-cooperation. The model highlights the potential gains from improving bargaining power versus increasing cooperation between spouses, and presents conditions under which relatively large gains would be expected from moving to more equitable bargaining power versus achieving intra-household cooperation. The model's predictions are in turn tested using a unique panel data set on married couples in rural Malawi. The analysis shows that, relative to increasing wives' bargaining power, improving cooperation between spouses would exert larger and statistically significant positive impacts on total household income and consumption expenditures per capita, as well as the share of household consumption devoted to public goods. Supported also by cross-country qualitative research, the results suggest that household public goods are relatively important to both women and men in rural Malawi, husbands' capacity to control wives' incomes is relatively limited, and development programs that promote intra-household cooperation could lead to greater gains in income and household public goods provision compared with interventions focusing exclusively on women's empowerment
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-8043
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 43
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    Costing Household Surveys for Monitoring Progress toward Ending Extreme Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (34 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Kilic, Talip Costing Household Surveys for Monitoring Progress toward Ending Extreme Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity
    Abstract: 92 million is projected to cover the survey implementation costs across 78 countries, and US
    Abstract: 92 million is projected to cover the survey implementation costs across 78 countries, and US
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7951
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 44
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    Mapping the World Population One Building at a Time (2017)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Series Statement: Other papers
    Abstract: High resolution datasets of population density which accurately map sparsely distributed human populations do not exist at a global scale. Typically, population data is obtained using censuses and statistical modeling. More recently, methods using remotely-sensed data have emerged, capable of effectively identifying urbanized areas. Obtaining high accuracy in estimation of population distribution in rural areas remains a very challenging task due to the simultaneous requirements of sufficient sensitivity and resolution to detect very sparse populations through remote sensing as well as reliable performance at a global scale. Here, the authors present a computer vision method based on machine learning to create population maps from satellite imagery at a global scale, with a spatial sensitivity corresponding to individual buildings and suitable for global deployment
    DOI: 10.1596/33700
    URL: Deutschlandweit zugänglich
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  • 45
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    Can Enhancing the Benefits of Formalization Induce Informal Firms to Become Formal? Experimental Evidence from Benin (2016)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (60 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Benhassine, Najy Can Enhancing the Benefits of Formalization Induce Informal Firms to Become Formal? Experimental Evidence from Benin
    Abstract: Governments around the world have introduced reforms to attempt to make it easier for informal firms to formalize. However, most informal firms have not gone on to become formal, especially when tax registration is involved. A randomized experiment based around the introduction of the entreprenant legal status in Benin is used to provide evidence from an African context on the willingness of informal firms to register after introducing a simple, free registration process, and to test the effectiveness of supplementary efforts to enhance the presumed benefits of formalization by facilitating its links to government training programs, support to open bank accounts, and tax mediation services. Few firms register when just given information about the new regime, but 9.6 percentage points more register when they were visited in person and the benefits were explained. The full package of supplementary efforts boosts the impact on the formalization rate to 16.3 percentage points, demonstrating that enhancing the benefits of formalization does induce more firms to formalize. Firms that are larger, and that look more like formal firms to begin with, are more likely to formalize, providing guidance for better targeting of such policies. However, formalization appears to offer limited benefits to the firms, and the costs of personalized assistance are high, suggesting that such enhanced formalization efforts are unlikely to pass cost-benefit tests
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7900
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 46
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    Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status (2016)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (24 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? : Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
    Abstract: A survey of participants in a large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which winners received an average of US
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7668
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 47
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    Labor Drops : Experimental Evidence on the Return to Additional Labor in Microenterprises (2016)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (60 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als de Mel, Suresh Labor Drops: Experimental Evidence on the Return to Additional Labor in Microenterprises
    Abstract: The majority of enterprises in many developing countries have no paid workers. This paper reports on a field experiment conducted in Sri Lanka that provided wage subsidies to randomly chosen microenterprises to test whether hiring additional labor would benefit such firms. In the presence of labor market frictions, a short-term subsidy could have a lasting impact on firm employment. Using 12 rounds of surveys to track dynamics four years after the end of the subsidy, the study finds that firms increased employment during the subsidy period, but there was no lasting impact on employment, profitability, or sales. Two supplementary interventions and treatment heterogeneity suggest the lack of impact is not due to complementarities with capital or management skills, and detailed survey data help rule out a number of theoretical mechanisms that could result in sub-optimally low employment. The study concludes that the urban labor market facing microenterprises does not have large frictions that would prevent own-account workers from becoming employers
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7924
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 48
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    Methodological Experiment on Measuring Asset Ownership from a Gender Perspective (2016)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Series Statement: Women in Development and Gender Study
    Abstract: In their productive capacity, assets generate income and facilitate access to capital and credit. In the face of shocks, they enhance the ability to diversify income and alleviate liquidity constraints (Hulme and Shepherd, 2003; Carter and Barrett, 2006). Ownership of, and control over assets is a key input into individual empowerment and the related micro data constitute an essential input into extensive economic research focused on intra-household bargaining outcomes and their impact on household and individual welfare. Underlying these sub-optimal approaches to individual level data collection, in particular the use of proxy respondents that overlooks information asymmetries within households, is the lack of technical guidelines on questionnaire design and respondent selection protocols that properly capture individual-level ownership of, and rights to assets. In a world of imperfect and scarce data, the absence of these recommended practices fuels the prevalence of myths regarding women's asset ownership and contributes to the inability to clearly articulate policy responses to inequalities faced by women and men (Doss and others, 2015). The provision of these guidelines, anchored in solid methodological research, would in turn improve the collection of household survey data facilitating better socioeconomic research focused on personal wealth and its distribution. The MEXA design was informed by the recommendations of the EDGE Follow-up Meeting on Measuring Asset Ownership from a Gender Perspective that was held on November 21-22, 2013 with participation from the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the UN Women, World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), UBOS and Yale University. A review of the survey instruments and protocols linked to the Gender Asset Gap Project, Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), Demographic and Health Surveys, and Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) initiative was important for distilling the prominent approaches to respondent selection in household surveys across the developing world
    DOI: 10.1596/33653
    URL: Deutschlandweit zugänglich
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  • 49
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    Business Practices in Small Firms in Developing Countries (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (42 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David Business Practices in Small Firms in Developing Countries
    Abstract: Management has a large effect on the productivity of large firms. But does management matter in micro and small firms, where the majority of the labor force in developing countries works? This study developed 26 questions that measure business practices in marketing, stock-keeping, record-keeping, and financial planning. These questions have been administered in surveys in Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka. This paper shows that variation in business practices explains as much of the variation in outcomes-sales, profits, and labor productivity and total factor productivity-in microenterprises as in larger enterprises. Panel data from three countries indicate that better business practices predict higher survival rates and faster sales growth. The effect of business practices is robust to including many measures of the owner's human capital. The analysis finds that owners with higher human capital, children of entrepreneurs, and firms with employees employ better business practices. Competition has less robust effects
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7405
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  • 50
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    Identifying and Spurring High-Growth Entrepreneurship : Experimental Evidence from a Business Plan Competition (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (74 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David Identifying and Spurring High-Growth Entrepreneurship: Experimental Evidence from a Business Plan Competition
    Abstract: Almost all firms in developing countries have fewer than 10 workers, with the modal firm consisting of just the owner. Are there potential high-growth entrepreneurs with the ability to grow their firms beyond this size? And, if so, can public policy help alleviate the constraints that prevent these entrepreneurs from doing so? A large-scale national business plan competition in Nigeria is used to help provide evidence on these two questions. The competition was launched with much fanfare, and attracted almost 24,000 entrants. Random assignment was used to select some of the winners from a pool of semi-finalists, with US
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7391
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 51
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    How Much of the Labor in African Agriculture is Provided by Women? (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (36 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Palacios-Lopez, Amparo How Much of the Labor in African Agriculture is Provided by Women?
    Abstract: Communities & Human Settlements
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7282
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 52
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    Finding a Path to Formalization in Benin : Early Results after the Introduction of the Entreprenant Legal Status (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (39 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Benhassine, Najy Finding a Path to Formalization in Benin: Early Results after the Introduction of the Entreprenant Legal Status
    Abstract: In April 2014, the Government of Benin launched the entreprenant status, a simplified and free legal regime offered to small informal businesses to enter the formal economy. This paper presents the short-term results of a randomized impact evaluation testing three different versions of the entreprenant status on business registration decisions, each version including incremental incentives to registration: (i) information on the new legal status and its benefits, (ii) business training, counseling services, and support to open a bank account, (iii) tax mediation services. The study included 3,600 informal businesses operating with a fixed location in Cotonou, Benin, which were randomly allocated between three treatment groups and one control group. One year after the program launch, all versions of the program had significant impact on formalization rates. The impact was 9.1 percentage points in the first treatment group; 13 percentage points in the second group; and 15.8 percentage points in the last group. The program had a higher impact on male business owners, with more education, operating outside Dantokpa Market, in sectors other than trade, and that before being offered the incentives to formalization had characteristics similar to businesses that were already formal. Data from a second follow-up survey, which is expected to take place in March 2016, will explore the impacts on other outcomes, like business performances or access to banking
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7510
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 53
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    The Long-Term Impacts of International Migration : Evidence from a Lottery (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (35 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Gibson, John The Long-Term Impacts of International Migration: Evidence from a Lottery
    Abstract: This study examines the long-term impacts of international migration by comparing immigrants who had successful ballot entries in a migration lottery program, and first moved almost a decade ago, with people who had unsuccessful entries into those same ballots. The long-term gain in income is found to be similar in magnitude to the gain in the first year, despite migrants upgrading their education and changing their locations and occupations. This results in large, sustained benefits to the migrants' immediate family, who have substantially higher consumption, durable asset ownership, savings, and dietary diversity. In contrast, the study finds no measureable impact on extended family
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7495
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  • 54
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    The Demand for, and Impact of, Youth Internships : Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Yemen (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (22 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David The Demand for, and Impact of, Youth Internships: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Yemen
    Abstract: This paper evaluates a youth internship program in the Republic of Yemen that provided firms with a 50 percent subsidy to hire recent graduates of universities and vocational schools. The first round of the program took place in 2014 and required both firms and youth to apply for the program. The paper examines the demand for such a program, and finds that in the context of an economy facing substantial political and economic uncertainty, it appears there is an oversupply of graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and a relative undersupply of graduates in marketing and business. Conditional on the types of graduates firms were looking to hire as interns, applicants were then randomly chosen for the program. Receiving an internship resulted in an almost doubling of work experience in 2014, and a 73 percent increase in income during this period compared with the control group. A short-term follow-up survey conducted just as civil conflict was breaking out shows that internship recipients had better employment outcomes than the control group in the first five months after the program ended
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7463
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  • 55
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    The Additionality Impact of a Matching Grant Program for Small Firms : Experimental Evidence from Yemen (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (23 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als McKenzie, David The Additionality Impact of a Matching Grant Program for Small Firms: Experimental Evidence from Yemen
    Abstract: Matching grants are one of the most common types of private sector development programs used in developing countries. But government subsidies to private firms can be controversial. A key question is that of additionality: do these programs get firms to undertake innovative activities that they would not otherwise do, or merely subsidize activities that would take place anyway? Randomized controlled trials can provide the counterfactual needed to answer this question, but efforts to experiment with matching grant programs have often failed. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial of a matching grant program for firms in the Republic of Yemen to demonstrate the feasibility of conducting experiments with well-designed programs, and to measure the additionality impact. In the first year, the matching grant is found to have led to more product innovation, firms upgrading their accounting systems, marketing more, making more capital investments, and being more likely to report their sales grew
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7462
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  • 56
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    Same Question but Different Answer : Experimental Evidence on Questionnaire Design's Impact on Poverty Measured by Proxies (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Kilic, Talip Same Question but Different Answer: Experimental Evidence on Questionnaire Design's Impact on Poverty Measured by Proxies
    Abstract: Does the same question asked of the same population yield the same answer in face-to-face interviews when other parts of the questionnaire are altered? If not, what would be the implications for proxy-based poverty measurement? Relying on a randomized household survey experiment implemented in Malawi, this study finds that observationally equivalent as well as same households answer the same questions differently when interviewed with a short questionnaire versus the longer counterpart that, in a prior survey round, would have informed the prediction model for a proxy-based poverty measurement exercise. The analysis yields statistically significant differences in reporting between the short and long questionnaires across all topics and types of questions. The reporting differences result in significantly different predicted poverty rates and Gini coefficients. While the difference in predictions ranges from approximately 3 to 7 percentage points depending on the model specification, restricting the proxies to those collected prior the variation in questionnaire design, namely demographic variables from the household roster and location fixed effects, leads to same predictions in both samples. The findings emphasize the need for further methodological research, and suggest that short questionnaires designed for proxy-based poverty measurement should be piloted, prior to implementation, in parallel with the longer questionnaire from which they have evolved. The fact that at the median it took 25 minutes to complete the food and non-food consumption sections in the long questionnaire also implies that the implementation of these sections might not be as overly costly as usually assumed
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7182
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  • 57
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    Short-Term Impacts of Formalization Assistance and a Bank Information Session on Business Registration and Access to Finance in Malawi (2015)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (43 p)
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    Parallel Title: Erscheint auch als Campos, Francisco Short-Term Impacts of Formalization Assistance and a Bank Information Session on Business Registration and Access to Finance in Malawi
    Abstract: Despite regulatory efforts designed to make it easier for firms to formalize, informality remains extremely high among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most of the region, business registration in a national registry is separate from tax registration. This paper provides initial results from an experiment in Malawi that randomly allocated firms into a control group and three treatment groups: a) a group offered assistance for costless business registration; b) a group offered assistance with costless business registration and (separate) tax registration; and c) a group offered assistance for costless business registration along with an information session at a bank that ended with the offer of business bank accounts. The study finds that all three treatments had extremely large impacts on business registration, with 75 percent of those offered assistance receiving a business registration certificate. The findings offer a cost-effective way of getting firms to formalize in this dimension. However, in common with other studies, information and assistance has a limited impact on tax registration. The paper measures the short-term impacts of formalization on financial access and usage. Business registration alone has no impact for either men or women on bank account usage, savings, or credit. However, the combination of formalization assistance and the bank information session results in significant impacts on having a business bank account, financial practices, savings, and use of complementary financial products
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7183
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  • 58
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    The Nexus between Gender, Collective Action for Public Goods, and Agriculture : Evidence from Malawi (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (55 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McCarthy, Nancy The Nexus between Gender, Collective Action for Public Goods, and Agriculture
    Abstract: Across the developing world, public goods exert significant impacts on the local rural economy in general and agricultural productivity and welfare outcomes in particular. Economic and social-cultural heterogeneity have, however, long been documented as detrimental to collective capacity to provide public goods. In particular, women are often under-represented in local leadership and decision-making processes, as are young adults and minority ethnic groups. While democratic principles dictate that broad civic engagement by women and other groups could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of local governance and increase public goods provision, the empirical evidence on these hypotheses is scant. This paper develops a theoretical model highlighting the complexity of constructing a "fair" schedule of individual contributions, given heterogeneity in costs and benefits that accrue to people depending, for instance, on their gender, age, ethnicity, and education. The model demonstrates that representative leadership and broad participation in community organizations can mitigate the negative impacts of heterogeneity on collective capacity to provide public goods. Nationally-representative household survey data from Malawi, combined with geospatial and administrative information, are used to test this hypothesis and estimate the relationship between collective capacity for public goods provision and community median estimates of maize yields and household consumption expenditures per capita. The analysis shows that similarities between the leadership and the general population, in terms of gender and age, and active participation by women and young adults in community groups alleviate the negative effects of heterogeneity and increase collective capacity, which in turn improves agricultural productivity and welfare
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6806
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  • 59
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    The Impact of Vocational Training for the Unemployed : Experimental Evidence from Turkey (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (45 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Hirshleifer, Sarojini The Impact of Vocational Training for the Unemployed
    Keywords: Arbeitsmarktpolitik ; Berufsbildung ; Erwerbstätigkeit ; Wirkungsanalyse ; Türkei
    Abstract: A randomized experiment is used to evaluate a large-scale, active labor market policy: Turkey's vocational training programs for the unemployed. A detailed follow-up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity. The average impact of training on employment is positive, but close to zero and statistically insignificant, which is much lower than either program officials or applicants expected. Over the first year after training, the paper finds that training had statistically significant effects on the quality of employment and that the positive impacts are stronger when training is offered by private providers. However, longer-term administrative data show that after three years these effects have also dissipated
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6807
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  • 60
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    Do Poverty Traps Exist? (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (27 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Kraay, Aart Do Poverty Traps Exist?
    Abstract: This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the existence of poverty traps, understood as self-reinforcing mechanisms through which poor individuals or countries remain poor. Poverty traps have captured the interest of many development policy makers, because poverty traps provide a theoretically coherent explanation for persistent poverty. They also suggest that temporary policy interventions may have long-term effects on poverty. However, a review of the reduced-form empirical evidence suggests that truly stagnant incomes of the sort predicted by standard models of poverty traps are in fact quite rare. Moreover, the empirical evidence regarding several canonical mechanisms underlying models of poverty traps is mixed
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6835
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  • 61
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    Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth? (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (51 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Clemens, Michael A Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth?
    Abstract: Although measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. This paper reviews existing explanations for this puzzle and proposes three new ones. First, it offers evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory-arising from changes in measurement, not changes in real financial flows. Second, it shows that even if these increases were correctly measured, cross-country regressions would have too little power to detect their effects on growth. Third, it points out that the greatest driver of rising remittances is rising migration, which has an opportunity cost to economic product at the origin. Net of that cost, there is little reason to expect large growth effects of remittances in the origin economy. Migration and remittances clearly have first-order effects on poverty at the origin, on the welfare of migrants and their families, and on global gross domestic product; but detecting their effects on growth of the origin economy is likely to remain elusive
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6856
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  • 62
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    Directing Remittances to Education with Soft and Hard Commitments : Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment and New Product Take-up among Filipino Migrants in Rome (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (26 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De Arcangelis, Giuseppe Directing Remittances to Education with Soft and Hard Commitments
    Abstract: This paper tests how migrants' willingness to remit changes when given the ability to direct remittances to educational purposes using different forms of commitment. Variants of a dictator game in a lab-in-the-field experiment with Filipino migrants in Rome are used to examine remitting behavior under varying degrees of commitment. These range from the soft commitment of simply labeling remittances as being for education, to the hard commitment of having funds directly paid to a school and the student's educational performance monitored. The analysis finds that the introduction of simple labeling for education raises remittances by more than 15 percent. Adding the ability to directly send this funding to the school adds only a further 2.2 percent. The information asymmetry between migrants and their most closely connected household is randomly varied, but no significant change is found in the remittance response to these forms of commitment as information varies. Behavior in these games is shown to be predictive of take-up of a new financial product called EduPay, designed to allow migrants to pay remittances directly to schools in the Philippines. This take-up seems largely driven by a response to the ability to label remittances for education, rather than to the hard commitment feature of directly paying schools
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6896
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  • 63
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    Decomposition of Gender Differentials in Agricultural Productivity in Ethiopia (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (54 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Aguilar, Arturo Decomposition of Gender Differentials in Agricultural Productivity in Ethiopia
    Abstract: This paper employs decomposition methods to analyze differences in agricultural productivity between male and female land managers in Ethiopia. It employs data from the 2011-2012 Ethiopian Rural Socioeconomic Survey. An overall 23.4 percent gender differential in agricultural productivity is estimated at the mean in favor of male land managers, of which 10.1 percentage points are explained by differences in land manager characteristics, land attributes, and unequal access to resources (the endowment effect). The remaining 13.4 percentage points are explained by unequal returns to productive components, but cannot be easily tied to specific covariates. These results are mainly driven by non-married female managers (mainly single and divorced). Married female managers do not display such disadvantages. Further analysis along the productivity distribution reveals that gender differentials are more pronounced at mid-levels of productivity and that the share of the gender gap explained by the endowment effect declines as productivity increases. Detailed decomposition of estimates at selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution provides valuable information for policy intervention purposes
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6764
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  • 64
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    Testing the Importance of Search Frictions, Matching, and Reservation Prestige through Randomized Experiments in Jordan (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (43 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Groh, Matthew Testing the Importance of Search Frictions, Matching, and Reservation Prestige through Randomized Experiments in Jordan
    Abstract: Unemployment rates for tertiary-educated youth in Jordan are high, as is the duration of unemployment. Two randomized experiments in Jordan were used to test different theories that may explain this phenomenon. The first experiment tested the role of search and matching frictions by providing firms and job candidates with an intensive screening and matching service based on educational backgrounds and psychometric assessments. Although more than 1,000 matches were made, youth rejected the opportunity to even have an interview in 28 percent of cases, and when a job offer was received, they rejected this offer or quickly quit the job 83 percent of the time. A second experiment built on the first by examining the willingness of educated, unemployed youth to apply for jobs of varying levels of prestige. Youth applied to only a small proportion of the job openings they were told about, with application rates higher for higher prestige jobs than lower prestige jobs. Youth failed to show up for the majority of interviews scheduled for low prestige jobs. The results suggest that reservation prestige is an important factor underlying the unemployment of educated Jordanian youth
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-7030
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  • 65
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    Radio Frequency (Un)Identification : Results from a Proof-of-Concept Trial of the Use of RFID Technology to Measure Microenterprise Turnover in Sri Lanka (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (44 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: de Mel, Suresh Radio Frequency (Un)Identification
    Keywords: Kleinstunternehmen ; Befragung ; Gewinn ; Absatz ; RFID
    Abstract: Accurate measurement of stock levels, turnover, and profitability in microenterprises in developing countries is difficult because the majority of these firms do not keep detailed records. This paper tests the use of radio frequency identification tags as a means of objectively measuring stock levels and stock flow in small retail firms in Sri Lanka. In principle, the tags offer the potential to track stock movements accurately. The paper compares the stock counts obtained from RFID reads to physical stock counts and to survey responses. There are three main findings. First, current RFID-technology is more difficult to use, and more time-consuming to employ, than had been envisaged. Second, the technology works reasonably well for paper products, but very poorly for most products sold by microenterprises: on average only about one-quarter of the products tagged could be read and there was considerable day-to-day variation in read-efficiency. Third, a comparison of survey responses and physical stock-takes shows much higher accuracy for survey measures. As a result, the study concludes that this technology is currently unsuitable for improving stock measurement in microenterprises, except perhaps for a few products
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  • 66
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    Development through Seasonal Worker Programs : The Case of New Zealand's RSE Program (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (30 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Gibson, John Development through Seasonal Worker Programs
    Abstract: Seasonal worker programs are increasingly seen as offering the potential to be part of international development policy. New Zealand's Recognised Seasonal Employer program is one of the first and most prominent of programs designed with this perspective. This paper provides a detailed examination of this policy through the first six seasons. This includes the important role of policy facilitation measures taken by governments and aid agencies. The evolution of the program in terms of worker numbers is discussed, along with new data on the (high) degree of circularity in worker movements, and new data on (very low) worker overstay rates. There appears to have been little displacement of New Zealand workers, and new data show Recognised Seasonal Employer workers to be more productive than local labor and that workers appear to gain productivity as they return for subsequent seasons. The program has also benefitted the migrants participating in the program, with increases in per capita incomes, expenditure, savings, and subjective well-being. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the program is largely living up to its promise of a "triple win" for migrants, their sending countries in the Pacific, and New Zealand
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6762
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  • 67
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    Macroinsurance for Microenterprises : A Randomized Experiment in Post-Revolution Egypt (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (38 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Groh, Matthew Macroinsurance for Microenterprises
    Abstract: Firms in many developing countries cite macroeconomic instability and political uncertainty as major constraints to their growth. Economic theory suggests uncertainty can cause firms to delay investments until uncertainty is resolved. A randomized experiment was conducted in post-revolution Egypt to measure the impact of insuring microenterprises against macroeconomic and political uncertainty. Demand for macroeconomic shock insurance was high; 36.7 percent of microentrepreneurs in the treatment group purchased insurance. However, purchasing insurance does not change the likelihood that a business takes a new loan, the size of the loan, or how the loan is invested. This lack of effect is attributed to microenterprises largely investing in inventories and raw materials rather than irreversible investments like equipment. These results suggest that, contrary to what some firms profess, macroeconomic and political risk is not inhibiting the investment behavior of microenterprises. However, insurance may still be of value to help firms cope with shocks when they do occur, but the paper is unable to examine this dimension, because the insurance product did not pay out over the course of the pilot
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  • 68
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    Evidence on Policies to Increase the Development Impacts of International Migration (2014)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (52 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David Evidence on Policies to Increase the Development Impacts of International Migration
    Abstract: International migration offers individuals and their families the potential to experience immediate and large gains in their incomes, and offers a large number of other positive benefits to the sending communities and countries. However, there are also concerns about potential costs of migration, including concerns about trafficking and human rights, a desire for remittances to be used more effectively, and concerns about externalities from skilled workers being lost. As a result there is increasing interest in policies which can enhance the development benefits of international migration and mitigate these potential costs. This paper provides a critical review of recent research on the effectiveness of these policies at three stages of the migration process: pre-departure, during migration, and directed toward possible return. The existing evidence base suggests some areas of policy success: bilateral migration agreements for countries whose workers have few other migration options, developing new savings and remittance products that allow migrants more control over how their money is used, and some efforts to provide financial education to migrants and their families. Suggestive evidence together with theory offers support for a number of other policies, such as lowering the cost of remittances, reducing passport costs, offering dual citizenship, and removing exit barriers to migration. Research offers reasons to be cautious about some policies, such as enforcing strong rights for migrants like high minimum wages. Nevertheless, the paper finds the evidence base to be weak for many policies, with no reliable research on the impact of most return migration programs, nor for whether countries should be trying to induce communal remitting through matching funds
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  • 69
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    Eliciting Illegal Migration Rates through List Randomization (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (19 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David Eliciting Illegal Migration Rates through List Randomization
    Abstract: Most migration surveys do not ask about the legal status of migrants due to concerns about the sensitivity of this question. List randomization is a technique that has been used in a number of other social science applications to elicit sensitive information. This paper trials this technique by adding it to surveys conducted in Ethiopia, Mexico, Morocco, and the Philippines. It shows how, in principal, this can be used both to give an estimate of the overall rate of illegal migration in the population being surveyed, as well as to determine illegal migration rates for subgroups such as more or less educated households. The results suggest that there is some useful information in this method: higher rates of illegal migration in countries where illegal migration is thought to be more prevalent and households who say they have a migrant are more likely to report having an illegal migrant. Nevertheless, some of the other findings also suggest some possible inconsistencies or noise in the conclusions obtained using this method. The authors suggest directions for future attempts to implement this approach in migration surveys
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6426
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  • 70
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    A Helping Hand or the Long Arm of the Law? : Experimental Evidence on What Governments Can Do to Formalize Firms (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (43 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De Andrade, Gustavo Henrique A Helping Hand or the Long Arm of the Law?
    Abstract: Many governments have spent much of the past decade trying to extend a helping hand to informal businesses by making it easier and cheaper for them to formalize. Much less effort has been devoted to raising the costs of remaining informal, through increasing enforcement of existing regulations. This paper reports on a field experiment conducted in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in order to test which government actions work in getting informal firms to register. Firms were randomized to a control group or one of four treatment groups: the first received information about how to formalize; the second received this information and free registration costs along with the use of an accountant for a year; the third group was assigned to receive an enforcement visit from a municipal inspector; while the fourth group was assigned to have a neighboring firm receive an enforcement visit to see if enforcement has spillovers. The analysis finds zero or negative impacts of information and free cost treatments, and a significant but small increase in formalization from inspections. Estimates of the impact of actually receiving an inspection give a 21 to 27 percentage point increase in the likelihood of formalizing. The results show most informal firms will not formalize unless forced to do so, suggesting formality offers little private benefit to them. But the tax revenue benefits to the government of bringing firms of this size into the formal system more than offset the costs of inspections
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6435
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  • 71
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    Up in Smoke? : Agricultural Commercialization, Rising Food Prices and Stunting in Malawi (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (36 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Wood, Benjamin Up in Smoke?
    Abstract: Diversification into high-value cash crops among smallholders has been propagated as a strategy to improve welfare in rural areas. However, the extent to which cash crop production spurs projected gains remains an under-researched question, especially in the context of market imperfections leading to non-separable production and consumption decisions, and price shocks to staple crops that might be displaced on the farm by cash crops. This study is a contribution to the long-standing debate on the links between commercialization and nutrition. It uses nationally-representative household survey data from Malawi, and estimates the effect of household adoption of an export crop, namely tobacco, on child height-for-age z-scores. Given the endogenous nature of household tobacco adoption, the analysis relies on instrumental variable regressions, and isolates the causal effect by comparing impact estimates informed by two unique samples of children that differ in their exposure to an exogenous domestic staple food price shock during the early child development window (from conception through two years of age). The analysis finds that household tobacco production in the year of or the year after child birth, combined with exposure to an exogenous domestic staple food price shock, lowers the child height-for-age z-score by 1.27, implying a 70-percent drop in z-score. The negative effect is, however, not statistically significant among children who were not exposed to the same shock. The results put emphasis on the food insecurity and malnutrition risks materializing at times of high food prices, which might have disproportionately adverse effects on uninsured cash crop producers
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6650
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  • 72
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    Decentralized Beneficiary Targeting in Large-Scale Development Programs : Insights from the Malawi Farm Input Subsidy Program (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (36 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Kilic, Talip Decentralized Beneficiary Targeting in Large-Scale Development Programs
    Abstract: This paper contributes to the long-standing debate on the merits of decentralized beneficiary targeting in the administration of development programs, focusing on the large-scale Malawi Farm Input Subsidy Program. Nationally-representative household survey data are used to systematically analyze the decentralized targeting performance of the program during the 2009-2010 agricultural season. The analysis begins with a standard targeting assessment based on the rates of program participation and the benefit amounts among the eligible and non-eligible populations, and provides decompositions of the national targeting performance into the inter-district, intra-district inter-community, and intra-district intra-community components. This approach identifies the relative contributions of targeting at each level. The results show that the Farm Input Subsidy Program is not poverty targeted and that the national government, districts, and communities are nearly uniform in their failure to target the poor, with any minimal targeting (or mis-targeting) overwhelmingly materializing at the community level. The findings are robust to the choice of the eligibility indicator and the decomposition method. The multivariate analysis of household program participation reinforces these results and reveals that the relatively well-off, rather than the poor or the wealthiest, and the locally well-connected have a higher likelihood of program participation and, on average, receive a greater number of input coupons. Since a key program objective is to increase food security and income among resource-poor farmers, the lack of targeting is a concern and should underlie considerations of alternative targeting approaches that, in part or completely, rely on proxy means tests at the local level
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6713
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  • 73
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    Unilateral Facilitation Does Not Raise International Labor Migration from the Philippines (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (52 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Beam, Emily Unilateral Facilitation Does Not Raise International Labor Migration from the Philippines
    Keywords: 2010-2012 ; Arbeitsmigranten ; Migrationspolitik ; Arbeitsvermittlung ; Wirkungsanalyse ; Schätzung ; Philippinen
    Abstract: Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. The authors conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the Philippines testing the impact of unilaterally facilitating international labor migration. The most intensive treatment doubled the rate of job offers but had no identifiable effect on international labor migration. Even the highest overseas job-search rate that was induced (22 percent) falls far short of the share initially expressing interest in migrating (34 percent). The paper concludes that unilateral migration facilitation will at most induce a trickle, not a flood, of additional emigration
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6689
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  • 74
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    Caught in a Productivity Trap : A Distributional Perspective on Gender Differences in Malawian Agriculture (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (51 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Kilic, Talip Caught in a Productivity Trap
    Abstract: In targeting poverty gains, sub-Saharan African governments have emphasized the alleviation of gender differences in agricultural productivity. The empirical studies on the gender gap, however, have frequently used data that were limited regarding geographic and topical coverage, and/or details on intra-household dynamics. The study provides a nationally-representative analysis of the gender gap in Malawi, and decomposes it, for the first time, at the mean and at selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution into (i) a portion driven by gender differences in levels of observable attributes (the endowment effect), and (ii) a portion driven by gender differences in returns to the same set of observables (the structure effect). Sequentially, the authors unpack the relative contributions of different factors towards the gender gap, and suggest future research priorities to inform policy interventions. The authors find that while female-managed plots are, on average, 25 percent less productive, 82 percent of this differential is explained by differences in endowments, mainly due to high-value crop cultivation and levels of household adult male labor inputs. The factors driving the structure effect include child dependency ratio and effectiveness of household adult male labor and inorganic fertilizer. The gender gap increases across the productivity distribution, ranging from 22 percent at the 10th percentile to 37 percent at the 90th percentile. While it is explained predominantly by the endowment effect in the first half of the distribution, the contribution of the structure effect towards the gender gap increases steadily above the median, standing at 34 percent at the 90th percentile
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6381
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  • 75
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    Using Administrative Data to Evaluate Municipal Reforms : An Evaluation of the Impact of Minas Fácil Expresso (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (27 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Bruhn, Miriam Using Administrative Data to Evaluate Municipal Reforms
    Abstract: Efforts to make it easier for firms to register formally are the most common form of business regulatory reform over the past decade. While there is evidence that large reforms have resulted in some increases in registration rates, recent experimental evidence suggests very few informal firms choose to register when given information about how to do so. This raises the question of whether it is productive for governments to continue to extend simplification efforts to all firms, especially those in more remote areas where many of the benefits of registering may be reduced. This study uses administrative data to evaluate the impact of Minas Fácil Expresso, a program in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, which attempted to expand a business start-up simplification program to more remote municipalities. Using difference-in-differences with 56 months of registration data for 822 municipalities, the analysis finds introducing these units actually led to a reduction in registration rates, and no change in tax revenues. The paper uses this evaluation to illustrate the design choices and issues involved in using administrative data to evaluate reforms, with the goal of also providing a template that can be used for evaluating similar reforms elsewhere
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6368
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  • 76
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    Why is Voluntary Financial Education so Unpopular? : Experimental Evidence from Mexico (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (46 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Bruhn, Miriam Why is Voluntary Financial Education so Unpopular?
    Abstract: Take-up of voluntary financial education programs is typically extremely low. This paper reports on randomized experiments around a large financial literacy course offered in Mexico City to understand the reasons for low take-up, and to measure the impact of financial education. It documents that the general public displays little interest in such courses and that participation is low even among individuals who express interest in financial education. The paper experimentally investigates barriers to take-up, and finds no impact of relaxing reputational or logistical constraints and no evidence that time inconsistency is the reason for limited participation. Even relatively sizeable monetary incentives get less than 40 percent of interested individuals invited to training to attend. Using a randomized encouragement design, the authors measure the impact of the course on financial knowledge and behavior. Attending training results in a 9 percentage point increase in financial knowledge and a 9 percentage point increase in saving outcomes, but no impact on borrowing behavior. Administrative data indicate that the savings impact is relatively short-lived. The results suggest people are making optimal choices not to attend financial education courses, and point to the limits of using general purpose courses to improve financial behavior for the general population
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6439
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  • 77
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    Entry Regulation and Formalization of Microenterprises in Developing Countries (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (18 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Bruhn, Miriam Entry Regulation and Formalization of Microenterprises in Developing Countries
    Abstract: The majority of microenterprises in most developing countries remain informal despite more than a decade of reforms aimed at making it easier and cheaper for them to formalize. This paper summarizes the evidence on the effects of entry reforms and related policy actions to promote firm formalization. Most of these policies result only in a modest increase in the number of formal firms, if at all. Less is known about the impact of other forms of business regulations on the performance of low-scale enterprises. Most informal firms appear not to benefit on net from formalizing, so ease of formalization alone will not lead to most of them formalizing. Increased enforcement of rules can increase formality. Although there is a fiscal benefit of doing this with larger informal firms, it is unclear whether there is a public rationale for trying to formalize subsistence enterprises
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6507
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  • 78
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    Missing(ness) in Action : Selectivity Bias in GPS-Based Land Area Measurements (2013)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (31 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Kilic, Talip Missing(ness) in Action
    Abstract: Land area is a fundamental component of agricultural statistics, and of analyses undertaken by agricultural economists. While household surveys in developing countries have traditionally relied on farmers' own, potentially error-prone, land area assessments, the availability of affordable and reliable Global Positioning System (GPS) units has made GPS-based area measurement a practical alternative. Nonetheless, in an attempt to reduce costs, keep interview durations within reasonable limits, and avoid the difficulty of asking respondents to accompany interviewers to distant plots, survey implementing agencies typically require interviewers to record GPS-based area measurements only for plots within a given radius of dwelling locations. It is, therefore, common for as much as a third of the sample plots not to be measured, and research has not shed light on the possible selection bias in analyses relying on partial data due to gaps in GPS-based area measures. This paper explores the patterns of missingness in GPS-based plot areas, and investigates their implications for land productivity estimates and the inverse scale-land productivity relationship. Using Multiple Imputation (MI) to predict missing GPS-based plot areas in nationally-representative survey data from Uganda and Tanzania, the paper highlights the potential of MI in reliably simulating the missing data, and confirms the existence of an inverse scale-land productivity relationship, which is strengthened by using the complete, multiply-imputed dataset. The study demonstrates the usefulness of judiciously reconstructed GPS-based areas in alleviating concerns over potential measurement error in farmer-reported areas, and with regards to systematic bias in plot selection for GPS-based area measurement
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6490
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  • 79
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    The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De Mel, Suresh The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka
    Abstract: The majority of firms in most developing countries are informal. The authors of this paper conducted a field experiment in Sri Lanka that provided incentives for informal firms to formalize. Offering only information about the registration process and reimbursement for direct registration costs had no impact on formalization. Adding payments equivalent to one-half to one month's profits for the median firm led to registration of around one-fifth of firms. A larger payment equivalent to two months' median profits induced half the firms to register. The main reasons for not formalizing when offered incentives included issues related to ownership of land and concerns about facing labor taxes in the future. The degree of bureaucracy in the registration process also seems to matter for those with the incentive to register, with response to the incentives higher in Colombo, where the registration process was easier, than in Kandy. Three follow-up surveys, at 15 to 31 months after the intervention, measure the impact of formalizing on these firms. Although mean profits increased, this appears largely due to the experiences of a few firms that grew rapidly, with most firms experiencing no increase in income as a result of formalizing. The authors also find little evidence for most of the channels through which formalization is hypothesized to benefit firms, although formalized firms do advertise more and are more likely to use receipt books. In qualitative interviews owners of formalized firms also feel their businesses have more legitimacy. Finally, formalizing is found to result in a large increase in trust in the state. Their focus is largely on the private costs and benefits of existing firms formalizing. Within their sample they cannot measure broader impacts of formalization on other firms (who may prosper from not having to compete against informal firms not paying taxes), nor impacts of easier formalization on entry of new firms. Nevertheless, our results suggest that although most informal firms do not want to formalize, given the current private costs and benefits of formalizing, policy efforts that lead to relatively modest increases in the net benefits of formalizing would induce a sizeable share of informal firms to formalize
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5991
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  • 80
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    Distortions in the International Migrant Labor Market : Evidence from Filipino Migration and Wage Responses to Destination Country Economic Shocks (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (36 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: David McKenzie Distortions in the International Migrant Labor Market
    Abstract: The authors use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to gross domestic product shocks in destination countries. They find a large significant elasticity of migrant numbers to gross domestic product shocks at destination, but no significant wage response. This is consistent with binding minimum wages for migrant labor. This result implies that labor market imperfections that make international migration attractive also make migrant flows more sensitive to global business cycles. Difference-in-differences analysis of a minimum wage change for maids confirms that minimum wages bind and demand is price sensitive without these distortions
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6041
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  • 81
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    Soft Skills or Hard Cash? : The Impact of Training and Wage Subsidy Programs on Female Youth Employment in Jordan (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (38 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Groh, Matthew Soft Skills or Hard Cash?
    Abstract: Throughout the Middle East, unemployment rates of educated youth have been persistently high and female labor force participation, low. This paper studies the impact of a randomized experiment in Jordan designed to assist female community college graduates find employment. One randomly chosen group of graduates was given a voucher that would pay an employer a subsidy equivalent to the minimum wage for up to 6 months if they hired the graduate; a second group was invited to attend 45 hours of employability skills training designed to provide them with the soft skills employers say graduates often lack; a third group was offered both interventions; and the fourth group forms the control group. The analysis finds that the job voucher led to a 40 percentage point increase in employment in the short-run, but that most of this employment is not formal, and that the average effect is much smaller and no longer statistically significant 4 months after the voucher period has ended. The voucher does appear to have persistent impacts outside the capital, where it almost doubles the employment rate of graduates, but this appears likely to largely reflect displacement effects. Soft-skills training has no average impact on employment, although again there is a weakly significant impact outside the capital. The authors elicit the expectations of academics and development professionals to demonstrate that these findings are novel and unexpected. The results suggest that wage subsidies can help increase employment in the short term, but are not a panacea for the problems of high urban female youth unemployment
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6141
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  • 82
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    Business Training and Female Enterprise Start-up, Growth, and Dynamics : Experimental Evidence from Sri Lanka (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (42 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De Mel, Suresh Business Training and Female Enterprise Start-up, Growth, and Dynamics
    Abstract: The authors conduct a randomized experiment among women in urban Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business program. They work with two representative groups of women: a random sample of women operating subsistence enterprises and a random sample of women who are out of the labor force but interested in starting a business. They track the impacts of two treatments - training only and training plus a cash grant - over two years with four follow-up surveys and find that the short and medium-term impacts differ. For women already in business, training alone leads to some changes in business practices but has no impact on business profits, sales or capital stock. In contrast, the combination of training and a grant leads to large and significant improvements in business profitability in the first eight months, but this impact dissipates in the second year. For women interested in starting enterprises, business training speeds up entry but leads to no increase in net business ownership by the final survey round. Both profitability and business practices of the new entrants are increased by training, suggesting training may be more effective for new owners than for existing businesses. The study also finds that the two treatments have selection effects, leading to entrants being less analytically skilled and poorer
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6145
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  • 83
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    What are we Learning from Business Training and Entrepreneurship Evaluations around the Developing World? (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David What are we Learning from Business Training and Entrepreneurship Evaluations around the Developing World?
    Abstract: Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these programs in developing countries. This paper undertakes a critical review of these studies with the goal of synthesizing the emerging lessons and understanding the limitations of the existing research and the areas in which more work is needed. It finds that there is substantial heterogeneity in the length, content, and types of firms participating in the training programs evaluated. Many evaluations suffer from low statistical power, measure impacts only within a year of training, and experience problems with survey attrition and measurement of firm profits and revenues. Over these short time horizons, there are relatively modest impacts of training on survivorship of existing firms, but stronger evidence that training programs help prospective owners launch new businesses more quickly. Most studies find that existing firm owners implement some of the practices taught in training, but the magnitudes of these improvements in practices are often relatively modest. Few studies find significant impacts on profits or sales, although a couple of the studies with more statistical power have done so. Some studies have also found benefits to microfinance organizations of offering training. To date there is little evidence to help guide policymakers as to whether any impacts found come from trained firms competing away sales from other businesses versus through productivity improvements, and little evidence to guide the development of the provision of training at market prices. The paper concludes by summarizing some directions and key questions for future studies
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6202
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  • 84
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    Learning from the Experiments That Never Happened : Lessons from Trying to Conduct Randomized Evaluations of Matching Grant Programs in Africa (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (36 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Campos, Francisco Learning from the Experiments That Never Happened
    Abstract: Matching grants are one of the most common policy instruments used by developing country governments to try to foster technological upgrading, innovation, exports, use of business development services and other activities leading to firm growth. However, since they involve subsidizing firms, the risk is that they could crowd out private investment, subsidizing activities that firms were planning to undertake anyway, or lead to pure private gains, rather than generating the public gains that justify government intervention. As a result, rigorous evaluation of the effects of such programs is important. The authors attempted to implement randomized experiments to evaluate the impact of seven matching grant programs offered in six African countries, but in each case were unable to complete an experimental evaluation. One critique of randomized experiments is publication bias, whereby only those experiments with "interesting" results get published. The hope is to mitigate this bias by learning from the experiments that never happened. This paper describes the three main proximate reasons for lack of implementation: continued project delays, politicians not willing to allow random assignment, and low program take-up; and then delves into the underlying causes of these occurring. Political economy, overly stringent eligibility criteria that do not take account of where value-added may be highest, a lack of attention to detail in "last mile" issues, incentives facing project implementation staff, and the way impact evaluations are funded, and all help explain the failure of randomization. Lessons are drawn from these experiences for both the implementation and the possible evaluation of future projects
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6296
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  • 85
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    The Impact of Financial Literacy Training for Migrants (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (31 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: John Gibson The Impact of Financial Literacy Training for Migrants
    Abstract: Remittances are a major source of external finance for many developing countries but the cost of sending remittances remains high for many migration corridors. International efforts to lower costs by facilitating the entry of new financial products and new cost comparison information sources rely heavily on the financial literacy of migrants. This paper presents the results of a randomized experiment designed to measure the impact of providing financial literacy training to migrants. Training appears to increase financial knowledge and information seeking behavior and reduce the risk of switching to costlier remittance products. But it does not change either the frequency or level of remittances
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6073
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  • 86
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    Who You Train Matters : Identifying Complementary Effects of Financial Education on Migrant Households (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (42 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Doi, Yoko Who You Train Matters?
    Abstract: There has long been a concern among policymakers that too much of remittances are consumed and too little saved, limiting the development impact of migration. Financial literacy programs have become an increasingly popular way to try and address this issue, but to date there is no evidence that they are effective in inducing savings among remittance-receiving households, nor is it clear whether such programs are best targeted at the migrant, the remittance receiver, or both. The authors conducted a randomized experiment in Indonesia which allocated migrants and their families to a control group, a migrant-only training group, a family member-only training group, and a training group in which both the migrant and a family member were trained. Three rounds of follow-up surveys are then used to measure impacts on the financial knowledge, behaviors, and remittance and savings outcomes of the remaining household. They find that training both the migrant and the family member together has large and significant impacts on knowledge, behaviors, and savings. Training the family member alone has some positive, but smaller effects, whilst training only the migrant leads to no impacts on the remaining family members. The results show that financial education can have large effects when provided at a teachable moment, but that this impact varies greatly with who receives training
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6157
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  • 87
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    Should African Rural Development Strategies Depend on Smallholder Farms? : An Exploration of the Inverse Productivity Hypothesis (2012)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (32 p)
    Edition: 2012 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Larson, Donald F Should African Rural Development Strategies Depend on Smallholder Farms?
    Abstract: In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale-a premise supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases. This paper explores a research design conundrum that encourages researchers who study the relationship between productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow geographic reach, when policy would be better served with studies based on wide and heterogeneous settings. Using a model of endogenous technology choice, the authors explore the relationship between maize yields and scale using alternative data. Since rich descriptions of the decision environments that farmers face are needed to identify the applied technologies that generate the data, improvements in the location specificity of the data should reduce the likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates. However, the analysis finds that the inverse productivity hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data, despite obvious shortcomings with some components. It also finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-6190
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  • 88
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    Beyond Baseline and Follow-up : The Case for More T in Experiments (2011)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (36 p)
    Edition: 2011 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David Beyond Baseline and Follow-up
    Abstract: The vast majority of randomized experiments in economics rely on a single baseline and single follow-up survey. If multiple follow-ups are conducted, the reason is typically to examine the trajectory of impact effects, so that in effect only one follow-up round is being used to estimate each treatment effect of interest. While such a design is suitable for study of highly autocorrelated and relatively precisely measured outcomes in the health and education domains, this paper makes the case that it is unlikely to be optimal for measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes such as business profits, household incomes and expenditures, and episodic health outcomes. Taking multiple measurements of such outcomes at relatively short intervals allows the researcher to average out noise, increasing power. When the outcomes have low autocorrelation, it can make sense to do no baseline at all. Moreover, the author shows how for such outcomes, more power can be achieved with multiple follow-ups than allocating the same total sample size over a single follow-up and baseline. The analysis highlights the large gains in power from ANCOVA rather than difference-in-differences when autocorrelations are low and a baseline is taken. The paper discusses the issues involved in multiple measurements, and makes recommendations for the design of experiments and related non-experimental impact evaluations
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5639
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  • 89
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    Eight Questions about Brain Drain (2011)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (30 p)
    Edition: 2011 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Gibson, John Eight Questions about Brain Drain
    Abstract: High-skilled emigration is an emotive issue that in popular discourse is often referred to as brain drain, conjuring images of extremely negative impacts on developing countries. Recent discussions of brain gain, diaspora effects, and other advantages of migration have been used to argue against this, but much of the discussion has been absent of evidence. This paper builds upon a new wave of empirical research to answer eight key questions underlying much of the brain drain debate: 1) What is brain drain? 2) Why should economists care about it? 3) Is brain drain increasing? 4) Is there a positive relationship between skilled and unskilled migration? 5) What makes brain drain more likely? 6) Does brain gain exist? 7) Do high-skilled workers remit, invest, and share knowledge back home? And 8) What do we know about the fiscal and production externalities of brain drain?
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5668
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  • 90
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    How Can We Learn Whether Firm Policies are Working in Africa? : Challenges (and Solutions?) for Experiments and Structural Models (2011)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (26 p)
    Edition: 2011 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David How Can We Learn Whether Firm Policies are Working in Africa?
    Abstract: Firm productivity is low in African countries, prompting governments to try a number of active policies to improve it. Yet despite the millions of dollars spent on these policies, we are far from a situation where we know whether many of them are yielding the desired payoffs. This paper establishes some basic facts about the number and heterogeneity of firms in different sub-Saharan African countries and discusses their implications for experimental and structural approaches towards trying to estimate firm policy impacts. It shows that the typical firm program such as a matching grant scheme or business training program involves only 100 to 300 firms, which are often very heterogeneous in terms of employment and sales levels. As a result, standard experimental designs will lack any power to detect reasonable sized treatment impacts, while structural models which assume common production technologies and few missing markets will be ill-suited to capture the key constraints firms face. Nevertheless, the author suggests a way forward which involves focusing on a more homogeneous sub-sample of firms and collecting a lot more data on them than is typically collected
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5632
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  • 91
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    When is Capital Enough to get Female Enterprises Growing : Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Ghana (2011)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (61 p)
    Edition: 2011 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Fafchamps, Marcel When is Capital Enough to get Female Enterprises Growing
    Abstract: Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firms should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. The authors randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and female-owned microenterprises in urban Ghana. Their findings cast doubt on the ability of capital alone to stimulate the growth of female microenterprises. First, while the average treatment effects of the in-kind grants are large and positive for both males and females, the gain in profits is almost zero for women with initial profits below the median, suggesting that capital alone is not enough to grow subsistence enterprises owned by women. Second, for women they strongly reject equality of the cash and in-kind grants; only in-kind grants lead to growth in business profits. The results for men also suggest a lower impact of cash, but differences between cash and in-kind grants are less robust. The difference in the effects of cash and in-kind grants is associated more with a lack of self-control than with external pressure. As a result, the manner in which funding is provided affects microenterprise growth
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5706
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  • 92
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    The Impact of Economics Blogs (2011)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (47 p)
    Edition: 2011 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David The Impact of Economics Blogs
    Abstract: There is a proliferation of economics blogs, with increasing numbers of economists attracting large numbers of readers, yet little is known about the impact of this new medium. Using a variety of experimental and non-experimental techniques, this study quantifies some of their effects. First, links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers. Second, blogging raises the profile of the blogger (and his or her institution) and boosts their reputation above economists with similar publication records. Finally, a blog can transform attitudes about some of the topics it covers
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5783
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  • 93
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    Using Repeated Cross-Sections to Explore Movements into and Out of Poverty (2011)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (44 p)
    Edition: 2011 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Dang, Hai-Anh Using Repeated Cross-Sections to Explore Movements into and Out of Poverty
    Abstract: Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper, the authors build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data can allow inferences to be made about movements in and out of poverty. They illustrate that the method permits the estimation of bounds on mobility, and provide non-parametric and parametric approaches to obtaining these bounds. They test how well the method works on data sets for Vietnam and Indonesia where we are able to compare our method to true panel estimates. The results are sufficiently encouraging to offer the prospect of some limited, basic, insights into mobility and poverty duration in settings where historically it was judged that the data necessary for such analysis were unavailable
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5550
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 94
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    Enterprise Recovery Following Natural Disasters (2010)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (44 p)
    Edition: 2010 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Woodruff, Christopher Enterprise Recovery Following Natural Disasters
    Abstract: Using data from surveys of enterprises in Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami, the authors undertake the first microeconomic study of the recovery of the private firms in a developing country following a major natural disaster. Disaster recovery in low-income countries is characterized by the prevalence of relief aid rather than of insurance payments; the data show this distinction has important consequences. The data indicate that aid provided directly to households correlates reasonably well with reported losses of household assets, but is uncorrelated with reported losses of business assets. Business recovery is found to be slower than commonly assumed, with disaster-affected enterprises lagging behind unaffected comparable firms more than three years after the disaster. Using data from random cash grants provided by the project, the paper shows that direct aid is more important in the recovery of enterprises operating in the retail sector than for those operating in the manufacturing and service sectors
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5269
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 95
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    Accounting for Selectivity and Duration-Dependent Heterogeneity When Estimating the Impact of Emigration On Incomes and Poverty in Sending Areas (2010)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (28 p)
    Edition: 2010 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Stillman, Steven Accounting for Selectivity and Duration-Dependent Heterogeneity When Estimating the Impact of Emigration On Incomes and Poverty in Sending Areas
    Abstract: The impacts of international emigration and remittances on incomes and poverty in sending areas are increasingly studied with household survey data. But comparing households with and without emigrants is complicated by a triple-selectivity problem: first, households self-select into emigration; second, in some emigrant households everyone moves while others leave members behind; and third, some emigrants choose to return to the origin country. Allowing for duration-dependent heterogeneity introduces a fourth form of selectivity - one must now worry not just about whether households migrate, but also when they do so. This paper clearly sets out these selectivity issues and their implications for existing migration studies, and then addresses them by using survey data designed specifically to take advantage of a randomized lottery that determines which applicants to the over-subscribed Samoan Quota may immigrate to New Zealand. The analysis compares incomes and poverty rates among left behind members in households in Samoa that sent Samoan Quota emigrants with those for members of similar households that were unsuccessful in the lottery. Policy rules control who can accompany the principal migrant, providing an instrument to address the second selectivity problem, while differences among migrants in which year their ballot was selected allow for estimation of duration effects. The authors find that migration reduced poverty among former household members, but they also find suggestive evidence that this effect may be short-lived as both remittances and agricultural income are negatively related to the duration that the migrant has been abroad
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5268
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 96
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    Experimental Approaches in Migration Studies (2010)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
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    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (28 p)
    Edition: 2010 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David Experimental Approaches in Migration Studies
    Abstract: The decision of whether or not to migrate has far-reaching consequences for the lives of individuals and their families. But the very nature of this choice makes identifying the impacts of migration difficult, since it is hard to measure a credible counterfactual of what the person and their household would have been doing had migration not occurred. Migration experiments provide a clear and credible way for identifying this counterfactual, and thereby allowing causal estimation of the impacts of migration. The authors provide an overview and critical review of the three strands of this approach: policy experiments, natural experiments, and researcher-led field experiments. The purpose is to introduce readers to the need for this approach, give examples of where it has been applied in practice, and draw out lessons for future work in this area
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5395
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 97
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    The development impact of a best practice seasonal worker policy (2010)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (33 p)
    Edition: 2010 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David The development impact of a best practice seasonal worker policy
    Abstract: Seasonal migration programs are widely used around the world, and are increasingly seen as offering a potential “triple-win”- benefiting the migrant, sending country, and receiving country. Yet there is a dearth of rigorous evidence as to their development impact, and concerns about whether the time periods involved are too short to realize much in the way of benefits, and whether poorer, less skilled households actually get to participate in such programs. This paper studies the development impacts of a recently introduced seasonal worker program that has been deemed to be “best practice.” New Zealand's Recognized Seasonal Employer program was launched in 2007 with an explicit focus on development in the Pacific alongside the aim of benefiting employers at home. A multi-year prospective evaluation allows measurement of the impact of participation in this program on households and communities in Tonga and Vanuatu. Using a matched difference-in-differences analysis based on detailed surveys fielded before, during, and after participation, the authors find that the Recognized Seasonal Employer program has indeed had largely positive development impacts. It has increased income and consumption of households, allowed households to purchase more durable goods, increased the subjective standard of living, and had additional benefits at the community level. It also increased child schooling in Tonga. This should rank it among the most effective development policies evaluated to date. The policy was designed as a best practice example based on lessons elsewhere, and now should serve as a model for other countries to follow
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5488
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 98
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    The Remitting Patterns of African Migrants in the OECD (2010)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (50 p)
    Edition: 2010 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Morten, Melanie The Remitting Patterns of African Migrants in the OECD
    Abstract: Recorded remittances to Africa have grown dramatically over the past decade. Yet data limitations still mean relatively little is known about which migrants remit, how much they remit, and how their remitting behavior varies with gender, education, income levels, and duration abroad. This paper constructs the most comprehensive remittance database on immigrants in the OECD currently available, containing microdata on more than 12,000 African immigrants. Using this microdata the authors establish several basic facts about the remitting patterns of Africans, and then explore how key characteristics of policy interest relate to remittance behavior. Africans are found to remit twice as much on average as migrants from other developing countries, and those from poorer African countries are more likely to remit than those from richer African countries. Male migrants remit more than female migrants, particularly among those with a spouse remaining in the home country; more-educated migrants remit more than less educated migrants; and although the amount remitted increases with income earned, the gradient is quite flat over a large range of income. Finally, there is little evidence that the amount remitted decays with time spent abroad, with reductions in the likelihood of remitting offset by increases in the amount remitted conditional on remitting
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5260
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 99
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    The Economic Consequences of "Brain Drain" of the Best and Brightest : Microeconomic Evidence From Five Countries (2010)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (48 p)
    Edition: 2010 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: McKenzie, David The Economic Consequences of "Brain Drain" of the Best and Brightest
    Abstract: Brain drain has long been a common concern for migrant-sending countries, particularly for small countries where high-skilled emigration rates are highest. However, while economic theory suggests a number of possible benefits, in addition to costs, from skilled emigration, the evidence base on many of these is very limited. Moreover, the lessons from case studies of benefits to China and India from skilled emigration may not be relevant to much smaller countries. This paper presents the results of innovative surveys which tracked academic high-achievers from five countries to wherever they moved in the world in order to directly measure at the micro level the channels through which high-skilled emigration affects the sending country. The results show that there are very high levels of emigration and of return migration among the very highly skilled; the income gains to the best and brightest from migrating are very large, and an order of magnitude or more greater than any other effect; there are large benefits from migration in terms of postgraduate education; most high-skilled migrants from poorer countries send remittances; but that involvement in trade and foreign direct investment is a rare occurrence. There is considerable knowledge flow from both current and return migrants about job and study opportunities abroad, but little net knowledge sharing from current migrants to home country governments or businesses. Finally, the fiscal costs vary considerably across countries, and depend on the extent to which governments rely on progressive income taxation
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5394
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 100
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    Eliciting probabilistic expectations with visual aids in developing countries : how sensitive are answers to variations in elicitation design? (2010)
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Details
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (35 p)
    Edition: 2010 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Delavande, Adeline Eliciting probabilistic expectations with visual aids in developing countries
    Abstract: Eliciting subjective probability distributions in developing countries is often based on visual aids such as beans to represent probabilities and intervals on a sheet of paper to represent the support. The authors conducted an experiment in India that tested the sensitivity of elicited expectations to variations in three facets of the elicitation methodology: the number of beans, the design of the support (pre-determined or self-anchored), and the ordering of questions. The results show remarkable robustness to variations in elicitation design. Nevertheless, the added precision offered by using more beans and a larger number of intervals with a predetermined support improves accuracy
    DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5458
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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