Search

• Investigating how pension coverage reduces energy poverty in rural China. • Exploiting age-based eligibility for pension coverage to address endogeneity. • Anticipatory response is explored to validate the estimates. • Liquidity constraint might restrict anticipatory responses. • Competing interpretations on living arrangements and lifestyle are excluded. This paper estimates the causal effect of income change on reducing energy poverty by exploiting age-based eligibility for China's New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) through a regression discontinuity (RD) design. More than one billion people worldwide live in energy poverty, and the situation is even more difficult in developing world. It is an important development challenge to reduce energy poverty, which could be further associated with health outcome, labor productivity, and educational achievements. While public policies that increase income for poor households are the most direct ways to reduce energy poverty, the reverse causality makes establishing a convincing causal link between income and energy poverty challenging. Using the quasi-experimental variation in income induced by NRPS, this paper addresses the endogeneity of income and examines the impact of exogenous sharp changes in income on energy consumption behaviors. The findings indicate substantial increases in modern energy consumption and sizable reductions in solid fuels (e.g., straw and fuelwood), suggesting that "windfall income" by pension coverage alleviates energy poverty. Although individuals could anticipate the income shocks by pension coverage, the evidence suggests that they do not engage in anticipatory responses to smooth their consumption. Further evidence shows that liquidity constraints may be the underlying mechanism for the lack of anticipatory responses in household energy consumption. Besides reducing energy poverty, the results demonstrate that pension coverage leads to a decrease in elderly labor supply, an increase in subjective health and life satisfaction, and an increase in non-energy consumption, all of which are positively associated with the well-beings of senior citizens. We anticipate that the findings of this paper in the context of China may be extended to developing world which has been expected to set up targeted measures to tackle energy poverty in upcoming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Home-visiting interventions have positive effects on child cognitive development, parenting beliefs and parenting practices of caregivers in rural China. • Home-visiting interventions have null effects on child social-emotional development in rural China. • Three mechanisms are identified through which interventions are able to raise child cognitive development. • Shifting parenting beliefs; increasing parenting practices; and shifting parenting beliefs thus fostering better parenting practices of primary caregivers are the three mechanisms that are driving our overall results of the impact of home-visiting interventions on early child development. To better understand the impacts of parenting interventions (e.g., parental training of psychosocial stimulating activities) on child developmental outcomes and design effective policies to benefit young children, it is essential to identify the mechanisms through which the interventions work. To this end, this paper presents the results of two randomized controlled trials that offered home visitation, parenting trainings to 435 households (with 527 households as the control group) in 174 villages across three provinces in China. The findings from the randomized controlled trials showed that the interventions significantly improved child cognitive development and had a positive effect on the primary caregivers' parenting practices and their parenting beliefs. The analysis suggests three possible mechanisms through which the parenting interventions affected child cognitive development: changing the parenting beliefs of the primary caregivers, shifting the parenting practices of the primary caregivers, and improving the primary caregivers' parenting beliefs, thus fostering better parenting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Many rural poor in developing countries live in areas far away from markets and isolation is a key limiting factor to their livelihood. In this paper, we use four waves of a primary panel household survey conducted in 17 remote natural villages in China to study how road access shapes farmers’ production patterns, input use, and rural poverty. We adopt a difference-in-difference approach by comparing the outcomes of the households in villages with and without road access, before and after the introduction of each road. Our results show that access to roads facilitates specialization in agricultural production. In natural villages with better road access, farmers plant fewer numbers of crops, purchase more fertilizer, and hire more labor. Consequently, road connections improve household agricultural income and reduce poverty. In addition, road access significantly increases local nonfarm income for the relatively poor households, but not the rich. Overall, our research provides empirical justification on the importance of rural road on agricultural specialization and poverty reduction, especially in isolated and impoverished regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that labor segmentation exists along gender lines in the newly privatized Township and Village enterprises in rural China. The results, based upon surveys of workers, enterprise managers, and local officials, indicate that women are segregated into production type jobs in certain industries, have less control over their work, do not receive a return to experience, and are adversely affected by wage discrimination. There is a clear gender bias in favor of men in share holding, a new and important form of workplace benefit that confers wealth and affects control within the workplace and thus, privatization has contributed to gender segmentation. The results support the general argument that the process of economic transition is not gender-neutral. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]