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Most analyses of the impact of community management of common property resources are based on cross-sectional comparisons in case studies or small samples, perception-based measurement of resource conditions, and absence of controls for unobserved community characteristics and non-random assignment of management types. This paper compares forests managed by local community groups called Van Panchayats (VPs), with protected and unprotected state forests in the Indian state of Uttaranchal. We utilize ground-level ecological measures of forest quality including canopy cover, biomass, lopping and regeneration in 399 forests accessed by residents of a random sample of 83 villages in the mid-Himalayan region of Uttaranchal. Raw differences between VP and non-VP forest quality indicate no significant differences. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that these understate the benefits of VP management owing to endogenous selection, since more degraded forests are more likely to be converted to VP forests. Controlling for forest geography, unobserved village characteristics and cross-forest spillovers, VP forests are significantly less lopped, and similar on other dimensions. The lopping differences are greater the longer the forest has been under a VP.

SummaryThis paper uses UNICEF’s Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys cross-country data to shed light on unequal investments in the wellbeing of children (boys and girls) within the household. The paper proposes a new methodology to measure the extent of gender intrahousehold inequality and its contribution to overall levels of inequality using an L-Theil index decomposition. The individual and joint distribution of inequality in four key indicators of child wellbeing is analyzed: stunting, birth registration, school attendance, and time spent on work and chores (working hours) in the search for evidence of gender bias. Evidence from various separate county studies had shown that the direction of the gender bias is not universal. Such conclusion holds when using a consistent methodology and comparable cross-country datasets; this paper shows that disparities inside households do not follow the same bias toward one or the other gender in all countries and the direction of the bias is not the same across indicators of wellbeing. While progress in improving child wellbeing has occurred in many countries, inequalities remain. Intrahousehold inequalities might still be considered a priority in an agenda focused on closing these progress gaps.

The relationship between planning research and practice plays a key role in shaping global commitments related to urban development. Arguably, this is the case for a ‘global urban agenda’ being articulated at an international scale via frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. These multilateral commitments have been shaped by power relationships and assumptions about what kind of knowledge is valuable at different historical moments, a recognition of the local and global impacts of urban development and what sort of urban development is desirable at specific historical junctures. The pathways that have led to the present global attention to cities are as telling as the frameworks themselves. In this paper, we explore the history of multilateral and international networks that have shaped today’s global urban agenda. We focus on the three United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat I, II and III) as milestones in the evolution of this agenda. Drawing on Southern urban theory and current debates on the interaction of practitioners and academics, we discuss the paradigms that have shaped the ways in which knowledge has been articulated, circulated and valued in those historical moments via the concept of ‘knowledge translation’. We discuss the way in which ‘urban equality’ has been approached and explored in the praxis of these agendas. To do so, the paper discusses community-based cases that can highlight the different knowledge paradigms, and the power dynamics behind them, opening up questions about the challenges of including diverse voices and knowledges in the ‘global’ conversation on urban agendas.

This paper maps the policy actors and their networks in the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan and the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) process in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). It analyzes power relations in the FLEGT VPA process, as well as actors’ preferences in relation to a number of policy issues dealt with in the FLEGT VPA. To provide contextual understanding, the paper explores pathways of policy influence along which international actors influence domestic decision-making processes within the FLEGT VPA. We find that in the Lao FLEGT VPA policy process, power is held by the traditionally most powerful policy actors, the central governmental agencies, donor community and international development partners, while the private sector, civil society organizations and actors from subnational levels are substantially less powerful. Strong policy preferences were noted for all aspects of timber legality, except for the legality of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Similarly, strong preferences were observed for considerations of transparency and accountability, while preferences were comparatively weaker for issues concerning i) forest communities' rights to forest and land, ii) livelihood impacts on small-scale operators and family businesses as well as those of forest communities, and iii) the involvement of civil society organizations in the VPA process. The most dominant pathways through which VPA influences domestic policy-making is the direct access to domestic policy-making, followed by the international rules pathway of influence. Based on our analysis, we argue that imbalance in distribution of power and in representation of actors in the VPA policy network may obstruct the intended outcomes and progress on important policy issues, despite the stated policy goals and resources provided by the donor community. This in turn fosters perpetual dominance of the traditionally powerful policy actors, which is likely to lead to further marginalization and disempowerment of the less powerful actors, such as forest communities and informal operators.

This paper investigates if residing in a joint family affects non-farm employment for married women in rural India. Our estimates based on a longitudinal survey of over 27,000 women conducted in 2005 and 2012, and using the conditional logistic regression and instrumental variable approach suggest that living in a joint family lowers married women’s participation non-farm work by around 12% points. The adverse impact is higher for younger women, for those from families with higher social status, and for those residing in Northern India. We present evidence to suggest that women with higher education are not constrained from cultural and traditional norms since education raises women’s decision-making power in a joint family. An increased education level is likely to raise women’s earning capacity as well as the quality of jobs which may help in lowering family pressure against work. Public policies that encourage higher education, improve job accessibility along with affordable childcare, will raise non-farm employment, which has increasingly been the main source of new jobs, for women living in a rural India.

The paper shows that international government borrowing from multilateral development banks is countercyclical while international government borrowing from private sector lenders is procyclical. The countercyclicality of multilateral development bank (MDB) lending is mostly driven by the behavior of the World Bank (borrowing from regional development banks tends to be acyclical). The paper also shows that MDB lending to Latin America and East Asia is more countercyclical than MDB lending to other regions. Private sector lending is instead procyclical in all developing regions. While the cyclicality of MDB lending does not depend on domestic or international conditions, private lending becomes particularly procyclical in periods of limited global capital flows. By focusing on both borrower and lender heterogeneity, the paper shows that the cyclical properties of international government debt are mostly driven by credit supply shocks. Demand factors appear to be less important drivers of procyclical international government borrowing. The focus on supply and demand factors is different from the traditional push and pull classification, as push and pull factors could affect both the demand and the supply of international government debt.

Violence against children and adolescents, a highly prevalent problem, is a clear violation of child rights and has detrimental effects on later life outcomes. Programs that alleviate poverty address a structural determinant of child vulnerability and can thereby reduce child abuse. This paper investigates whether the Government of Zimbabwe’s Harmonized Social Cash Transfer (HSCT) Program, which combines cash transfers with complementary services, affects youth exposure to physical violence. The analysis uses data from a non-experimental impact evaluation and a difference-in-differences approach. Results show a 19-percentage point decline in the incidence of physical violence among youth four years into the program. HSCT-induced enhancements in beneficiary households’ purchasing capacity and food security, improvements in caregiver subjective well-being, and reductions in youth participation in economic work for pay could be mediating the program’s effects on youth abuse. This paper adds to the relatively scarce evidence on the impacts of anti-poverty policies on young people’s susceptibility to physical violence in developing countries.

Highlights • 1. The Covid19 pandemic urges us to advancing a new and different framing on government intervention to properly serve the public interest. • 2. Production dynamics in every country are highly affected by the pandemic, with drastic changes that might become structural in our economies. • 3. A turning point on the connection between industrial policy, sustainability and development has been reached to tackle wide societal challenges. • 4. A new analytical framework with real-world implications is needed to support industrial policy governance and implementation. • 5. Industrial policy in the post-Covid19 era should steer the structural change of our economies and societies towards sustainable human development., National and local societies all around the world are fighting the most dramatic global public health emergency of our time, which has soon become an economic, social and human crisis touching all key dimensions of our lives. Within an inevitable revamping attention on the need for government intervention to face the challenges raised by the Covid19 pandemic, industrial policy is appearing as a central piece of the puzzle. As production dynamics in every country is highly affected by the crisis, industrial policy is considered part of the response to solve dramatic economic and social problems deriving by extraordinary levels of unemployment, deprivation and poverty. In this paper, we argue that a turning point on the connection between industrial policy, sustainability and development has been reached, highlighting the need to rethink its theoretical foundations as well as its governance and implementation processes for a new role in our post-Covid 19 societies. Therefore, the research question underlying this paper deals primarily with the nexus between the debate on industrial policy and its effects in terms of human development, social cohesion and sustainability. For this reason, we attempt at closing the gap between different strands of literature, whose integrated connection leads to a new analytical framework with real-world implications on the role of industrial policy, not only as tool for productive dynamics, but also as a leverage for sustainable human development. All in all, we aim at contributing to the debate on our post-Covid19 economies and societies in two ways: firstly, by providing a new integrated analytical framework on industrial policy to steer a sustainable structural change of our economies and societies towards sustainable human development; secondly, by identifying preliminary implications on industrial policy governance and implementation, investing in the accurate and transparent design of industrial policy in the post-Covid19 era.

A contemporary challenge is inequality. This paper illustrates why ideas matter, and how they can change over time. Inequalities are reinforced when they are taken for granted. But this can be disrupted when marginalised people gain self-esteem; challenge hitherto unquestioned inequalities; and gain confidence in the possibility of social change. Slowly and incrementally, social mobilisation can catalyse greater government commitment to socially inclusive economic growth. This is illustrated with ethnographic research from Latin America, where income inequality has recently declined. Clearly, however, no single paper can provide a comprehensive account of political change in an incredibly diverse region. By highlighting some ways in which ideas matter (and the limitations of alternative hypotheses about increased fiscal space and democratisation), this paper merely seeks to persuade political economists to go beyond ‘incentives’. Future efforts to tackle inequality might harness the power of ideas: tackling ‘norm perceptions’ (beliefs about what others think and do); publicising positive deviance; and strengthening social movements.

Most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the household as the unit of analysis, so that the multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all its members. This assumption ignores intra-household inequalities. Additionally, households containing both a female and a male cannot contribute to a gender gap in poverty, so gender differentials in poverty cannot be estimated. But, the Sustainable Development Goals have put special emphasis on gender equality; therefore, new measures able to capture the gender differences are needed. Consequently, in this paper, we propose an individual-based multidimensional poverty measure in order to estimate the three I’s of multidimensional poverty (incidence, intensity, and inequality) in Nicaragua as well as the gender differentials. We also estimate logit regressions to better understanding the determinants of multidimensional poverty in this country. Overall, we find that there are statistically significant gender differences in multidimensional poverty in Nicaragua; but, they are estimated to be small and lower than 5%. However, the gender differential in inequality is larger than 10%, and it suggests that multi-dimensionally poor women are living in very intense poverty when compared with multi-dimensionally poor men. We also find that the elderly and children are the most vulnerable people in terms of multidimensional poverty in this country; furthermore, when information on employment, domestic work, and social protection is considered in the analysis, the gender gaps become more substantial, and women are more likely to be poor than men.

This paper provides evidence on the effects of agricultural productivity on wage rates, labor supply to market oriented activities, and labor allocation between own farming and wage labor in agriculture. To guide the empirical work, this paper develops a general equilibrium model that underscores the role of reallocation of family labor engaged in the production of non-marketed services at home (`home production'). The model predicts positive effects of a favorable agricultural productivity shock on wages and income, but the effect on hired labor is ambiguous; it depends on the strength of reallocation of labor from home to market production by labor surplus and deficit households. Taking rainfall variations as a measure of shock to agricultural productivity, and using subdistrict level panel data from Bangladesh, this paper finds significant positive effects of a favorable rainfall shock on agricultural wages, labor supply to market work, and per capita household expenditure. The share of hired labor in contrast declines substantially in response to a favorable productivity shock, which is consistent with a case where labor-deficit households respond more than the labor-surplus ones in reallocating labor from home production.

Public Works (PW) programs are popular development interventions due to their potential ‘double dividend’ of transferring income to the poor while at the same time creating public infrastructure. However, PW programs are costly and demanding from an administrative perspective and it is not clear whether they are the most cost-effective intervention to reduce poverty. Therefore, an assessment of PW programs needs to understand which benefits and costs these programs entail relative to other interventions, and whether or not the extra cost can be outweighed by generating benefits over and above those of alternative interventions, such as Cash Transfer programs. This paper seeks to identify these benefits, and develops a conceptual framework that highlights four mechanisms through which PW programs could strengthen the productive capacity of poor households beyond the effects of Cash Transfers: productive investments, labor market effects, skills development, and increases in trade and production. It then reviews available empirical evidence from PW programs in developing countries. The results suggest that PW programs can induce productive investments via income and insurance effects when the program is sufficiently reliable and long-term. PW programs can also have positive welfare effects by raising wages, but potential adverse effects on labor markets have to be taken into account. Implicit or explicit training components of PW programs do not seem to increase the employability or business earnings of participants. Finally, there is only scant empirical evidence on the productive effects of the public infrastructure generated by PW programs, and further research is crucial to understand and quantify those effects. This paper concludes that PW programs are only preferable over alternative interventions if they generate substantial investments among the target group, if there is clear evidence that private-sector wages are below equilibrium wages, or if the public infrastructure generated in PW programs has substantial growth effects.

This paper looks at patterns of growth faltering and catch up of around 1000 children as they moved from 8 to 19 years of age, from middle childhood through adolescence to young adulthood, using Height for Age Difference (HAD) and the more conventional Height for age z-scores (HAZ). It also looks at what individual and household characteristics may have moved these children into or out of situations of nutritional deprivation and how their stunting profile in later childhood correlates with psychosocial outcomes at age 19 and how it may have intergenerational consequences. The paper uses 4 rounds of longitudinal data collected in 2002, 2006, 2009 and 2013 from Andhra Pradesh and Telengana, India when the children were aged 8, 12, 15 and 19. The paper finds that there are significant gender based biases in growth faltering later in childhood disfavouring girls and that becoming newly stunted as an adolescent is strongly correlated with a child reporting to have poorer relationships with peers compared to the group that were never stunted. We also find that a girl experiencing stunting in middle childhood or adolescence (even if they were not stunted at age 8 or eventually moved out of being stunted by age 19) correlates significantly with offspring being shorter and thinner than the offspring of girls never stunted. This is one of few, if any, studies that look at growth patterns in middle childhood and adolescence and outcomes as a young adult and the results are important for their implications for further research and policy.

Summary This paper examines the relationship among gender, social capital, and access to finance of micro, small, and medium enterprises in the manufacturing sector in Viet Nam. Our dataset is from the 2011, 2013, and 2015 results of the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise Survey in Viet Nam. Using the Heckman technique to control for sample selection bias, the estimates do not provide evidence for discrimination against female-owned enterprises in the formal lending market. Specifically, female entrepreneurs have a higher probability of getting a loan and they pay lower interest rates in comparison with male entrepreneurs. No discrimination in formal credit markets may arise from the preference for informal loans over formal loans as entrepreneurs tend to borrow informal loans before applying for formal ones. Further analysis shows that social capital could facilitate loan applications: firms that have a closer relationship with government officials and other business people can get loans of longer duration.

Summary An extensive literature exists on the adverse effects of corruption on inward FDI and the impact this may have on economic development but the reverse causality has not been fully explored. Legislation in the US and the EU prohibits firms from engaging in corrupt practices in foreign countries and this suggests that foreign-owned firms might be less likely to pay bribes. However, such legislation may be ineffective because foreign firms have to adapt to local market conditions or risk being uncompetitive. Using firm-level data for 41 emerging countries, a probit model estimates the probability that a firm pays bribes. To allow for possible endogeneity this probit analysis is repeated with an instrument to proxy for endogenous foreign ownership. Then, a propensity score matching technique tests for differences in the propensity to pay bribes by domestic and foreign firms. The paper finds no difference in the behavior of foreign-owned and domestic firms with respect to corrupt practices. Results are robust to different levels of foreign ownership and support the view that foreign-owned firms adapt to local practices and are neither more nor less likely to pay bribes than comparable domestic firms. The paper finds that other variables including bureaucracy, government contracts, and perceived difficulties with civil society (legal and political) do have statistically significant effects on increasing bribery and that some others, such as per capita GDP, tend to reduce bribery. The study concludes that there is no evidence that foreign ownership, after investment has occurred, tends to reduce bribery but it does support the view that foreign-owned firms adopt local behavioral norms.

As in most immigrant-receiving countries in the global North, countries in the South face challenges regarding migrant access to social rights and the effect of migrants on the sustainability of the welfare state. In the Latin American context, this holds especially for countries such as Costa Rica, which has one of the strongest social policy regimes in the South and the highest (Nicaraguan) immigrant stock in Latin America. Set in the context of Costa Rica, this paper assesses two views which seem hard to reconcile, and, are common in the country. First, it is claimed that Nicaraguan migrants use public health services disproportionately, thereby threatening the country’s welfare system. Second, pro-migrant rights non-governmental organizations and academics are concerned, primarily based on qualitative studies, that access to health services for Nicaraguan immigrants is limited, and that they are discriminated based on nationality. This paper relies on administrative data and a unique data set representative of Nicaraguan born individuals residing in Costa Rica to examine the validity of both these claims. We do not find support for either. The incidence of migrant health care use is lower than their share in the population and at the same time there is no evidence of discrimination in health care access for migrants based on their nationality. The paper underlines the need for more informed migration debates. 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (IIS)

For international and domestic actors, post-conflict peacebuilding is one of the most difficult policy arenas to understand and in which to operate. Environmental and natural resource governance have the potential to facilitate peacebuilding in such contexts, but existing research has not yet produced a cohesive theoretical understanding of the pathways by which natural resource management strategies can facilitate positive peace. This paper explores the wider benefits of natural resource management and discusses their potential for reducing political fragility in affected states and helping to build positive peace. The paper outlines three mechanisms through which improved natural resource governance in post-conflict contexts is theorized to have positive effects on peace: (a) the contact hypothesis, whereby the facilitation of intergroup cooperation reduces bias and prejudice; (b) the diffusion of transnational norms, where the introduction of environmental and other good governance norms supports human empowerment and strengthens civil society; and (c) state service provision, where the provision of access to public services addresses the instrumental needs of communities, thereby strengthening their belief in the state. Guided by an interest in the opportunities presented by natural resource management to support peacebuilding processes in post-conflict states, the paper seeks to revise and advance the current environmental peacebuilding research agenda.

It is of global interest to understand under what conditions community forestry can be successful and sustainable in terms of environmental conservation and local livelihood benefits. Existing theories have explained several influential factors, including small groups of people with shared norms, sound institutions, high levels of decentralization, downward accountability, and security of tenure. This paper explores how local conceptions of environmental justice become closely linked to sustainable community forestry. Based on an in-depth case study in a highly populated and culturally heterogeneous village in southwest China, we examine an enduring example of community forestry, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The results show that village forest cover has increased significantly over the last 30 years, contributing to improvements in local livelihoods. It is argued that one of the important factors in this success has been villagers’ ability to align forest management with local justice norms and practices. Distributive, procedural, and recognition aspects of justice are considered, and we find that, in combination, these become integral to building effective institutions for collective action. To broaden the focus on successful factors in existing theories, this paper argues that the consideration of justice as an important condition for establishing effective and durable local institutions that will be effective for community forestry. The insights from this study suggest a need to consider justice dimensions in community forestry research to enable improved understanding of its dynamics and outcomes worldwide.

This paper looks at household consumption and financial decisions made in a matrilineal society where women are traditionally the household financial managers. This culture was strongly altered by the British in the mid-19th century through Christian missionaries who proclaimed that the role of the household manager is ascribed to men and not to women. Using self-collected data from 650 individuals in the matrilineal state of Meghalaya, India, and exploring households’ distance to the historical Protestant base in Cherrapunji, we find evidence that households in which women are empowered spend more on welfare-enhancing goods, such as food, but are less likely to have savings left at the end of the month. Our paper contributes to the literature by investigating how a historical shift in female empowerment, mostly driven by cultural norms, can have long-term effects on financial decisions.

Highlights • This paper explores the role of climate risk, preparedness and culture in explaining the cross-country variation in the Covid-19 mortality rates. • The greater the climate risk and the lower the readiness to climate change, the higher the risk of mortality from Covid-19. • Countries that were better prepared for the climate emergency were also better placed to fight the pandemic. • Individualistic societies fared significantly worse than collectivist ones in coping with Covid-19, resulting in much higher mortality rates. • To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper formally establishing the link between climate risk, culture and the Covid-19 mortality rate., Why have some countries done significantly better than others in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic? Had some countries been better prepared than others? This paper attempts to shed light on these questions by examining the role of climate risk and culture in explaining the cross-country variation in the Covid-19 mortality, while controlling for other potential drivers. In our analysis, we consider climate risk, readiness to climate change and individualism as main indicators reflecting the climate and culture status of individual countries. Using data from 110 countries, we find that the greater the climate risk; the lower the readiness to climate change and the more individualistic the society, the higher the pandemic mortality rate. We also present a series of sensitivity checks and show that our findings are robust to different specifications, alternative definitions of the mortality rate; and different estimation methods. One policy implication arising from our results is that countries that were better prepared for the climate emergency were also better placed to fight the pandemic. Overall, countries in which individuals look after each other and the environment, creating sustainable societies, are better able to cope with climate and public health emergencies.

Summary This paper investigates whether small-scale water supply systems implemented and operated by water user associations increase access to piped water supply in rural Brazil by more than systems by local governments. Starting from 15% to 16% in the year 2000, access rates in rural areas with water user associations increased to 33.4% in 2010. In areas with local government supply systems, access rates only increased to 24.9%. Based on data from Brazilian census and the national water and sanitation survey, the empirical analysis in this paper shows that the observed difference is effectively due to project-type choice. Additionally it points toward higher accountability as a potential reason for better results of community-based projects. In municipalities where social groups requested a new system before the local government started implementation and therefore public awareness for the project was higher, the increase in access rates is comparable to the increase in municipalities with water user association projects. The same is true if local media is present or political competition in local elections is higher. As the effect of project type on access rates might be confounded by simultaneous drivers of project-type choice and access rates, the quantitative analysis is based on a difference-in-difference estimator in combination with kernel matching to overcome the endogeneity of project type. The treatment effect revealed by this analysis is robust to various specification changes and the robustness checks show no structural differences between treatment and control groups that could bias the results. The calculation of matching weights for the kernel matching is informed by semi-structured interviews with academics and sector experts in Brazil explaining the determinants of project choice. The interviews highlight the political economy behind infrastructure expansion in rural Brazil.

Summary The political empowerment of women is a societal process crucial to development and progress. The V-Dem women’s political empowerment index (WPEI) provides information about women’s civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation globally. Spanning from 1900 to 2012, three dimensions of empowerment, and over 170 countries, it is among the most comprehensive measures of women’s empowerment available. This paper presents a conceptualization of women’s political empowerment and provides an overview of the construction of the index and operationalization of its three sub-dimensions: Women’s civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation. Compared to other indices measuring women’s empowerment, such as the GDI, the GEM, the GII, and the CIRI data on human rights, the V-Dem index allows more precise measurement and is superior in temporal scope and coverage of countries of the Global South. The paper demonstrates the benefits of this new index and its sub-dimensions through several empirical illustrations.

Summary This paper estimates slum residents’ willingness to pay for formalized land tenure in Pune, India. The results show that the legal assurance of slum residents’ occupancy of their lands could benefit them. Previous studies have discussed the legal and non-legal factors that substantially influence the tenure security of residents in informal settlements; however, it remains unclear how and to what extent the assignment of legal property rights through the formalization of land tenure improves the tenure security of residents in informal settlements and living conditions, even in the presence of other legal and non-legal factors that also contribute to their tenure security. To address this question, this study focuses on the city of Pune, India, where government agencies have formalized slums by legally ensuring the occupancy of the residents under the “slum declaration.” Applying a hedonic price model to an original household survey, this paper investigates how slum residents evaluate formalized land tenure. A spatial econometrics method is also applied to account for spatial dependence and spatially autocorrelated unobserved errors. The spatial hedonic analysis shows that the premium of slum declaration is worth 19.2% of the average housing rent in slums. The associated marginal willingness to pay is equivalent to 6.7% of the average household expenditure, although it is heterogeneous depending on a household’s caste and other legal conditions. This finding suggests that the assurance of occupancy rights is a vital component of land-tenure formalization policy even if it does not directly provide full property rights.

Summary This paper examines the role that multinational enterprises (MNEs) and foreign direct investments (FDI) can have in enhancing the access to electricity for local communities in developing countries based on the quality of home and host institutions. Access to electricity is a marker for development but it is far from being universal in developing countries. The shortage of electricity is mainly the consequence of inability of governments in planning, financing, and developing necessary electricity infrastructure. In this context, investments from other actors can be essential. Particularly, we focus on the role of FDI and MNEs. We claim that when MNEs invest in developing countries, they are incentivized to solve the lack of electricity infrastructure mainly for two reasons: to guarantee their business activities and to gain legitimacy with their local stakeholders. In addition, we argue that MNEs and FDI from institutionally underdeveloped countries will be more prone to develop infrastructure for the provision of electricity to local population, as generally they suffer from a negative stereotype. For this study, we rely on 1,547 observations composed of pairs of 83 home countries and 15 host countries in sub-Saharan Africa, observed from 2005 to 2011. Due to the nature of the database, we adopt panel data techniques, i.e., system-GMM and corrected Least Square Dummy Variable estimators. We find that FDI promotes access to electricity in developing countries with weak institutions and this is more likely true when FDI come from institutionally underdeveloped countries. These results are far from obvious, as they controvert common idea among institutional scholars that a regulatory authority is essential in the provision of infrastructure. In conclusion, with this paper we partially rehabilitate the image of MNEs investing in developing countries, by demonstrating that—under certain conditions—they could contribute to energy poverty alleviation of local population.

Highlights • We examine the impact of improved cowpea adoption on poverty in Nigeria. • We use a unique and recent nationally representative survey data. • Adoption leads to an increase in household income and asset ownership. • Poverty reduces with the adoption of improved cowpea varieties., Adoption of improved agricultural technologies has long been recognized as critical for reducing poverty through increased productivity, incomes, and asset accumulation. Using a nationally representative survey data from a sample of over 1500 households in Nigeria, this paper evaluates the impacts of adoption of improved cowpea varieties on income and asset poverty reduction using an endogenous switching regression model. The results showed that adoption of improved cowpea varieties increased per capita household income and asset ownership by 17 and 24 percentage points, respectively. The results based on the observed and counterfactual income and asset distributions further showed that adoption reduced both income poverty and asset poverty by 5 percentage points. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy options for increasing adoption and impacts of improved cowpea varieties in Nigeria.

Inclusive innovation as a strategy for inclusive development has received increased attention from development policymakers, practitioners, and scholars in recent years. What these processes entail in practical terms, however, remains contested and under-theorized. This paper addresses the scarcity of mid-level analysis and models of inclusive innovation processes within complex systems, which are needed to enable a coherent empirical research agenda and to inform program theory-building, implementation, and evaluation. Looking to smallholder-oriented agricultural systems in the Global South, where the majority of inclusive innovation implementation and research has been located, this paper proposes that it is possible to identify the essential features and causal logic of these processes to create an empirically-derived, middle-range model with cross-context applicability. Drawing on methods from realist evaluation and social inquiry, I conducted a theory-driven, cross-case synthesis of three studies of inclusive innovation processes in agricultural systems, with one case each from South America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. I find that despite significant diversity in project designs, facilitation approaches, and local contexts, the three inclusive innovation processes unfolded in strikingly similar ways, and that this modus operandi can be modeled as a middle-range theory of change. In each case, I find that a consistent set of activities and processes changed the local context for the inclusive innovation initiative. These altered contextual factors interacted with ongoing programmatic activities in consistent ways to trigger processes of social learning, social capital strengthening, collective cognition, and consensus formation, which acted as causal mechanisms responsible for producing the intermediate outcomes that led to technical, organizational, and institutional system innovation. The middle-range model enables cross-context insights into how inclusive innovation processes work and what capacities are needed to facilitate them. It can also guide the adaptive management and assessment of these processes, while offering testable hypotheses to guide future empirical work and evaluation.

International audience; Are Muslims qua Muslims discriminated against in the French labour market? Identifying anti-Muslim hiring discrimination is challenging because it requires neutralising two confounding factors: geographic origin (the bulk of Muslim-majority countries are located outside of Europe and its offshoots) and religiosity (survey-based evidence reveals greater importance attached to God among Muslims than Christians). To address these challenges, this paper compares the callback rates of fictitious job applicants of Muslim and Christian affiliation who originate from the same country, Lebanon, and are identical in every respect save the religion they inherited. This paper also varies whether the job applicants are “religious”, i.e. whether they practise their religion in adulthood, through their membership in Scouting associations. The results reveal no discrimination against Muslims when they are not religious. However, Muslims lose ground when they are religious, unless they are outstanding. The gap further widens when religious Muslims are compared to religious Christians. While religiosity constitutes a penalty for Muslims, it works as a premium for Christians: their callback rate is boosted when they are religious. Consequently, religious Muslims must submit twice as many applications as religious Christians before being called back by the recruiters. A closer look at the data reveals that the “religiosity penalty” affects ordinary Muslim men and accounts for the full gap in callback rate between religious ordinary Muslim men (4.2%) and their Christian counterparts (10.9%). This finding is compatible with employers incurring a disutility when they interact with religious Muslim men, that wanes as the latter become outstanding and, hence, more likely to behave in a way that pleases employers. It is also compatible with religious ordinary Muslim men being linked to a risk of religious radicalism. A follow-up survey confirms that the signal used to convey religiosity is deemed relevant and correctly interpreted by employers.

Sen’s entitlement thesis rooted in social contract theory has been used to explain access to food, and is used by states to design social protection programs as transfer entitlements to diffuse food insecurities. Social protection programs have now burgeoned in several countries as a strategy to enable the poor to overcome risks, vulnerabilities and poverty. These social protection programs have inclusion and exclusion errors, which current theorization attributes mainly to political clientalism, social vulnerability, elite capture, targeting inefficiency, leakages and corruption, lack of information transparency and improper designing of social protection programs. This paper argues that the errors are due to a more fundamental assumption made in application of social contract and entitlement-based approach to social protection programing. It identifies an uncritical application of Sen’s entitlement thesis to social protection programs, as leading to inclusion and exclusion errors. The main problematic, the paper shows is that the social contract-led entitlement thesis works within the domain of formal rights situated within the state-citizen relations, and as such, misses out on the non-formal entitlements and non-state influences that impact materialization of social protection programs in practice. Evidences from flood prone Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, India indicate that non-state rules linked with clientele and patronage relations, moral and local political economies trump over formal rights to mediate social protection entitlement outcomes. Rather than abstract state-citizen social contract, it is the moral contracts of reciprocal exchanges with influential patrons embedded in the moral economy of the villages that ultimately ground the social protection entitlement claims of poor villagers. Conceptualizing this process of access as cultures of entitlement, the paper builds a framework for reinterpretation of entitlements and their outcomes, suggesting a recalibration of application of Sen’s entitlement thesis to social protection programs. In conclusion it argues that Sen’s entitlement thesis which is pitched at transfer of economic resources through social protection from the state to the poor is inadequate. Learning from social movements currently leading the transparency and accountability struggles in India, it calls for an instituting and recognition of accountability as new cultural resource and entitlement. In conclusion it argues that information, and accountability as new cultural entitlements, when mobilized through collective agency of the poor can potentially challenge the current cultures of entitlements evidenced in this paper that presently underlie social protection outcomes.

Summary It has now become almost a stylized fact that sustained agricultural growth is central to rapid poverty reduction and economic development. Yet, world poverty is largely concentrated in the agrarian societies, which have the potential for agricultural productivity growth. This is particularly true for Sub-Saharan African countries, where the gaps between potential and actual yields remain high. Minimizing this gap through the promotion of modern inputs—such as fertilizer and modern seeds—has been at the core of almost all development strategies in Ethiopia. Among other initiatives, the country has promoted microfinance institutions and member-owned financial cooperatives to alleviate credit constraints of the smallholder farmers. This paper analyzes the impacts of these institutions. Using household survey data and a propensity-score-matching technique, we examine the effects that institutional financial services have on farmers’ adoption of agricultural technology in Ethiopia. The results suggest that access to institutional finance has a significant positive impact on both the adoption and extent of technology use. However, when impacts are disaggregated by type of financial institution and farm size, heterogeneities are observed. In particular, financial cooperatives have a greater impact on technology adoption than microfinance institutions, and the results appear to vary depending on farm size and types of inputs. The paper concludes with implications for policies to promote adoption of modern agricultural inputs.

Poor health at birth has negative long-run effects on individual well-being and is also detrimental for intergenerational mobility. This paper examines whether health outcomes at birth are affected by in utero increased exposure to rainfall and temperature shocks in Colombia, one of the countries in the world with the highest incidence of extreme weather events per year. The paper uses a fixed effects design to gauge the causal effect using variation in fetal exposure to these shocks by municipality and date of birth. The analysis finds negative effects of temperature shocks on birth health outcomes and no effect of rainfall shocks. The results indicate that heat waves lead to a 0.5 percentage point reduction in the probability of being born at full term and a decline of 0.4 percentage point in the probability of newborns classified as healthy. The timing of exposure to the shock matters and it matters differently for different outcomes. These findings are critical to prioritize responses to counteract the negative effects of weather, particularly hot shocks, which are projected to become more frequent and intense with changing climate.

SummaryThe growing involvement of the Chinese state and business in Africa has generated significant debate about China’s Africa strategy and the benefits for Africa’s development. What is the nature of Chinese state capitalism in Africa? This study examines Chinese state–business relations and argues that China’s involvement in Africa is more complex than often portrayed. It aims to build a closer understanding of the diverse factors that influence the Chinese state–business relations as it is implemented in Africa. This paper focuses on how state–business interactions influence agricultural development outcomes, using six case-studies from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It explores the question of how far the state can control business and direct development by identifying the key relationships that influence the decision-making processes of state and business actors within China and its African engagement. The paper challenges the conventional wisdom of homogenized, unitary relations. It argues that these relations are, in practice, heterogeneous, as a result of the state being disaggregated into a multiplicity of provincial relations and central state agencies, and tensions arising between commercial market and political interests. The active role of African governments in agricultural schemes is also affecting outcomes. China’s engagement is multivariate, involving a multiplicity of agencies, operating at different levels, structures, and processes with sometimes contrary interests and goals. The findings of an analysis of six state–business projects in the agricultural sectors of Zimbabwe and Mozambique suggest that where agriculture is concerned, a wide range of Chinese agencies are involved, with businesses being driven by either market forces or national state interests, which together make outcomes less open to generalization.

Summary Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centre (ATDC) has been considered as an alternative model to pursue sustainability of Chinese foreign aid to African countries in the new era. This paper attempts to examine the ATDC scheme, particularly focus on the knowledge construction at macro level of design and the knowledge encounter at micro level of daily operation based on the case studies in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Our study finds multiple facets of the ATDC, i.e., the cleavage between the macro-level of policy design and micro level of implementation realities; the interplay between knowledge and politics, and appearance of possible alternative development pathways stimulated by ATDCs in African countries. The paper argues that even though the ATDC is a technology-centered scheme, it is inevitably a social and political process in implementation, resulting in the discontinuity of the policy results. With a whole set of ideas and imaginaries being delivered, frustrated, and negotiated, the ATDC creates a very different vision to the established CG system, or the western bilateral aid programs. As an embodiment of a “traveling technocratic rationality”, the ATDCs are important sites for negotiations over knowledge and politics, and the meanings of aid, investment, and development, as part of the wider playing out of China’s engagement in Africa.

Summary International trade in medicinal herbal products is growing, while value chains are becoming more complex and governed by a range of public and private standards. There is a debate over the extent to which phytomedicine production can be beneficial for farmers in low- and middle-income countries. More generally, there are varied views about the extent to which small farmers are disadvantaged by stringent public health and private consumer standards in northern markets for agricultural products. This paper proves a comparative analysis of value chains, using case studies of turmeric production in India. It marries a qualitative investigation of turmeric producing sites in India with an investigation into the chemical quality of various turmeric products. The aim of the paper is to understand the way that varied structure and governance of value chains changes the benefits to both producer and consumer. When production is for the organic northern market, we found evidence of a “captive” value chain, where the lead firm requires strict adherence to conditions of production and processing. Prices for farmers were relatively stable, at a reasonably high level. In contrast, where farmers were producing for local markets, including the major auction at Erode, prices were volatile and farmers bore considerable risk. We found that competition and volatility in the market-based chain can lead to turmeric adulteration and contamination, both intentional and unintentional. Our case study suggests that many small turmeric farmers would find it difficult to meet both public and private health standards, in contrast to some academic literature that argues that public health standards do not discriminate against small farmers. More than this, our study adds to the discussion of the impact of standards, suggesting clear consumer benefits in northern markets. However, there are also indications that only larger and more dynamic farmers can participate in the lucrative phytomedicine trade. As such, our study tentatively supports previous literature suggesting that the application of standards in northern markets lead to increasing farmer differentiation.

Firms from emerging countries such as Brazil, India, and China (BIC) are going global, and Europe is attracting around one-third of their direct outward investments. Growing internationalization constitutes an opportunity for technological catch up. In this paper we analyze BIC firms' cross-border inventions with European Union (EU-27) actors, during the period 1990-2012. Our results suggest that cross-border inventions represent an opportunity for BIC firms to accumulate technological capabilities, access frontier knowledge, and appropriate the property rights of co-inventions. This paper contributes to the understanding of the catching up process by emerging country firms, and offers some policy recommendations.

In projecting global food demand to 2050, much attention has been given to rising demand due to the projected population increase from the current 7.4 billion to more than 9 billion. An increasingly important source of the increase in food demand is per capita demand growth induced by rising income per person. Since the proportion of income spending on food decreases as incomes rise, growth in global food demand will be greater if incomes grow faster in developing countries than in high-income countries. Such a pattern of income convergence has become established in recent years, making it important to assess the implications for food demand and supply. Using a resource-based measure of food that accounts for the much higher production costs associated with dietary upgrading, this paper concludes that per capita demand growth is likely to be a more important driver of food demand than population growth between now and 2050. Using the middle-ground International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis Shared Socioeconomic Pathway projections to 2050, which assume continued income convergence, the paper finds that the increase in food demand (102 percent) would be roughly a third greater than without convergence (78 percent). Since the impact of convergence on the supply side is much more muted, convergence puts upward pressure on world food prices, partially offsetting a baseline trend toward falling world food prices to 2050.

With emerging recognition of changing climates’ impact on agricultural productivity, a sharper lens is focused on how to target agricultural public investments for development. This paper contributes to an understanding of budget decision-making processes in agricultural development, by examining to what extent those with superior information and expertise on a sector have sway over how public resources to the sector are allocated. The empirical qualitative analysis of this paper employs process tracing with an embedded case study design, based on interviews of 79 senior public sector key-informants in Nigeria. We also analyzed quantitative public expenditure data in the study areas. We draw insights from theories of information asymmetries in the public sector along three dimensions. Within the first type of information asymmetry, we find that, despite the higher agricultural technical expertise that sector bureaucrats have vis-a-vis the elected non-sector-specific chief executives, it is the latter who heavily influence agricultural resource allocation. In the second form of information asymmetry, the benefits from superior lower-tier information are only exploited at one subnational (state) level but not at the other (local government) level. Within the third kind of information asymmetry, public leaders prioritize funding for those types of public investments that are more visible by their nature, and outputs of which materialize relatively rapidly; this disfavors agriculture. Going beyond the literature on the impact of information interventions, this study sheds light on the extent to which information already in the public sector is tapped into to guide the provision of public goods and services.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call upon all countries to achieve 17 broad development goals by 2030. The SDGs are a central component of many national development plans and foreign aid strategies. While the SDGs have become a central aspect of development planning, how achievable are they under present conditions? This paper explores a dynamic “middle-of-the-road” baseline global development scenario (Shared Socio-economic Pathway 2) using an integrated assessment model (International Futures) to evaluate progress toward target values on nine indicators related to six human development SDGs. We find that, between 2015 and 30, the world will make only limited progress towards achieving those SDGs with our current set of policy priorities. Our study finds that across the variables explored here (nine indicators for 186 countries = 1674 country-indicators), 43 percent had already reached target values by 2015. By 2030, target values are projected to be achieved for 53 percent of country-variables. This paper highlights special difficulty in achieving targets on some SDG indicators (access to safe sanitation, upper secondary school completion, and underweight children) representing persistent development issues that will not be solved without a significant shift in domestic and international aid policies and prioritization. In addition, we highlight 28 particularly vulnerable countries that are not projected to achieve any of the nine human development related target values in a middle-of-the-road scenario. These most vulnerable countries (MVCs) must be the focus of international assistance.

In India, role of women as farm managers has been veiled behind image of men as primary decision makers on farms. Data shows that approximately 8% farm households had women farm managers in India in 2004, and this number increased to 11% in 2011. This rising phenomenon of farm management by women begets an in depth understanding about these farms, including, differentials in productivity levels across men and women managers. This paper uses three measures to capture productivity – production value, profit value and crop specific yields. Results show that total farm production and profits are lower by approximately 11% in households where women manage farms. This falls to 7% when controls for crop choice, input usage, location and farmer characteristics are included. The main mediating factors in explaining the productivity gap are crop choice and input usage, explaining almost 45% of the productivity gap. Further, the paper provides suggestive evidence on mechanisms contributing to the remaining productivity difference that cannot be explained by differences in observed characteristics. It shows that inadequate experience of women farm managers in agricultural production processes can be an important factor behind the remaining gap. The study makes two contributions to the literature – one, it is the first quantitative study in the Indian context on gender differentials in farm productivity and second, it applies semi-parametric decomposition techniques to look at the productivity differentials along the entire distribution.

Summary Despite some progress in the last decade, Sub-Saharan Africa’s participation in the global economy remains generally limited and poorly diversified. Among the various reasons behind the lack of competitiveness of Sub-Saharan Africa exports, this paper analyzes whether changes in market access conditions affect export diversification. The findings of this paper indicate that market access conditions remain important and that the presence of trade relationships depends not only on favorable market access conditions but also on how these compare relative to foreign competitors. These results imply that freer trade within Sub-Saharan African countries could provide significant incentive to intra-regional trade.

This paper provides unique evidence of the positive consequences of seasonal migration for investments in early childhood development. The authors analyze migration in a poor shock-prone border region in rural Nicaragua where it offers one of the main household income diversification and risk coping strategies. IV estimates show, somewhat surprisingly, that in particular mother's migration has a positive effect on early cognitive development. The authors attribute these findings to changes in income and to the intra-household empowerment gains resulting from mother's migration, which offset potential negative ECD effects from temporary lack of parenting. This paper, hence, illustrates how increased opportunities in seasonal migration due to higher South-South mobility might positively affect early childhood development and as such long-term poverty reduction.

Green industrial policies around renewable energy (RE) are growing increasingly prevalent in emerging economy contexts as a means to foster low-carbon industrialization pathways. However, policymakers often face a tradeoff in their policy designs. In this paper, we focus on the tradeoff between minimizing the cost of low-carbon energy generation to fuel traditional input-intensive industrialization strategies, and implementing potentially costly measures to build local industries around low-carbon energy technologies. Specifically, we utilize the cases of Mexico and South Africa to investigate how each country’s distinct prioritization of these two objectives led to a divergence of their RE auction designs and outcomes. Specifically, using data on the involvement of local and foreign actors in Mexican and South African RE projects, policy documents, and interviews with public and private stakeholders in the two countries, we show how each country’s policy design shaped RE market and bid price developments, and the formation of local RE value chains. We find that the prioritization of low-cost RE generation can result in a greater reliance on existing foreign value chains and capital, without building the local capabilities that could result in greater long-term benefits for the market. We further discuss the implications of our results for policymakers, focusing on providing recommendations for RE industrial policy design in general, and the calibration of local content incentives in particular.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between life satisfaction and empowerment in rural Bangladesh. We analyse this relationship across region, religion, gender and income categories using data from the BIHS 2012. This dataset has detailed socio-economic information on co-resident couples and also provides information on the empowerment of individuals within the household. We correct for endogeneity both by including a range of community and household fixed effects to capture the impact of omitted variables as well as by estimating an instrumental variable model in which the average participation rate in community activities is our identifying variable. Our results are robust and indicate a positive relationship between empowerment and life satisfaction. Analysing the sub-components of the empowerment index, we find that women draw less satisfaction from having a say in production decisions and use of borrowed money but gain more satisfaction from membership in groups. The puzzle of “contented women” (i.e. the gender gap in life satisfaction) therefore is partly explained by the fact that men and women differ in the way they draw satisfaction from different domains of empowerment.

How to understand impact, recognise different types of knowledge and assess quality in a transdisciplinary project? The authors were faced with these questions at the start of a four-year project created to address aspects of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of clean water and sanitation. The decision by a project consortium to adopt a transdisciplinary approach – i.e. research that emphasises the need to include both scientific and societal stakeholders – raised a number of practical issues. In particular, issues relating to an understanding of research impact; the existence of alternative knowledge typologies in transdisciplinary research; and uncertainty regarding an assessment of research quality – given the involvement of multiple discipline paradigms. The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate a novel analytical framework that addresses issues relating to impact, knowledge and quality in transdisciplinary research. The purpose of developing the framework was to address some of the inherent problems of transdisciplinary research – in particular how to structure the different perceptions and expectations of project consortium partners. The framework was constructed through an iterative process of data collection and qualitative analysis in the initial phase of the project. This process enabled the authors to structure, in a meaningful way, the perceptions of different scientific and societal actors in the project consortium. The framing exercise raised wider issues concerning how to assess the quality of transdisciplinary research. The importance of the study is that it presents new ways by which academics and practitioners can address some of the inherent problems involved in undertaking transdisciplinary research.

We review briefly recent trends in food security and violent conflict and the quantitative literature discussing their interactions, as reflected by the papers in this special issue. We find a large diversity in experiences of food security and conflict, posing a challenge for causal identification which can be resolved by spatially disaggregated, high frequency micro-level data on both food security and conflict. We identify examples of strong individual and institutional capacities to cope with conflict, maintaining food security against the odds across very diverse settings, stressing the importance in accounting for the type of conflict at the micro-level. We also discuss how the concept of resilience is a useful lens for understanding household food security in conflict settings and we outline how food insecurity and conflict can lead to protracted crises. Finally, we identify future research topics in this field. Overall, the special issue contributes to the literature on food security and violent conflict by highlighting three insights: First, the need for adequate data to advance the analytical and policy agendas; second, the diversity of experiences of conflict and food security; and, third, the decisive role played by specific practices and policies in smoothing the negative effects of conflicts for food security.

The literature on poverty convergence is sparse and much of the empirical evidence relies on Ravallion (2012) who found a lack of poverty convergence across some ninety Less Developed Countries (LDCs) during 1980–2007. This paper revisits cross-country poverty convergence using data from the same sources but an extended period of 1980–2014. We find that while poverty convergence remains absent across LDCs, it is present in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during the extended period. Initial poverty canceling the effectiveness of growth in reducing poverty explains the lack of poverty convergence across LDCs; while a strong growth effect dominating the adverse effect of initial poverty on growth effectiveness explains the strong poverty convergence found in SSA. A direct adverse link between initial poverty and subsequent growth – which Ravallion (2012) recognized as the main impediment to poverty convergence during 1980–2007 – is not found in this study.

Motivated by the siloed nature of much poverty research, as well as the challenge of finding inclusive operational definitions of poverty, this study reflects on the merits of seeking to reconcile economic (quantitative) and anthropological (qualitative) analytical approaches. Drawing on detailed evidence from Mozambique, we highlight fundamental philosophical tensions in poverty research along three main axes: social ontology (what is the form of social reality?); (b) epistemology (what can be known about poverty?); and (c) aetiology (how is poverty produced?). We argue the quantitative tradition is rooted in an atomistic view of the social world, which is allied to an etic epistemology in which causes and effects are treated as analytically separable. Anthropological work in Mozambique is anchored in an emic perspective, where the diverse forms of poverty are revealed through investigation of their generative mechanisms. This provides a view of poverty as a relational process of social marginalization and directs attention to the diversity of lived-experiences, as well as structural factors that limit individuals’ agency. In clarifying their distinct philosophical commitments, we contend that a forced empirical marriage of the two approaches may be unhelpful. Instead, we recommend the virtues of each approach are leveraged toward genuine mutual dialogue.

Access to electricity in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, where livelihoods are predominantly based on small scale farming, is significantly low. Extending centralised national electricity grids to these rural areas faces significant technical and financial constraints. As a result, many see household-financed decentralised technologies such as small standalone solar photovoltaic (PV) systems as being important for achieving greater electricity access. However, rural farm households typically face a range of market imperfections including lack of access to credit, investment irreversibility (or absence of second-hand markets) and farm production/income risk which act as barriers to their ability and/or willingness to invest. This paper examines how these market imperfections impact on the adoption of standalone solar PV systems for small scale farm households in Uganda. We consider how temporary or permanent these barriers to adoption are when farm production/income is uncertain. We do so by using a dynamic programming model which captures household investment in small scale solar PV systems where significant positive benefits arise through assumed improved farm productivity or income effects, while allowing for credit constraints, investment irreversibility and income risk. Although strong positive incentives exist in the model to adopt a solar PV system, the results show that adoption rates are substantially lower for credit constrained households, with only 40% of these households adopting immediately, compared with over 70% of credit unconstrained households. While these adoption rates do increase over time, only 60% of credit constrained households have adopted within 5 years compared with nearly all credit unconstrained households adopting within the same time period. In the longer term for almost 30% of households the credit constraints act as a permanent barrier to adoption. The presence of a well-functioning second-hand market does increase household consumption and welfare but the impacts on overall adoption rates are rather small.

Food aid constitutes a heated debate in development discourse. In Nepal’s Himalayan region, it is blamed for aggravating food insecurity by inducing dependency and negatively affecting local agriculture and diet patterns. Transferring large amount of rice, a grain scantily produced locally, food aid is considered to have worsened human nutrition by directing the traditionally diverse diet to rice-based monotonous diet. The aid dependent farmers are alleged to have given up cultivating land for less preferred local grains, ultimately reducing local food production and reproducing the need for more aid. Therefore, the removal of food aid is considered indispensable to the achievement of self-sustained food security. This paper examines the dependency narrative in light of empirical data produced by a mixed-method study conducted in Humla, a highly food insecure district in western Nepal. The results show no indication of ‘dependency’ as alleged in the narrative. Despite the free/concessional food transfers, the local farms have not only maintained diverse traditional crops, recent agricultural innovation has actually increased on-farm crop diversity. On average, the local grains contribute about 65% of the total local consumption signifying a diet pattern well embedded with the local food system. Food aid transfers cover about 20% of the total food need and constitute an important resource for households suffering high food scarcity. Therefore, we argue that the idea of removing food aid in the guise of “dependency” will directly affect many poor farmers’ food access, and will also leave an increased number of Himalayan farmers vulnerable to food insecurity in the face of emerging environmental and socio-economic stresses.

The paper critically reviews the arguments for and against both employment guarantees and income guarantees when viewed as rights-based policy instruments for poverty reduction in a developing economy, with special reference to India. Evidence on India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act does not suggest that the potential for either providing work when needed or reducing current poverty is being realized, despite pro-poor targeting. Instead, work is often rationed by local leaders in poor areas, and the poverty impact is small when all the costs are considered. Decentralized implementation of the right-to-work poses serious challenges in poor places. The option of income support using cash transfers also has both pros and cons. Widely-used methods for finely targeting cash transfers tend to miss many poor people, and discourage those reached from earning extra income. Yet it cannot be presumed that switching to a universal basic income will reduce poverty more than workfare or finely-targeted transfers; that is an empirical question and the answer will undoubtedly vary across settings, belying the generalizations often heard from advocates. Nonetheless, more incentive-neutral, universal and/or state-contingent transfer schemes merit consideration in settings in which existing public spending is skewed against poor people and/or there is scope for raising taxes on the rich.

Certification systems (CS) set and monitor voluntary standards to make agricultural production sustainable in socio-economic terms and agricultural trade fairer for producers and workers. They try to achieve a wide range of socio-economic and environmental effects through bundles of interventions that include the process of standard setting and compliance, advocacy among consumers, capacity building for producers, building supply chains, price interventions, and the application of acceptable labour standards, overall to improve the wellbeing of farmers and agricultural workers. This paper presents the results of a mixed-method systematic review that synthesized the literature on socio-economic effects of certification systems on agricultural producers and wage workers in low and middle income countries. The review followed the Campbell Collaboration guidelines for systematic reviews, and included studies published between 1990 and 2016 in different languages, with evidence on low and middle income countries. The review included a quantitative effectiveness question focused on a range of intermediate (e.g. prices, wages) and endpoint outcomes (e.g. household income). It also included a question on barriers, facilitators and contextual factors shaping effectiveness which drew on qualitative or mixed-method studies. Eligible certification systems were based on second- (industry-level) or third-party certifications, and excluded own-company standards. For the effectiveness review, quantitative impact evaluations must use experimental or non-experimental methods demonstrating control for selection bias. With these inclusion criteria, the review includes 43 studies used for analysing quantitative effects, and 136 qualitative studies for synthesizing barriers, enablers and other contextual factors. Most included studies report on initiatives in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa and focus primarily on agricultural producers. The quality of the included studies is mixed, and several studies are weak on a number of methodological fronts, especially on statistical reporting. Overall, there is limited and mixed evidence on the effects of CS on a range of intermediate and final socio-economic outcomes for agricultural producers and wage workers. There are positive effects on prices and income from the sale of produce is higher for certified farmers. However, workers' wages do not seem to benefit from the presence of CS and, further along the causal chain, we find no evidence that total household income improves with certification. The integrated synthesis of quantitative and qualitative studies shows that context matters substantially in all causal chains and multiple factors shape the effectiveness and causal mechanisms that link interventions associated with certification and the wellbeing of producers, workers and their families.