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Future climate change policy in developing countries is likely to require both technology transfer and the achievement of a “development dividend.” This paper analyzes how cross-sector partnerships between investors, municipalities, and citizens can enhance both technology transfer and local deliberation about development benefits. Adopting a political institutional approach, the paper compares examples of partnerships involving waste-to-energy investment in India, the Philippines, and Thailand to consider how more and less complex forms of contracting and deliberation may advance policy. Building partnerships that can reduce costs and increase local deliberation is an important complement to formal mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism.

"Although achieving in situ conservation is possible without changing farmers' customary management of crops as common pool resources, an alternative approach is to negotiate a bioprospecting contract with providers of the resource that involves direct payment and royalties. This bioprospecting mechanism implies a change in the customary treatment of crop genetic resources as common pool goods and is in line with national ownership mandated by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This paper questions the value of bioprospecting for protecting traditional agricultural knowledge and argues for a common pool approach. It examines the nature of crop genetic resources and farmers' knowledge about them, and it analyzes the nature of the ‘common heritage' regime that was partly dismantled by the Convention on Biological Diversity. The paper reviews the implementation of access and benefit sharing schemes under the CBD and discusses programs to recognize Farmers' Rights that have arisen since the establishment of the CBD. It concludes with recommendations for meeting the Farmers' Rights mandate of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture." Author's Abstract

Summary This paper studies the characteristic features of the escape from high mortality as recorded from the historical experience of Northwestern Europe and from the current experience of less developed countries. The paper documents stylized facts of mortality change and measures the contribution of economic development, represented by income per capita, to the mortality decline during the second half of the 20th century. The paper argues that improvements in economic conditions since the 18th century are an important factor behind the decline in death rates in developed countries and in the subsequent reduction of death rates in less developed countries. We show that economic development lowers mortality through differential effects in infectious disease mortality and that quantitatively, income growth is able to account for between one-third and one-half of the recent mortality decline.

This paper addresses the issue of chronic poverty in Rwanda, an issue which has not been addressed specifically in the policy debate, despite the fact that it is likely to be widespread. In part this has reflected lack of available evidence, in that the conventional sources used to analyze chronic poverty are not available. We argue in this paper that by judicious combination of existing qualitative (a high quality nationwide participatory poverty assessment) and quantitative sources (a household survey) it is possible to identify and characterize a clearly distinct group of chronically poor households, whose characteristics are different from the poor as a whole.

Drawing on recently completed firm-level surveys in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Peru, this paper investigates the relationship between investment climate and international integration. These standardized surveys of large, random samples of firms in common sectors reveal how firms experience bottlenecks and delays in hard infrastructure such as power and telecom as well as in soft infrastructure such as customs administration. The authors focus primarily on measures of the time or monetary cost of different bottlenecks (e.g., days to clear goods through customs, days to get a telephone line, sales lost to power outages). For many of these costs, the obstacles are lower in China than in the South Asian or Latin American countries. There is also systematic variation across cities within countries. The authors estimate a probit function for the probability that a randomly chosen firm is foreign-invested and a separate probit for the probability that a randomly chosen firm is an exporter. These measures of international integration are higher where investment climate is better. For locations to take advantage of opportunities in the international market, they need good infrastructure and a sound regulatory environment. The interaction of openness and sound investment climate creates a good environment for investment and production. This paper helps explain why China has been so successful over the past decade, both in terms of integration and of rapid growth, while other countries have had varied success.

Summary This paper analyzes policies affecting global groundnut-products markets. The new US groundnut policy is now a minor source of distortion in world markets where India and China stand out as the major distorters. We analyze and quantify the effects of groundnut-products trade liberalization on consumer welfare and producer income. Our analysis shows that African exporters would gain significantly from reductions in protection and subsidies in India, and to a lesser extent, China, although China’s exports of food-quality groundnuts would expand dramatically. Net-importing OECD countries would suffer from higher world prices. The paper draws direct implications for the Doha trade negotiations.

Summary This paper considers whether Africa can absorb a doubling of aid. If oil revenues provide a “natural experiment” the results are disappointing: far from being transformational, they have been markedly less successful than aid. One implication is that the delivery modalities of aid, though heavily criticized, have substantially added value: the paper discusses which modalities may have been most useful. Unfortunately, aid appears to be subject to diminishing returns, so that doubling aid through conventional modalities would not double its impact. The paper concludes by considering innovations in aid modalities, which might offset diminishing returns.

Summary Household consumption surveys suggest that the downward trend in rural poverty indicators recorded in Uganda during the 1990s has been reversed since 2000. This paper examines the Ugandan government’s strategy to reduce rural poverty, the Plan for Modernization of Agriculture (PMA). It argues that, while there appear few better choices of “target” for the PMA than to improve incomes of the rural poor through increased agricultural productivity, emphasis on decentralization as a mechanism for poverty reduction is misplaced in the current political context of Uganda. The paper considers what alternative mechanisms might better deliver reductions in rural poverty.

Metadata only record Using primary data from a survey of expert opinion, this paper identifies key successes emerging in African agriculture. Among these, major commodity-specific successes identified include breakthroughs in maize breeding across Africa, sustained gains in cassava breeding and successful combat of its disease and pests, control of the rinderpest livestock disease, booming horticultural and flower exports in East and Southern Africa and increased cotton production and exports in West Africa. Using a dynamic analytical framework, the paper attempts to identify key ingredients that appear necessary for building on these individual cases and expanding them into broad-based agricultural growth.

Development studies have paid less attention to the role of technological innovations and we are yet to understand how, and more importantly why, technological trajectories differ across countries. This gap becomes sharper as emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly important in addressing many world development challenges. Drawing on insights from institutional work literature, this paper develops a structure-agency interplay framework to unravel the various trajectories of emerging technologies at the national level and examines the development and diffusion of AI in Canada and China. The findings show that Canada’s stable institutional environment, reinforced through institutional work by various actors, generated a national AI trajectory driven by technology development through a strong focus on scientific research and ethics, with slower organic commercialisation of AI. In China, a dynamic and loose institutional structure characterised by lax regulations, low entry barriers, and high openness to novelties has resulted in a market-driven AI trajectory focused on technology commercialisation, with domestic digital giants and the government as dominant players. National-level dynamics in formal institutions, informal institutions, technologies, and actor strategies determine heterogeneous approaches to technology development and diffusion, giving rise to varieties of technological trajectories. The levels of institutionalisation exert different forces and create different spaces for institutional work across different geographical contexts.

We propose and test an internationally-comparable country-level index of the adequacy of the housing environment for protecting children from ill-health. The housing environment for protection (HEP) index combines seven easily-monitored indicators of housing conditions related to communications, density of occupants, toilet and handwashing facilities, the use of finished construction materials, and cooking facilities. In calibrating and validating the HEP index, the paper uses infant mortality, the incidence of child illnesses and child stunting. We calculate the HEP index for the 41 developing countries with complete recent data from the Demographic and Health Surveys. We find that only 8% of households fully comply with all our identified housing conditions, though there is considerable variation across countries, with full compliance varying from virtually zero to almost 60% of households. A poor HEP is found to be associated with significantly worse health outcomes among children. This finding is robust to adding controls for likely confounders such as income and poverty. Our results suggest that reducing the incidence of ill-health among children is in part achieved by reducing income poverty, but also depends crucially on how much income gains tend to directly improve housing conditions.

The paper clarifies the “meso-economy” concept by defining it as comprising both the market mechanisms and administrative procedures through which policy decisions and market signals trickle down to the household level. Three main bodies of literature are reviewed: the policy-oriented literature in which the meso-economy was initially considered; the transaction cost approach analyzing market and policy failures, and the “micro-economy” level of agricultural household models. The paper develops a synthesis of macro-, meso- and micro-economic perspectives, which focuses on the roles played by three levels of filters intervening along the policy chain. Implications for policy and research are drawn.

Which are the effects of pandemics on the returns to factors of production? Are these effects persistent over time? These questions have received renewed interest after the out-burst of deaths caused by Covid-19. The Spanish Flu is the closest pandemic to Covid-19. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the Spanish Flu on the returns to labor and capital in Spain. Spain is an ideal country to perform this exercise. First, the “excess death rate” was one of the largest in Western Europe and it varied substantially across regions. Second, Spain was transitioning towards industrialization, with regions in different stages of development. Third, Spain was developed enough to have reliable data. We identify the effect of the Spanish Flu by exploiting within-country variation in “excess death rate”. Our main result is that the effect of the Spanish Flu on daily real wages was large, negative, and broadly short-lived. The effects are heterogeneous across occupations and regions. The negative effects are exacerbated in (i) occupations producing non-essential goods like shoemakers and (ii) more urbanized provinces. Quantitatively, relative to pre-1918, the decline for the average region ranges from null to around 30 percent. In addition, we fail to find significant negative effects of the flu on returns to capital. Whereas the results for dividends are imprecisely estimated (we cannot reject a null effect), the effect on real estate prices (houses and land), driven by the post-1918 recovery, is positive. Experts on inequality have argued that pandemics have equalizing effects especially in a Malthusian setting, due to real wage increases. Our findings suggest that, at least, for a developing economy like Spain in the early 20th century, this result does not apply. Indeed, we document that the flu pandemic was conducive to a (short-run) reduction in real wages. In addition, we interpret our heterogeneous results as suggestive evidence that pandemics represent a demand shock.

This paper investigates the spatial diffusion of an intergovernmental grant in Benin. Using static and dynamic spatial models, we estimate the spillover effects of the Fonds d'Appui au Développement des Communes (FADeC) on per capita local government expenditure in the 77 municipalities from 2008 to 2015. Neighborliness – a measure of interdependence – is captured through geographic and distance-based spatial weighting schemes. In addition, we constructed a measurement of ethnic affinity as an alternative spatial weighting scheme to test for the existence of an ethno-spatial interdependence in local public finance in Benin. The empirical results suggest that a statistically significant share of the total effects of the FADeC stems from indirect elasticities or the diffusion process of grants received by neighboring jurisdictions, regardless of how we measure neighborliness. The results also confirm the existence of a robust ethno-spatial interdependence and complementarity in local government expenditure in Benin. The spillovers across ethnic neighbors are estimated to be 13.9% of the total effects in the short-run and 15.5% in the long-run. Put differently, the effects of the FADeC in a given municipality are influenced by the transfers received by its ethnic (and linguistic) neighbors. The findings point to the appeal of inter-governmental transfers for the decentralized financing of public services, especially in low-income countries where local bureaucratic capacity in raising own-source revenues might be limited. Supporting local governments with well-structured grants can not only be a channel to foster local public provision but also contribute to pushing geographic or ethnic neighboring localities to increase their own spending and generate positive spillovers that are crucial for wholistic regional development., World Development, 158, ISSN:0305-750X

Almost all developing countries are now experiencing demographic ageing. This paper examines the consequences of ageing for the poor. It assesses the extent to which the poor are participating in demographic ageing, or whether the process is largely restricted to relatively privileged groups. The paper observes that policy and research mainly focus on pensions programs, which have little relevance for most poor older people. It then describes livelihood patterns for poor elders, highlighting the importance of intergenerational exchange. Health policies are also found to largely ignore the needs of this group, and the expansion of private financing presents particular problems.

Too often the knowledge generated through food policy research does not become part of the local body of information and consequently is not used by policymakers. This leads to less than optimal food policies. Our paper highlights the need for better linkages between the food research and food policymaking processes. We propose that a key component of the linkage is the integration of clients into the research process. This paper discusses the link between food policy researchers and one group of clients—food policy decisionmakers. The paper first reviews the role of research and clients in the policymaking process and proposes a conceptual framework that integrates clients into the research process. Case studies utilizing client consultation in Ghana, India, Kenya, and Mali illustrate the hypothesis that integration of all client groups, including policy decisionmakers and in-country researchers, beginning at the priority-setting stage of the research process, may best influence ultimate policy decisions.

Using data from a national living standards survey undertaken in late 1993, this paper disaggregates and explores the economics of livelihood generation and class in rural South Africa in an effort to contribute to the ongoing and vociferous debate in South Africa about poverty and its alleviation. Pursuant to the suggestion of participants in a recent participatory poverty assessment, this paper analyzes what might be termed the class structure of poverty. After exploring the range of claiming systems and livelihood tactics available in rural South Africa, the paper offers a first look at who the poor are by disaggregating the rural population into discrete livelihood strategy classes. Non-parametric regression methods are used to then estimate and graphically explore the nature of the livelihood mapping between endowments and real incomes. In addition to identifying those endowment combinations that map to consumption levels below the poverty line (the asset basis of poverty), the topography of the estimated livelihood mapping helps identify the constraints that limit household's ability to effectively utilize their assets and endowments. These results suggest that poverty is a matter of not only having few assets, but also of constraints which limit the effectiveness with which those assets are used, and poverty and livelihood policy needs to be designed accordingly.

This paper contributes to the debate over land tenure in rural China by conceptualizing and measuring multiple dimensions of property rights in a way that elucidates the competing interests that are affected by the property rights regime. Utilizing a unique village-level data set, this paper argues that the regional and temporal variation in rural property rights signals a pattern in which decentralized institutional innovation occurs in response to the competing interests of the national state, of local authorities, and of present and possible future individual land users. Unlike the earlier debate concerning the household responsibility system, the current property rights dilemma is intrinsically more complex because the potential conflicts of interest between individuals, local collectives and the state are greater. Resolution of that debate will ultimately require careful exploration of the reality and substance of the tradeoffs and competing interests that make further reform of rural property rights so difficult.

Ignoring historical information is one of the major sources of error in development planning. Much can be learned about what works and what does not by examining unsuccessful interventions. This paper uses archival and ethnographic data to examine the very troubled history of cotton in Kirinyaga District, Kenya. It compares the crop's introduction and failure during the 1930s under British colonial rule with its later disappointing promotion by the independent Kenyan government in the 1960s and 1970s. The paper seeks to analyze how and why errors can arise, become embedded, and proliferate in agricultural development efforts. The paper also explores why planners sometimes have difficulties appreciating lessons from the past, especially those from colonial times. The paper calls for planners to redouble their efforts to learn from historical information.

This paper offers a simple model and corroborating empirical evidence that reconcile rivalrous claims about liberalization's impact on low-impact agrarian economies; growth and smallholder welfare reduction can go hand in hand. The model developed here reverses the causality o fBhagwati's well-known immiserizing growth model. Price shocks cause welfare effects that, in tum, drive output response, rather than output shocks, causing price shocks and then welfare effects, as in the trade theoretic original. Immiserized growth seems a plausible explanation for some important causes-e.g., the Malagasy case considered here-in which liberalization appears to have engendered both real agricultural growth and heightened food security stress among smallholder food producers.

This paper analyzes the repayment rates of 128 credit groups belonging to three group-based credit programs in Bangladesh: the Association for Social Advancement (ASA), the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), and the Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service (RDRS). Using TOBIT analysis, specific tests are performed on the following hypothesized determinants: group size, size of loans, degree of loan rationing, enterprise mix within groups, demographic characteristics, social ties and status, and occurrence of idiosyncratic shocks. The paper concludes that if basic principles of prudential banking are adhered to, repayment rates can be good even in poor and remote communities. The important thing for financial institutions is to tailor services such that it becomes worthwhile for the poor to establish a profitable long-term association. In addition, more freedom to members in the process of group formation is recommended.

This paper proposes a method to incorporate a concern for distributional inequalities of income, education, and longevity into the framework of the Human Development Index (HDI), as it is presently designed by the United Nations Development Programme. The paper constructs Gini coefficients, for a set of 20 developing countries, measuring inequalities in annual income, educational attainment, and life-span attainment. These calculations are combined with data from the HDI to produce an Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IAHDI). The implications of this proposed index for evaluating and promoting development are considered.

This paper examines strategies used by rural households in Ntcheu District, Malawi, to cope with a decreasing fuelwood availability. Fieldwork was carried out in 1990 and 1991. With increasing distance to woodlands, households initially collected further away, spending more time on collection. But when distance to woodlands increased further, households returned to nearby places using less time for collection and switching to lower quality woods. Results indicate that distance to collection place and collection time are not reliable indicators of fuelwood shortages. Households within the same village differed in collection strategies particularly as regards collection distance and collection frequency. Households that tended to collect further away and more frequently were large in size with more female adults. These households also collected more wood, even per capita, compared to smaller households, suggesting that smaller households economized on fuelwood use. This paper supports the idea that level of fuelwood used is not only determined by fuelwood availability, but more by labour availability.

Metadata only record In this paper we critically examine the concept of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). It proposes that there is an inverted U-shape relation between environmental degradation and income per capita, so that, eventually, growth reduces the environmental impact of economic activity. The concept is dependent on a model of the economy in which there is no feedback from the quality of the environment to production possibilities, and in which trade has a neutral effect on environmental degradation. The actual violation of these assumptions gives rise to fundamental problems in estimating the parameters of an EKC. The paper identifies other econometric problems with estimates of the EKC, and reviews a number of empirical studies. The inference from some such EKC estimates that further development will reduce environmental degradation is dependent on the assumption that world per capita income is normally distributed when in fact median income is far below mean income. We carry out simulations combining EKC estimates from the literature with World Bank forecasts for economic growth for individual countries, aggregating over countries to derive the global impact. Within the horizon of the Bank's forecast (2025) global emissions of SOI continue to increase. Forest loss stabilizes before the end of the period but tropical deforestation continues at a constant rate throughout the period.

This paper considers the implications of long-term trends in the international economy for the relative employment and income of men and women in developed and developing countries. We find that, given a persistent gender division of labor, mass unemployment in the North is due to different forces operating on men and women. The rate of growth of men's jobs has fallen because of deindustrialization, but men have not withdrawn from the labor force at a comparable rate. Women have been entering the labor force in feminized jobs at a faster rate than they have been created. In the South, women have largely taken traditionally feminized jobs in the labor-intensive, export-oriented growing manufacturing sectors; in Latin America, entry has been largely in the service sector. Men have been losing jobs in agriculture and domestic manufacturing. The paper proposes that the optimal solution to the mass unemployment problem in the North, as well as in the South, and the apparent competition for jobs between the North and the South and between men and women lies in achieving a trend increase in the growth rate of OECD and world aggregate demand and output. But such a trend rise in the long-term rate of growth of demand would only be possible if there were new cooperative institutional arrangements within and between countries. In such arrangements women need to have an important, independent role.

This paper argues that feminist analysis is finally making an impact in the field of economics. It begins with an historical overview of the alternative theoretical approaches that have discussed women's issues, particularly since the 1950s and 1960s, and it argues that, during the 1980s and 1990s, these approaches have tended to converge, at least partially, through the use of gender as a central category of analysis. The influence of postmodernism and the development of feminist theory have laid the basis for the task of transforming economics and engendering theory and policy. At the same time, feminist analysis has shifted from its main concentration on microeconomics to the discussion of macroeconomics. More specifically, the paper discusses two areas in which progress toward engendering economic analysis has been made since the late 1970s: 1. (a) the visibility of women's work and its inclusion in labor force and national accounting statistics, and 2. (b) macroeconomic issues, with focus on the area of gender and development and of structural adjustment policies, with particular reference to alternative models to the orthodox structural adjustment packages.

The global ecological crisis is the ultimate challenge to society's ability to learn. Traditional problem-solving approaches are inadequate to this challenge as they are based on the assumption that further development can solve the problems stemming from previous development programmes. This paper offers a rationale in support of these two propositions and proposes an alternative concept: social-environmental learning. An example of the actual application of this concept in the context of current issues of environment and development is described and the results are analyzed. The paper concludes with a conceptual framework within which further principles for social-environmental learning can be elaborated.

Previous research on the determinants of credit rationing focused exclusively on the behavior of formal lenders who contract directly with an individual borrower. Based on survey data from Madagascar, this paper presents an analysis of credit rationing by informal lenders and by members of community-based groups that allocate formal group loans among themselves. The results show that group members are able to obtain and to use locally available information about the applicant's creditworthiness in much the same way as informal lenders do. Both types of lenders use the applicant's debt-servicing obligations and income as the main criteria for credit rationing. This paper therefore empirically confirms theoretical arguments that community-based groups have an information advantage over distant formal bank agents.

Rural household travel patterns have been largely ignored in African transport studies. Over the past ten years, however, village-level surveys have been undertaken which reveal the preeminence of female porterage in rural transport activities. Donor agencies are now focussing efforts on "appropriate" transport technology interventions to directly enhance rural mobility and to indirectly improve agricultural productivity. Preliminary evidence, however, suggests that men rather than women are the main benficiaries of appropriate transport technology. This paper asks why and suggests a number of methodological refinements to future rural transport studies to generate the necessary information for devising programmes with a higher likelihood of effective assistance to rural women transporters. The paper reviews the findings on rural household transport demand emanating from surveys and literature reviews in East and West Africa.

The adoption of new technology is a key driver of firm performance and economic development. Yet the process of transferring and adopting new technologies is not seamless, particularly when the pace of technological change accelerates, and more advanced capabilities are required for the effective operation of new technology. In this paper we develop a framework for the analysis of the drivers of adoption of advanced digital production technologies associated with Industry 4.0 in developing economies. In particular, we ask whether firms' participation to global value chains (GVCs) can facilitate the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing sectors. Using a novel UNIDO database on firms' adoption of different generations of production technology in Ghana, Viet Nam, and Thailand, we find that firms' participation to GVCs is positively associated with the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies, and that adoption is positively associated with firm-level performance. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Countries that undertake serious and sustained programs of stabilization and structural adjustment should expect to attract significant new inflows of capital from donor countries and international institutions. While apparently beneficial, those flows can work at crosspurpose with other goals of the policy reforms. In particular, abundant foreign exchange loans can force an appreciation of the real exchange rate (often through domestic inflation rather than a nominal appreciation). In addition, since the government is almost always the recipient of these loans, it can crowd out the private sector if it increases its aggregate demand for domestic goods and services. If the crowding out is accomplished by tight monetary policy, it will fall primarily on private investment rather than consumption. This paper shows that both of these problems have surfaced in Ghana, a country that has become a favorite of donors after demonstrating a serious commitment to policies promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The paper also suggests modifications in macroeconomic policy that would help lower inflation and boost private investment.

The paper examines the relative importance and source of informal sector differentiation in terms of firm characteristics and business behavior. Based on data from metal and wood-processing firms in the Nigerian cities of Lagos and Ibadan, the paper investigates branch-specific and locational differences among firms. Using multivariate analysis, the study demonstrates the primacy of the larger economic environment in which informal sector firms operate, and shows that locational factors are better predictors of firm characteristics and business behavior than industry-specific factors. The results suggest a shift in focus from economic sectors to regional economics. Implications for research and policy are discussed.

Large forest reserves represent a long-standing state response to tropical forest destruction. There are, however, growing doubts about their effectiveness as sustainable resource management regimes. This case study uses a social and historical perspective to examine conflicts about the use and management of the Mount Kenya Reserve in Kirinyaga District, Kenya since independence in 1963. Official policies and practices have treated local households and small-scale forest enterprises as the most serious threat to the reserve. In contrast, the paper argues that forest degradation has long been associated with official mismanagement and government-sanctioned development activities. In addition, it suggests that planned and spontaneous conversion of woodlands accelerated in the mid-1980s largely because of the implementation of government plans to establish extensive forest plantations. The paper also discusses proposals by the local and national government to convert forest reserves into tea revenue farms.

Increasing electricity capacity is a major requirement for China's modernization. Yet one trend, the construction of very small (12 MW) coal-fired electric power stations, raises serious economic and environmental issues. These plants, built at the county level to supplement chronic power shortages, are far less efficient and far more polluting than larger coal plants being built at the provincial and national level. The paper examines the electric power industry in China. The paper reflects upon China's recent policies toward decentralization and the conflicts that are created between greater economic activity, rural development, and environmental quality. The paper searches for explanations to the continued construction of these small power facilities, the implications for the regional and world environment resulting from their operation, and both technical and political solutions to problems caused by their continued use.

How do weather anomalies affect the economy at the local level? This paper presents a new data set that links weather data to annual average night-light emission data for 24.000 0.5°× 0.5° grid-cells around the globe for the period 1992–2013. Interpreting night-light emission as a proxy for economic activity, these data allow one to investigate how weather anomalies affect economic activity. Global coverage avoids selection bias, while high spatial resolution avoids averaging out heterogeneity in local impacts at higher aggregation levels. Our data show significant effects on the local growth of night-light for storms, excessive precipitation, droughts, and cold spells. Moreover, we find evidence for significant spatial spillovers to neighboring areas. Our results suggest that these offsetting spillovers are typically local. As positive and negative effects average out in larger areas, our results call for the analysis of economic effects of weather anomalies at a high geographical resolution. Finally, our results are driven by events in lower income regions. As climate change is expected to make weather patterns more erratic, our new data can inform emerging debates on how this will affect the economy in both science and politics.

We combine new data from high-frequency surveys with data on the stringency of containment measures to examine the short-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on households in developing countries. This paper is one of the first to document the impacts of COVID-19 on households across a large number of developing countries and to do so for a comparable time-period, corresponding to the peak of the pandemic-induced drop in human mobility, and the first to systematically analyze the cross- and within-country effects on employment, income, food security and learning. Using representative data from 31 countries, accounting for a combined population of almost 1.4 billion, we find that in the average country 36 percent of respondents stopped working in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, 65 percent of households reported decreases in income, and 30 percent of children were unable to continue learning during school closures. Pandemic-induced jobs and income losses translated into heightened food insecurity at the household level. The more stringent the virus containment measures, the higher the likelihood of jobs and income losses. The pandemic's effects were widespread and regressive, disproportionally affecting vulnerable segments of the population. Women, youth, and workers without higher education - groups disadvantaged in the labor market before the COVID-19 shock - were significantly more likely to lose their jobs and experience decreased incomes. Self-employed and casual workers - the most vulnerable workers in developing countries - bore the brunt of the pandemic-induced income losses. Interruptions in learning were most salient for children from lower-income countries, and within countries for children from lower-income households with lower-educated parents and in rural areas. The unequal impacts of the pandemic across socio-economic groups risk cementing inequality of opportunity and undermining social mobility and calls for policies to foster an inclusive recovery and strengthen resilience to future shocks.

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.

Like high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) offer reduced rates and exemptions on particular goods and services in their value-added tax (VAT) systems. These policies are often motivated by distributional concerns and target items thought to take up a larger share of the budgets of poorer households. This paper explores the effectiveness of such policies in six LMICs. We estimate their impact on tax revenues, inequality and poverty, and compare these effects to existing cash transfer schemes and a hypothetical Universal Transfer (UT) funded by broadening the VAT base. To do so, we use tax-benefit microsimulation models incorporating input–output tables, allowing us to estimate the impact of exemptions on consumer prices due to VAT embedded in supply chains. We show that although preferential VAT rates reduce poverty, they are not well targeted towards poor households overall. Existing cash transfer schemes are better targeted but generally have limited coverage. A UT funded by a broader VAT base would create large net gains for the poorest households, reducing inequality and most measures of extreme poverty in each of the countries studied. Our results suggest that the widespread practice of providing special VAT treatment to certain goods and services is an expensive way of reaching poor households. In principle, expanding the VAT base and social protection schemes in tandem has the potential to both raise tax revenues and reduce poverty. Such reforms therefore warrant consideration for LMICs as they pursue Domestic Revenue Mobilisation and broader development objectives.

This paper examines the short-run and medium-run impact of spending in social infrastructure, defined as expenditure in education, childcare, health and social care, wages and gender pay gap on output and employment of men and women for the case of South Korea. Based on a gendered post-Kaleckian feminist macroeconomic theoretical model, we estimate the macroeconomic effects of social expenditure, wages and gender pay gap using a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) analysis for the period of 1970-2012. The results show that an increase in the public social infrastructure significantly increases the total non-agricultural output and employment in South Korea both in the short and medium run. Moreover, we find that higher social infrastructure expenditure increases female employment more than male employment in the short run and raises both male and female employment in the medium run due to increasing output. Finally, the results show that South Korean economy is gender equality-led in the medium run, although the effects are economically small in comparison to the strong effects of increases social infrastructure spending. The results indicate that sustainable equitable development and a substantial increase in employment requires a mix of both labour market and fiscal policies.

This paper reports estimates of the economic impact of changes in weather variables on sub-Saharan African pearl millet yield based on panel data for 1970 - 2016. We control for spatial effects in all the components of our exposure-response function, plus a lag in time of the covariates through spatio-temporal econometrics techniques. Our results indicate own-location weather variables have significant contemporaneous impacts on millet yield. Specifically, we find that vapor pressure deficit, wet day frequency and temperature are important determinants of millet yield. In addition, accounting for spatial and temporal spillovers exacerbates and attenuates wet day cumulative effect, respectively, and local crop production is affected by neighboring countries’ production. The results are robust to several sensitivity checks, including accounting for adaptation using long-term averages, and are consistent acrosscountry-income groups. We also use our estimates to forecast how crop production would respond to climate change in the mid-future.

Restoring degraded landscapes is critical for achieving global environmental and development goals, and agroforestry is increasingly promoted as a nature-based solution to land degradation. Farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) is an agroforestry-based approach for restoring degraded agricultural land and it has been widely implemented in African drylands. However, a recent systematic review found significant gaps in the evidence base for FMNR, including that its upscaling has been based on inadequate understandings of local contexts. Furthermore, studies reporting on farmer adoption of FMNR have mainly relied on quantitative data from household surveys, resulting in limited understandings of what motivates farmers who practice FMNR. This paper draws on the results of a qualitative study in northeastern Ghana to address two questions: 1) How and why do farmers practice FMNR? And 2) How does context influence farmers’ rationales for practicing FMNR? We found that farmers grounded their perspectives on the utility of FMNR in nuanced understandings of the local farming and land and tree tenure systems. The results of our study also demonstrate how farmers’ decision-making was situated within socially and agroecologically differentiated contexts, which were conditioned by long-term, multi-faceted change in the region. We conclude that in spite of the rush to scale up FMNR, more attention should be directed to assessing where, when, and for whom FMNR might be appropriate. Such assessments should be grounded in resource managers’ preferences, local agricultural and land and tree tenure systems, and the requisite biophysical conditions for FMNR. To support these efforts, we propose an FMNR suitability assessment framework, based on our findings and those from related studies. As landscape restoration is scaled up globally, initiatives should be informed by evidence demonstrating how and why resource managers might practice a restoration activity as well as how context influences their choices., World Development, 158, ISSN:0305-750X

In sub-Saharan Africa, many micro and small enterprises do not (or at least only partially) comply with official rules and regulations. Given that low compliance rates impede economic growth and human development, it is essential to identify mechanisms that can help improve abidance with laws. This paper investigates how the quality of governance (defined as comprising three dimensions: transparency, legal security and infrastructure quality) is related to firm-level compliance with business laws and regulations in the case of Mozambique. We utilise firms’ subjective perceptions of governance quality and their self-reported law compliance over time to study the governance–compliance nexus, taking into account unobserved firm-level heterogeneity. Furthermore, we examine whether political legitimacy acts as a mediator or a moderator between governance and compliance. Our results suggest that perceived improvements in transparency positively affect firms’ compliance with existing legislation. Requests from provincial government officials for firms to comment on local regulations seem to be especially important for law abidance. We find that legitimacy is independently associated with compliance, but does not seem to mediate or moderate the quality of governance. Overall, our results suggest that, even in one of the least developed and non-democratic parts of the world, active participation in political processes is positively associated with law compliance. Using panel data of manufacturing enterprises in Mozambique between 2012 and 2017, we investigate how changes in perceived quality of governance are related to firms’ law compliance.Controlling for firm-level unobserved heterogeneity, we look at three aspects of governance and their components: transparency, security, and infrastructure. We examine which of these have thepotential to alter firm compliance behaviour. We find that enterprises’ perceptions of transparency are key to law abidance. In particular, higher predictability of changes in the law, better access tolegal documents, and regular meetings with state officials improve firm compliance rates. Thus, we confirm results showing that more political participation and government openness increasecompliance with regulations, even in a non-democratic context. Additionally, we test whether political legitimacy acts as a mediator or a moderator in this governance–compliance relationship,but find no clear evidence of this being the case. However, we do confirm that legitimacy has an independent effect on firms’ compliance with regulations in the context of Mozambique.

This paper proposes a reformulation of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) fit for the 21st century. The article explores the rise and usage of the original SLF, highlighting how its popularity among development practitioners emerged both from its practical focus, and its depoliticization of wider shifts in the development landscape at the time. Distilling the various critiques that have emerged around the use of the SLF and sustainable livelihoods approaches, the article highlights problems of theory, method, scale, historical conceptualisation, politics, and debates on decolonising knowledge. It further explores two key shifts in the global development landscape that characterise the 21st century, namely the impacts of climate change on rural livelihoods, and the shifts wrought by globalisation, before highlighting the structural and relational turns in critical development literature. In speaking to both historical critiques and more recent debates, we present a SLF for the 21st century, foregrounding a structural, spatially-disaggregated, dynamic and ecologically-coherent approach to framing rural livelihoods. We offer a framework and not an approach, hoping that that our SLF leaves open the possibility for different theoretical traditions to better work with emerging rural livelihoods.

Global value chain (GVC) participation is generally seen as an important avenue for developing countries to access new markets and diversify exports, to add value to local industries and to increase employment. For developing country firms it provides opportunities to access knowledge to enhance learning and capability building. However, many firms in developing countries do not directly integrate into GVCs but rather into regional value chains (RVCs) or local value chains (LVCs), as these have become increasingly important due to the emergence of “Southern”-end markets and increased South-South trade. In this paper we examine and compare the role of involvement in these different types of value chains in stimulating supplier learning in the context of the IT-enabled service (ITES) industry. We distinguish between different types of learning and argue that learning outcomes depend crucially on value chain governance: the power balance and interactions between the lead firms and suppliers. We draw on a survey among the population of ITES providers in South Africa. These novel firm level data allow for a study of learning mechanisms in value chains at the firm level, going beyond prior studies of aggregate level relationships. In a multivariate analysis, we find that service providers in GVCs learn via interactions with their client firms. Yet, GVC participation is not the only avenue for client learning and capability building; we similarly observe learning in LVCs and RVCs. Learning is generally and strongly enhanced by trust-based governance of the client-supplier relationship, while in GVCs, control-based governance additionally promotes learning specifically in the IT domain. These findings provide a better understanding of how firms in developing countries can build capabilities in local, regional and global value chains of services, a topic that has gained interest among development practitioners. ispartof: World Development vol:141 issue:2021 pages:1-10 status: Published online

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic South Africa was praised for decisive political leadership based on scientific advice and the strictness of the measures it imposed to limit domestic spread of the virus. This paper critically examines the South African response through two conceptual frameworks. The first frames an optimal policy response as a solution to an intertemporal welfare-optimisation problem. The need for governments to balance epidemiological considerations and public health measures with the negative consequences of non-pharmaceutical interventions to limit transmission is particularly acute in developing countries. The second considers the use of scientific evidence and expertise through the lens of scientism – undue deference to science. The South African government erred towards drastic action in the face of predictions by some scientific advisors of a catastrophe, but initially without a clear, public long-term plan. Its lockdown has caused serious economic and societal harm across a range of measures. But these costs have not been matched by proportional benefits in health system preparedness or, based on evidence three months into the epidemic, a definitive improvement in expected long-term epidemic outcomes. This failure, and the questionably confident basis for the original lockdown decision, has been obscured by the government’s performative scientism – a public performance of deference to science – even in the absence of transparent decision-making. One consequence was a slower correction of strategy than merited by evidence of limited benefits and high costs of the lockdown. Another was an unwillingness to admit and explain errors after the fact. The latter, combined with the convincingness of the initial performance undermined the behavioural dimension of policy – leading to beliefs among citizens that confounded efforts by the state to adapt its policy stance through reopening schools, reducing the stringency of clinical guidelines and resuming various economic activities while nevertheless observing basic social distancing precautions.

In this paper we develop a typology to help design and improve spatial targeting of food and nutrition security (FNS) interventions. Using a comprehensive framework, the proposed approach allows for the broad identification and location of major food security bottlenecks. The resulting typology is based on an amendable demarcation of areas in a four-indicator diagram representing the four core dimensions of FNS. The proposed typology is applied to the rural territories of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Despite a continuum of heterogenous development challenges across the country, the typology helps identify clusters of territories that suffer from production, access, and utilization constraints. For the nine territories (out of 145) with the highest child stunting levels, we identify four broad intervention zones and analyze their efficiency profile in more detail. Despite its reductionist nature, our typology is conceptually sound, operationally flexible, and less data intensive, important features to promote evidence-based policymaking in contexts characterized by imperfect and scarce data.

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.