Search

Summary There has been a major expansion of social security programs in India during the last 15 years or so, along with wider recognition of economic and social rights. This paper discusses five programs that can be seen as partial foundations of a possible social security system for India: school meals, child care services, employment guarantee, food subsidies, and social security pensions. The record of these programs varies a great deal between Indian states, but there is growing evidence that they make an important contribution to human well-being, and also that the achievements of the leading states are gradually spreading to other states as well. Much scope remains for extending these efforts: despite the recent expansion, India’s social security system is still very limited in international perspective. The paper also discusses some general issues of social policy in India, such as the arguments for universalization versus targeting and the value of a rights approach to social security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • I examine whether households' consumption is influenced by that of their peers using Indian data. • I employ an instrumental variables/fixed effects approach. • I find robust evidence of peer effects in consumption. • Thus policies that influence household consumption are likely to have social spillovers. Abstract This paper examines peer effects in consumption in context of a less developed country. Specifically, the question that I seek to answer is whether consumption expenditure of a household is influenced by that of its peers in a less developed country. To examine this question, I use newly available household level data from India. I define a household's peer group as other households living in its village/neighborhood. In assessing the influences of peers in this context, there are two key empirical challenges including shared group-level unobservables, and simultaneity of peer influences. I address these issues by using an instrumental variables/fixed effects approach that compares households in the same district but different villages/neighborhoods who are thus exposed to different sets of peers. In particular, I use plausibly exogenous variation in idiosyncratic expenditure shocks – which are accidental and negative in nature – faced by peers as instruments for peers' consumption expenditure. Preferred specification suggests that a one standard deviation increase in average consumption expenditure of a household's peers causes the household's own consumption expenditure to increase by 0.42 standard deviations. Falsification tests and robustness checks support the validity of my results. My findings suggest that policies that influence a household's consumption will also affect the consumption of the household's peers through social interactions. This implies traditional analyses of consumption intervention programs that do not take into account such spillover effects will understate the total social impact of the programs, and hence lead to inaccurate evaluation of cost-effectiveness of such programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Past assessments of workfare schemes are inconsistent with the policy rationale in poor rural economies. • A new evaluation method is implemented for India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. • Targeting performance is good but not enough to compensate for the loss from work requirements. • The policy ranking switches in favor of a basic-income guarantee over workfare. Abstract Prevailing methods for evaluating workfare schemes are inconsistent with the arguments made for workfare in poor rural economies. Those arguments emphasize the existence of higher involuntary underemployment among the poor and the fact that the type of work provided by these schemes gives disutility, deterring non-poor households from participating. To include these features, the consumption-based welfare metric used in past assessments of workfare schemes in underemployed developing countries is generalized to incorporate a welfare loss from casual manual work, while allowing the government to independently value the work done for other reasons. Using data for India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the paper shows that the policy ranking switches in favor of a basic-income guarantee (BIG) over workfare. Allowing for a welfare loss from casual manual labor implies a more “poor-poor” targeting performance, but this is not sufficient to compensate for the direct welfare loss from the work requirement for plausible parameter values. A BIG dominates NREGS for a given total outlay on workfare wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data collection methods and poverty measures have not caught up with the reality of an increasingly urbanised world; as a result, urban poverty may be underestimated. This has important implications for targeting interventions and allocating resources in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Several problems affect the measurement of urban poverty: definitions of ‘slum’ settlements vary widely, data collection may undercount slum populations, insufficient data disaggregation may conceal intra-city disparities, and common indicators and assumptions may be ill-suited to assessing both income and multidimensional poverty in urban contexts. However, not enough is known about the extent to which these issues affect the resulting estimates. This paper contributes to the existing literature by illustrating the scale of the bias associated with common practices in measuring urban poverty at different stages of the production of poverty estimates. The analysis draws on selected examples in the literature alongside new analysis of data from Demographic and Health Surveys and Household Income and Expenditure Surveys. The article also provides recommendations on how to address each of these problems to improve urban poverty measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Risks due to the occurrence of climatic aberrations pose an impediment to the economic growth of the households in vulnerable regions. The frequency of these events is projected to increase in the foreseeable future, with developing countries being the worst sufferers. Dealing with this appears to be an additional burden on the resources of such countries, a large part of which is already devoted to providing better living standards for its inhabitants. Does this imply that developmental interventions should be discontinued? Is there a link between these programs and adaptation to environmental shocks? In an effort to answer such questions, the paper examines the impact of the developmental schemes on the livelihood of the households in Western Odisha, India and investigates whether they augment post disaster coping and adaptation as well. The results indicate that overall the programs have made an impact concerning their intended goals but the diffusion of benefits across beneficiary groups is heterogeneous. Additionally, the programs have contributed in post disaster coping, but only in the regions where either they performed well or their penetration was extensive. Activities promoting livelihood diversification, food security, and poverty reduction also tacitly facilitate improvements in the resilience of the individuals and communities thereby enhancing their capacity to deal with climatic risks. Policy implication advocates the continuation of developmental interventions. However, realigning their framework to incorporate actions intended toward disaster risk reduction and management would result in more inclusive impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Rice and wheat cultivating households gain from high global food prices. • Welfare gains mainly accrued to net producers. • In-kind food transfers insulated food consumption. • High rice and wheat prices led to greater workdays on own farm. This paper studies the impact of high global rice and wheat prices on household welfare in India. I use the 2007–08 surge in global food prices and household share of area under rice and wheat at the baseline to show that rice and wheat cultivating households gain from high prices. These welfare gains mainly accrue to net producers. I observe that net producer households were able to maintain their per capita spending and consumption of rice and wheat by decreasing consumption of market purchased rice and wheat and increasing consumption of government-subsidized rice and wheat. Net consumers, on the other hand, experienced a decline in the total per capita consumption of rice and wheat even though they substituted their market purchases with homegrown produce and subsidized grains. The role of in-kind food transfers in insulating households from high prices was evident for both net producers and consumers. The combined effect of substitution within food staples from different sources was that both net consumer and producer households could maintain their total calorie intakes and resist an increase in the total food expenditure. Finally, I find evidence that high rice and wheat prices induced working-age adult males in net producer households to increase total workdays and workdays on their own farm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Using a Hurdle model, the paper finds that although significant progress in gender equality in education was achieved during 1993–2005, pro-male gender bias still exists in the within-household allocation of educational expenditure. This bias occurs primarily through differential spending on sons and daughters in the primary and middle school age groups, but through the decision to enroll sons and not daughters in the secondary school age group. Bias is substantially greater in rural than urban areas. An important mechanism through which households spend less on girls is by sending sons to private schools and daughters to the fee-free government schools. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper examines evidence of gender biases in the decisions of agricultural households, utilizing data from International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics’s village level studies in India (1975–85). The main empirical finding is that households with a high proportion of boys tend to use some agricultural inputs, including fertilizers and irrigation services more intensively than households with girls. This pattern is more pronounced among wealthier households but does not appear to be driven solely by bequest motives or male child labor productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Community-based development projects are often argued to strengthen social capital. This paper investigates the impact of a women’s empowerment program in India on trust and cooperation, using data on 2,000 households. The program significantly increases trust and stimulates contributions to educational and infrastructural community projects. The effect on informal assistance among households is less consistent. The findings suggest substantial spillovers on the wider community. Households who do not participate in the program themselves but who live in a program village are significantly more trusting and more likely to engage in collective action than households in control villages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Does the labeling of tradable products like carpets which have been produced without child labor increase the welfare of children and their families? This paper presents results of surveys conducted in India and Nepal. The findings suggest a positive link between social labeling and the removal of child laborers for households above the subsistence level. However, for households below the subsistence level, no significant influence has been found. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper is an attempt to understand the factors behind low contract renewal rates frequently observed in insurance programs in poor countries. This is done on the basis of the experience of a micro-insurance health program in India. We show that poor understanding of the insurance concept, compounded by a serious supply-side information failure, is a major cause of low contract renewal among households which had previously enrolled into the program. Controlling for the level of their information about how to collect the insurance payout, households that did not experience a health shock during the first year tended to pull out of the scheme when they are subject to a cognitive bias reflected in short-term framing. When they are classic expected utility maximizers, however, the absence of a health shock did not affect their contract renewal decision. The policy implication of our findings is considerable since they provide a strong justification for mandatory universal health insurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The impact of rainfall shocks on school enrollment has changed in the past 30 years. • By 2007, positive rainfall shocks lead to a decrease in school enrollment. • School enrollment rises after a negative rainfall shock. • These effects are more pronounced for girls and older children. Despite long-standing international agreements like the Millennium Development Goals, 264 million children in developing countries are not enrolled in school, and children in rural areas remain twice as likely to be out of school as children in urban areas. One potential explanation for this pattern is that children's education in rural areas is vulnerable to weather shocks, but there is no consensus about whether rainfall shocks help or harm school enrollment in the existing literature. This paper explores whether changes in the relationship between rainfall shocks and schooling outcomes over time can explain the different results in the literature by using household survey data from India across three decades. My study finds that adverse rainfall shocks have an increasingly stronger positive impact on school enrollment over time, whereas enrollment is increasingly falling after positive rainfall shocks. This effect is stronger for girls than for boys, more pronounced for older children, and is consistent with an increase in the importance of opportunity costs of a child's time in more recent years. Children may have to drop out of school when employment opportunities are more readily available after a positive rainfall shock, but are able to go to school when jobs are scarce. These results offer a potential explanation for the different results in the literature, where studies on countries with higher economic development tend to find results consistent with an opportunity cost story, whereas this is not the case for studies on countries with a lower level of development. The results suggest that policymakers need to pay close attention to the obstacles faced by girls and older children to make access to education universal, and should develop policy tools that incentivize households to send their children to school even when employment opportunities are readily available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]