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Summary: This paper explores community-organized, household water supply in seven communities in western Kenya. We compare water use, labor use, income and the conditions for collective action in three sets of communities: two have protected springs and piped homestead connections; two have protected springs but no homestead connection; and three draw potentially contaminated water from unprotected springs. We find that piped water reduces the work of women and girls, and facilitates home garden and livestock production. Together these changes lead to increased household incomes. Women recognize clear time-benefits. Men, however, experience extra work. No overall pattern emerges regarding the preconditions for collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper argues that there are two major factors underlying improved global health outcomes. These are, first, the discovery of cheap technologies that can dramatically improve outcomes and, second, the adoption of these technologies thanks to the spread of knowledge. Other factors have played a role. Increased income not only allows for improved nutrition, but also helps to improve access to more complex preventative technologies. Institutional development is a second key to the spread of such complex technologies. Nonetheless, evidence of dramatic health improvements even in environments of weak institutions and stagnant incomes suggests that the role of these factors may be secondary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper investigates the effect of religiosity on attitudes toward gender equality using World Values Survey data. Results indicate that religiosity is strongly correlated with gender inequitable attitudes across countries. Further, OLS, TSLS, and 3SLS regression estimates reveal that gender inequitable attitudes are associated with negative effects on seven measures of gender equality of well-being and public policy. No single religion stands out as more gender inequitable than others. The impact of religiosity is likely transmitted via “stealth” effects on everyday behavior in economic transactions in labor markets, household resource allocation, and government spending. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper looks at the human health impacts from urban air pollution in India. Such pollution is especially harmful to poor people, so the co-benefits from global climate change policies in terms of reduced local air pollution can have positive equity impacts. Health impacts (mortality and morbidity) of PM10 pollution are quantified for different socio-economic groups in Delhi. The spatial PM10 concentration levels are overlaid with spatial socio-economic data. Improvement in air quality would result in bigger health benefits for the poor. Most measures that reduce PM10 pollutants also reduce CO2 emissions while simultaneously imposing more costs on the better-off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Poor people rely on local commons not only for self-insurance, as commonly found, but also for mutual insurance, depending on resources and shocks. This paper demonstrates that this conjecture holds among cyclone victims in the Pacific Islands. On one hand, households increase coastal fishing and handicraft selling, but not forest-product gathering, to smooth income against own crop damage. On the other hand, households with undamaged housing intensify fishing to help other kin-group members with damaged housing. These distinct patterns of using commons as insurance are explained by distinct forms of risk sharing against these two shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper evaluates whether inward foreign direct investment stimulates technological upgrading, and if its impact depends on an economy’s level of social capability. FDI inflows exert a positive influence on technological upgrading over a lengthy time period for a large and diverse sample of countries. This effect is conditioned by an economy’s level of social capability, as well as its income. Among poor countries the effect of FDI on upgrading is bolstered for those endowed with higher levels of social capability. The effect of FDI on upgrading in rich countries remains positive but is weaker, and social capability exerts little disparate influence among these similarly socially capable economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Despite two decades of rapid growth, indigenous Chileans are reported to face high poverty rates. However, non-representative surveys provide imprecise estimates of income, so quantifying poverty and inequality has been difficult. This paper estimates poverty and inequality using poverty mapping. In contrast to the previous studies, however, we use ethnicity rather than geography as a basis for disaggregation. We find that indigenous Chileans are indeed poorer, although we also find significant heterogeneity among ethnic groups. In addition, income inequality is generally lower for indigenous groups. These reliable estimates of poverty and inequality may improve the antipoverty targeting criteria used in Chile. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper focuses on measuring the extent to which publicly subsidized transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean redistribute income. The redistributive power of 56 transfers in eight countries is measured by their simulated impacts on poverty and inequality, and by their distributional characteristic. Our findings suggest that public transfers can be effective instruments to redistribute income to the poor. Despite coverage and distributional patterns that favor the poor, small unit subsidies limit the redistributive, poverty and inequality impacts of even the most targeted social assistance programs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper provides unique evidence of the positive consequences of seasonal migration for investments in early childhood development. We 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 shock-driven migration by mothers has a positive effect on early cognitive development. We attribute these findings to changes in income and to the intra-household empowerment gains resulting from mother’s migration, which offset potential negative early childhood development effects from temporary lack of parenting. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper estimates trends in absolute poverty in urban China using the Chinese Household Income Project surveys. Poverty incidence curves are plotted, showing lower poverty in 2002 than in 1988 irrespective of the poverty line chosen. Incomes of the poorest fell during 1988–95, contributing to a rise in inequality. However, inequality has been fairly constant thereafter. Models of the determination of income and poverty reveal widening differentials by education, sex, and Communist Party membership. Income from government anti-poverty programs has little impact on poverty, which has fallen almost entirely due to overall economic growth rather than redistribution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: There is growing interest in the rural non-farm sector in developing countries as a contributor to economic growth, employment generation, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction. Access to infrastructure is identified in some studies as a factor that affects non-farm rural employment and income but less attention has been paid to the constraints imposed by poor quality infrastructure. In this paper, we use data from 4,000 households in rural Indonesia to show that the quality of two key types of infrastructure—roads and electricity—affects both employment in and income from non-farm enterprises. It appears that there would be gains from development strategies that improve both the access to and the quality of rural infrastructure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper tests whether corruption may be an efficient grease in the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework. It analyzes the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 69 countries, both developed and developing. Using two measures of corruption and two other aspects of governance, we observe that corruption is less detrimental to efficiency in countries where institutions are less effective. It may even be positively associated with efficiency in countries where institutions are extremely ineffective. We thus find evidence for the “grease the wheels” hypothesis in its weak and strong forms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: McKinnon’s [McKinnon, R. I. (1973). Money and capital in economic development. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution] complementarity hypothesis predicts that money and investment are complementary due to self-financed investment, so that a real deposit rate is the key determinant of capital formation for developing economies. This paper critically appraises this contention by conducting a vigorous empirical approach using panel data for 107 developing countries. The long-run and dynamic estimation results based on McKinnon’s theoretical model are supportive of the hypothesis. However, when the investment model is conditioned by factors such as financial development, different income levels across developing countries, external inflows, public finance, and trade constraints, the credibility of the hypothesis is undermined. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper uses a newly constructed cross-country database composed of comparable income aggregates to examine the full range of income generating activities carried out by rural households. The analysis paints a clear picture of multiple activities across rural space in countries on all four continents, though less so in the included African countries. For most countries the largest share of income stems from off-farm activities, and the largest share of households has diversified sources of income. Diversification, not specialization, is the norm. Nevertheless, agricultural sources of income remain critically important for rural livelihoods in all countries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The main goal of our paper is to understand what types of farmers have been able to participate in the horticultural revolution, how they interact with markets and how supply chains affect their production decisions and incomes. We also want to understand if the rise of supermarkets has changed supply chains. Our analysis uses spatially sampled data from 200 communities and 500 households in the Greater Beijing area. In contrast to fears of some researchers, we find small and poor farmers actively participate in the emergence of China’s horticulture economy. Moreover, there has been almost no penetration of modern wholesalers or retailers into rural communities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper examines the links between the assets and the economic activities of rural households in developing countries to provide insight into how the promotion of certain key assets—particularly education, land, and infrastructure—influences the economic choices of these households. Nationally representative data from 15 countries which form part of the rural income-generating activities (RIGA) database are used in the analysis. The results indicate that improved land access is linked to agricultural production and thus will lead households to take, on average, this path for improving household welfare. Higher levels of education and greater access to infrastructure appear to be most closely linked to non-agricultural wage employment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: In this paper we study the importance of the non-farm household enterprise (NFHE) sector in Vietnam. We do find that NFHEs increase income and reduce between-household inequality. However, the role of the NFHE sector has been diminishing, especially in urban areas, and the NFHEs have been affected by trade liberalization in the period 1993–2002. In terms of policy, this suggests that there is increasing scope for targeting NFHE sector policies at those NFHEs that are in the best position to benefit from the new opportunities in the liberalizing environment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Rainfall continued to be a significant predictor of the gender of a surviving infant in India in the early 2000s. • A large workfare program, which can help households smooth income and consumption in bad income years, attenuates this relationship. • Evidence indicates the reduction in sex selection during good rainfall years comes primarily through prenatal channels. • A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the program could have saved at least 0.7 million girls – relative to boys – over five years. This paper revisits the relationship between agricultural productivity shocks and the infant sex ratio in India and investigates how this relationship changes when households have access to government-provided employment opportunities outside of agriculture. When a household's preference for sons coincides with adverse agricultural productivity shocks, previous research shows that households tend to disproportionately reduce investments (prenatal and postnatal) in their female children. This behavior leads to a relatively more balanced sex ratio in good rainfall years and a more skewed sex ratio (in favor of boys) in low rainfall years. In a deviation from past work, we find evidence of this effect primarily through prenatal channels in modern India. More importantly, we show that a workfare program that decouples both wages and consumption from rainfall attenuates the relationship between rainfall and the infant sex ratio. Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we find that the program could have saved at least 0.7 million girls – relative to boys – if the government had implemented it from 2001 to 2005. Suggestive evidence also indicates that the program may have attenuated the positive effect of birth year productivity shocks on girls' longer-term height-for-age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Current concepts and measures of pro-poor growth are entirely focused on the income dimension of well-being. This neglects non-income dimensions of poverty as well as the multidimensionality of poverty and well-being. In this paper, we extend the pro-poor growth toolbox to individual and composite measures of non-income achievements. In particular, we apply growth incidence curves, the Ravallion–Chen pro-poor growth rate and the poverty-equivalent growth rate to a range of non-income indicators such as education, mortality, vaccinations, stunting, and a multidimensional well-being measure. We are thereby able to study improvements in these dimensions of well-being at various points of the distribution of those indicators as well as at various points of the income distribution. This way we can determine whether improvements in non-income indicators were pro-poor in an absolute or relative sense, and whether they benefited the income poor more than others. We illustrate this empirically for Bolivia during 1989–98. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper uses limited-dependent variable methods and new data from Burkina Faso to test the impact of inter-continental and continental migration on activity choice and incomes in rural households. Econometric evidence supports our theoretical expectation that the impact of emigration varies both by migrant destination and production activity. We find no evidence of either positive or negative effects of continental migration on agricultural or livestock activities, and only a small negative impact on nonfarm activities. However, inter-continental migration, which tends to be long-term and generates significantly larger remittances, stimulates livestock production while being negatively associated with both staple and nonfarm activities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper asks whether history can inform modern debate about immigration’s impact on high wage economies. It examines the relationship between migration’s labor market impact and capital flows before 1914, the first global era. It then assesses the effects of immigration on wages and employment with and without international capital mobility today, in the second global era. It then explores the links between these economic relationships, welfare burdens, and immigration policy. It concludes with an explanation for the apparent difference in immigration’s impact in the two global eras, and thus on policy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper first reviews the debate on the definition of pro-poor growth and argues that a relative definition has merits when defining the state of pro-poor growth, while an absolute definition is most suitable when analyzing the rate of pro-poor growth. The second contribution is to extend the pro-poor growth toolbox to non-income indicators. The analysis, applied to Bolivia, shows that this extension greatly improves our understanding of the distribution of change in non-income indicators, of the linkages between progress in income and non-income dimensions of poverty, and on the incidence of progress in non-income outcomes along the income distribution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The paper focuses on the impact of international core labor standards on long-term per capita income. In order to do that, it is necessary to build a new synthetic indicator of labor standards using multiple correspondence analysis, measuring the four core labor standards recognized by ILO. We propose an estimation of the steady-state per capita income for a large panel of countries (104) and then that of developing countries. The two-stage least square method is used to correct potential problems of endogeneity. The findings show that, by and large, countries with higher labor standards have a higher steady-state level. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper analyzes how economic and non-economic characteristics at the individual, household, and community level affect the risk of victimization in Mozambique. We use a countrywide representative household survey from Mozambique with unique individual level information and show that the probability of being victimized is increasing in income, but at a diminishing rate. The effect of income is dependent on the type of crime, and poorer households are vulnerable. While less at risk of victimization, they suffer relatively greater losses when such shocks occur. Lower inequality and increased community level employment emerge as effective avenues to less crime. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper reconsiders the A versus K debate, namely, which factor is the leading contributor to economic growth? productivity gains (A) or factor accumulation (K). The growth accounting analysis is conducted for 10 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries over the period 1960–98. The long-run share of capital in income is estimated using cointegration (country-specific) and panel data (region-specific) methods. We find that for most of the countries in our sample, the share of capital is much higher than the conventional share of 0.3–0.4. The growth accounting exercise conducted with the incorporation of human capital reveals that the contribution of productivity gains to growth is negligible and frequently even detrimental. Thus, we conclude that it is factor accumulation that drives the economic performance of the MENA economies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The conventional environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) model holds that pollution inevitably increases until societies reach middle-income status, because poor countries do not have the institutional capacity or political will to regulate polluters. Some policy makers and researchers have cited the EKC model when arguing that developing countries should “grow first and clean up later.” However, new evidence suggests that this argument is incorrect because it mistakenly assumes that strong environmental governance is not possible for poor countries. This paper extends the EKC model to include a new measure of environmental governance, as well as a detailed accounting of geographic vulnerability (climate and terrain factors). We find that these two factors can account for much of the observed variation in developing-country air pollution levels. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper provides a cross-country comparison of how income inequality has evolved within countries at different levels of development. It uses overlapping nonparametric regression, which allows visual comparisons of inequality both within and across countries. As a result, the methodology allows more specific conclusions than cross-country regressions, and yet is more general than within-country case studies. The approach highlights the problematic conclusions that can arise with parametric regressions, in particular with tests of the Kuznets curve. While some previous results are confirmed, some new results on inequality across countries are also discovered. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: In this paper, we test whether economic growth decreases child labor by bringing together data from the National Sample Survey of India and state-level macrodata to estimate a bivariate probit model of schooling and labor. Our results lead us to conclude that contrary to popular wisdom, growth actually increases rather than decreases child labor because it increases the demand for child workers. The level of state NDP, village wages, and household incomes are seen as the conduits through which growth influences the supply side of the child labor market. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper tests the hypothesis that aid contributes to increasing aggregate welfare, measured by infant mortality and the Human Development Index (HDI), in recipient countries. Estimation is based on data for 104 countries over the period 1980-2000, and for sub samples of low-income and middle-income countries. Fixed effect estimates provide robust evidence that aid is associated with improved values of the welfare indicators, and this effect appears to be greater in low-income countries. Aid appears to increase welfare either directly or through the effect on growth, and there is no evidence that aid operates through public spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the processes of growth and poverty reduction simultaneously under a neoclassical growth model framework, using provincial data from the Philippines. We obtain a high rate of provincial income convergence and a tradeoff between equity and growth. The lack of political competition inhibits growth. Land reform is positively associated with growth and poverty reduction while higher agricultural terms of trade facilitate poverty reduction. The “growth elasticity of poverty reduction” is low by international standards but is sensitive to sectoral income composition and initial conditions in poverty incidence, mortality rate and irrigation coverage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents a critical history of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). The EKC proposes that indicators of environmental degradation first rise, and then fall with increasing income per capita. Recent evidence shows however, that developing countries are addressing environmental issues, sometimes adopting developed country standards with a short time lag and sometimes performing better than some wealthy countries, and that the EKC results have a very flimsy statistical foundation. A new generation of decomposition and efficient frontier models can help disentangle the true relations between development and the environment and may lead to the demise of the classic EKC. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

While the income (poverty) effect on child labor is long established as a main determinant of child labor, there is a growing body of literature considering the pull of the labor market. This paper demonstrates that after controlling for household characteristics, employment rates for 14–16 year old boys and girls in urban Brazil increase as local labor market opportunities improve. Children are also more likely to leave school as local labor market conditions become more favorable. The relationship between children’s schooling and work and local labor market conditions changes in years of crisis compared to other years. The effects of macroeconomic fluctuations on children’s school and work behavior are examined with particular focus on whether the income effect or substitution effect dominates as macroeconomic conditions change over time. The study uses data from the Pesquisa Nacional Amostra de Domicilios, a large household survey that is conducted almost annually by the IBGE. We use variation in the urban areas of 25 states over 12 years to identify the aggregate effects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The calorie–income demand elasticity is an important parameter in the development literature and in the policy arena. Yet, there is very little evidence on the extent to which it can be considered as an unchanging parameter or a time-shifting parameter that, for example, changes with the economic conditions faced by households. In this paper I use data from the 1996 and 1999 SUSENAS surveys in Indonesia to examine whether the relationship between income changes and caloric availability has changed and if so, how. Using the same questionnaire, the SUSENAS surveys collect detailed information on more than 200 different food items consumed over the last seven days by 60,000 households at the same point in time in each survey year. I use nonparametric as well as regression methods to examine two important relationships: (a) the relationship between income and total calories; and (2) the relationship between income and calories from cereals and other foods (excluding cereals and root crops). The empirical analysis finds that the income elasticity of the demand for total calories is slightly higher in February 1999 (the crisis year with dramatically different relative prices) compared to its level in February 1996. In addition, the calorie–income elasticity for cereals as a group increases while the calorie–income elasticity for other food items decreases. The latter finding is interpreted as behavior that is consistent with the presence of a binding subsistence constraint. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

While international remittances provide significant disposable income for many households in less-developed countries, there is no consensus on migrants' remittance motivation. Two principal competing explanations for remittances arc altruism and risk sharing. This paper employs previously unanalyzed data to bring new evidence to the debate. We develop a simple theoretical model that yields distinct testable predictions for each motivation. Among the model's testable predictions is differential remittance behavior by migrants from households with multiple versus single migrants under altruism and risk sharing. Our estimation finds significant differences in remittance behavior of multiple and single migrants and these differences support the altruistic incentive to remit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• COVID-19 lockdowns increase the risk of extreme poverty for those who depend on daily hands-on income. • Poor workers may have to continue labor activities to survive during lockdown and hence be more exposed to the virus. • We exploit data on human mobility for nine Latin American and African countries. • We show that work mobility strongly declines during the first lockdown but significantly less so in poorer regions. • Higher poverty rates also translate into a faster spread of COVID-19 cases. Since March 2020, governments have recommended or enacted lockdown policies to curb the spread of COVID-19. Yet, poorer segments of the population cannot afford to stay at home and must continue to work. In this paper, we test whether work-related mobility is effectively influenced by the local intensity of poverty. To do so, we exploit poverty data and Google mobility data for 242 regions of nine Latin American and African countries. We find that the drop in work-related mobility during the first lockdown period was indeed significantly lower in high-poverty regions compared to other regions. We also illustrate how higher poverty has induced a faster spread of the virus. The policy implication is that social protection measures in the form of food or cash trasfers must be complementary to physical distancing measures. Further research must evaluate how such transfers, when implemented, have attenuated the difference between poor and non-poor regions in terms of exposure to the virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Borrowing responsibilities within the household are studied using survey data about 500 households in rural Tamil Nadu. • Women borrow far more than men relatively to their incomes, but mostly for social reproduction purposes – and to repay debts. • The poorer their household, the stronger women's borrowing responsibilities. • Dalit women tend to contract larger shares of household debt than their female counterparts. • These results highlight the gendered earmarking of debt and credit, long emphasized by socio-anthropology and history. The champions of financial inclusion regret women's lack of access to credit, while critics of financialization, by contrast, claim that women have become overly indebted. But little is actually known about women's debt/credit in quantitative terms, mostly due to a lack of data. This descriptive paper uses first-hand survey data from southern India disaggregated by sex in order to analyze the gender of debt and its interplay with caste and poverty, based on descriptive statistics and econometric results. We show that women are heavily indebted, first and foremost to informal sources, alongside microcredit. While men are much higher earners, they borrow much less in relative terms. Furthermore, women prominently – and markedly more so than men – borrow in order to make ends meet; productive investment largely remains a male practice. Lastly, women of the poorest and lowest-caste households have the heaviest borrowing responsibilities, managing the highest proportions of household debt. On a theoretical level, these results highlight the gendered earmarking of debt and credit: male and female debts/credits do not have the same meanings and uses. They also confirm the gendered dimension of behavior, in as much as women's behavior is constrained by family affiliation, poverty level and caste, all of which affects men much less. Last, in terms of policy implications, these results put into question the specific targeting of women by microcredit policies, likely to strengthen the association between debt and poverty for women, and in particular to exacerbate female responsibilities for managing scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Income per capita moderates the effect of fertility on female labor force participation across LICs, MICs and HICs. • In LICs, fertility is high, and women work in the informal sector. Household income sharing is not always practiced, and Women must work. • In LICs, women devise strategies of birth spacing, informal childcare, and switching job-type to enable childrearing and work. • In HICs, women work in the formal sector, but career advancement and gender wage gaps persist despite supportive policies. • For all women around the world, attaining the combination of reproductive empowerment, along with decent work, a challenge. This paper provides a narrative review of the literature that addresses the connection between women's reproductive health and women's economic activity. Women's reproductive health, gender equality and decent work, are all part of the Sustainable Development Goals and this review highlights how these Goals are interconnected. The review focuses on the relationship between fertility and women's work and provides a detailed discussion of the academic literature that identifies the causal effect of fertility on changes in female labor force participation. Fertility is captured by timing, spacing and number of children, and career advancement, job quality, and hours worked are addressed on the work side. The review contrasts the fertility-work nexus for low-, middle- and high-income countries separately, recognizing national income per capita as a moderator of the effect of fertility on female labor force participation. In low-income countries, where labor force participation is for the most part in the informal sector, women must adopt their own strategies for balancing child rearing and labor force participation, such as selection of job type, relying on other women in the household for childcare, and birth spacing to limit infants in their care. In middle-income countries, women juggle child rearing and labor force participation with the overarching issue of income inequality, and early childbearing and lone motherhood perpetuate poverty. For women in high-income countries, social protection policies can assist women in managing the balance of childrearing and work, but these policies do not address underlying issues of gender inequality. Despite these policies, career advancement is interrupted by childbearing. As the relationship between fertility and women's work varies by income per capita across countries, polices that support women in achieving balance in their desired family size and accessing decent work varies across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We study the impact of a comprehensive cash transfer programme implemented in Uruguay. • The programme combines income support with participation in a public works scheme. • We find no statistically significant effects on labour market and social outcomes. • Point estimates nevertheless are of the expected sign and reasonable magnitude. • Limited support to human capital accumulation might have hindered effectiveness. Integrated approaches providing assistance to jobless individuals through the combination of income support and active labour market policies have been increasingly advocated in the policy debate, both by policy makers and international organizations. By helping people tackle immediate needs while promoting labour market reinsertion, these combined approaches are expected to improve labour market and social conditions in a sustainable manner. However, evidence on the effectiveness of this policy approach is extremely scant in emerging and developing economies. This paper studies a pivotal example of this policy trend through the evaluation of a public works programme provided alongside a cash transfer as part of a comprehensive social assistance programme that reached around 10 per cent of households in Uruguay between 2005 and 2007. We use rich administrative data of panel nature to study the effects of (i) participating in the public works programme (active component), (ii) receiving the cash transfer (income-support component), and (iii) benefiting jointly of the active and income-support programmes. Results on measures of labour market participation, employment quality, and civil society participation are non-significant across the board. Point estimates are nevertheless of the expected sign and of reasonable magnitude, suggesting that the programme came close to achieving its objective. Possible reasons of the limited effectiveness of the programme could include limited treatment intensity and lack of human capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• I examine the impact of Forest Users' Cooperative (FUC) program on the smallholder's saving and investment decisions. • I estimate these impacts using propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods. • Participation in the FUC reduces savings in the form of livestock holdings. • Moreover, the FUC spurs investment in child education and off-farm self-employment. • The safety net effect of the FUC has far-reaching implications for long-term living standards. As the result of prohibitively high transaction costs, smallholder farmers are only partly integrated into agricultural and forest commodity markets, a situation that may leave them in a lower level of development equilibrium (i.e., a poverty trap). For the most part, many users of forest commons extract forest products, typically non-timber products, for subsistence use or safety net purposes. To overcome this problem, in recent years, collective vertical integration (VI) of forest product marketing cooperative structures have been promoted and, in some cases, adopted by users of forest commons. Although this type of program has been observed to raise smallholder incomes, there is little evidence available on saving/investment responses to such income gains. This paper investigates precautionary saving and investment responses to collective forest product marketing programs among users of forest commons in Ethiopian villages. To identify the causal effects of the program, I applied propensity score matching, difference-in-difference (DID) and change-in-change (CIC) estimators to household survey data collected from randomly selected households in the Gimbo district (south-western Ethiopia). I find strong evidence that participation in the program reduces savings in the form of livestock holdings and that effect is limited to non-poor households. When interpreted in terms of the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH), the results imply that participants felt the current income gains to be non-transient, which led to reduced precautionary savings and to a gain in consumption/welfare. Moreover, I found that the program has spurred investment in child education and participation in off-farm self-employment. These results point to the importance of the safety net/insurance channel of the program. Overall, the findings underscore the program's potential to raise the standard of living via ancillary mechanisms beyond directly raising income outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• I compare the process of structural transformation in both national data and household panel data in India. • The national data provides evidence that India is in the midst of structural transformation. • Household data tells a similar story, though rural households lag behind in key indicators. • The results have implications for using stylized facts to set policy agenda. This paper compares national-level data from India with 40 years of household panel data from rural India to track sectoral changes in employment and income as well as examine the hypothesis of induced innovation in agricultural production. In the national data, India appears to be in the midst of a structural transformation. The share of agriculture in GDP and employment has shrunk while agricultural output continues to grow. This productivity growth appears to adhere to the induced innovation hypothesis, as productivity per hectare has increased more rapidly than productivity per worker. Many of the same patterns exist in the household data. Tracking households across time, I observe agricultural output has increased, despite more households engaging in off-farm labor. Household agricultural production is highly specialized and has increased its reliance on improved inputs. However, while agricultural income has grown, industrial and service income has remained stagnant, and the relative income of these households has declined in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We analyze the relationship between energy intensity and economic growth using a flexible piecewise linear regression. • We find that energy intensity declines as income rises but the slope significantly flattens out at a GDP pc level of $5000. • Structural change is an important contributor to energy intensity changes at all income levels. • Efficiency changes are more important for energy intensity changes when income exceeds GDP pc levels of $5000. This paper revisits the relationship between energy intensity and economic growth, using a flexible piecewise linear regression model. Based on a panel data set of 137 economies during 1990–2014, the analysis identifies a threshold effect of income growth on energy intensity change: although energy intensity is negatively correlated with income growth throughout the entire sample and study period, the declining rate significantly slows by about 25 percent after the level of per capita income reaches $5,000. Based on index decomposition, the analysis also finds that although structural change is important for intensity levels in all countries, the efficiency effect is more important in higher-income countries. The results suggest that one can expect to see relatively rapid reduction in energy intensity as the economies in today's poor countries grow. However, when countries move beyond lower-middle-income levels, energy efficiency policies become far more critical for sustaining the rate of reduction in energy intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We examine the adoption and impacts of improved soybean technologies. • Over a third of the households adopted improved soybean varieties and agronomic practices. • Adoption is positively associated with yields and incomes. • Greater adoption requires increased access to modern inputs and extension services. Soybean constitutes an important component of the maize-based smallholder cropping systems in Malawi and holds considerable potential for countering soil fertility decline, enhancing household food and nutrition security, and raising rural incomes. A number of yield-enhancing improved soybean varieties and agronomic practices (ISVAPs) have been developed and disseminated in Malawi, but there is limited evidence on the adoption and impacts of these technologies. This paper assesses the productivity and income effects of adopting ISVAPs using plot level data collected from a nationally representative sample of 1237 soybean growing households in Malawi. Our results show that over a third of the sampled households have adopted ISVAPs. Furthermore, results from a stochastic dominance analysis showed that soybean yields and net crop incomes for adopters are significantly higher than those of non-adopters over the entire probability distribution of ISVAPs adoption. Endogenous switching regression model results further demonstrated that adoption of ISVAPs is associated with an average of 61% yield gain and 53% income gain for adopters. Overall, the results point to the need for further scaling of ISVAPs for greater adoption and impact on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Malawi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]