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• We partnered with a microfinance program and modified its health-credit scheme by reducing transaction costs and simplifying access. • Using an experimental design, we tested the modified scheme against the status quo one and found it to be successful in increasing access to health credit. • We also compared the utilisation of formal healthcare and out-of-pocket health expenditure among users and found that higher access to credit, contingent on health shocks, led to increased formal healthcare utilisation and higher out-of-pocket expenditure. • In the absence of health financing mechanisms that relies on pre-payment and pooling, access to health credit allows a stopgap option for smoothing consumption. In low- and middle-income countries, the absence of formal health insurance often forces households to resort to credit for covering healthcare expenses and stabilising consumption. Traditional microcredit offerings frequently impede swift access to funds, limiting households' ability to mitigate unforeseen health costs. Through a cluster-randomised controlled trial across 24 microfinance branches in northern Bangladesh, we investigated how modifying the features of an existing health credit scheme and reducing transaction costs could enhance credit accessibility. Our findings indicate that relaxing specific scheme features led to increased credit accessibility. This heightened access, triggered by health shocks, corresponded with a rise in utilising formal healthcare services. While we observed an overall uptick in out-of-pocket expenditures, this remained unchanged when excluding the borrowed amount. Our study suggests health credit initiatives promote formal healthcare-seeking behaviours and stimulate higher health-related spending. Immediate access to financial resources alleviates liquidity constraints, enabling increased health spending, facilitating consumption smoothing, and potentially enhancing welfare, particularly where efficient and equitable healthcare financing options are limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• I study a women's group-based health social and behavior change intervention implemented by CHWs in three unique sites. • I create a typology of volunteer CHW management 'styles' and use them to understand CHW empowerment and equity in each site. • Giving volunteers more responsibility leads to greater empowerment, yet demands more time, and excludes marginalized women from being CHWs. • Though payments are seen as 'solution' in volunteer sites and 'problem' in paying ones, I find they have little impact on CHW efficacy or motivation. • However, I find payments may allow more marginalized women to be CHWs and thereby make the program more effective and equitable. Community health workers (CHW) are individuals with no formal health training who perform various roles to address health disparities. There are long-sustained debates over how different forms of incentives shape CHW programs, which are often staffed with volunteer or minimally remunerated women. These debates are complicated by the diversity of CHW roles and contexts in which they work. Evidence is particularly scant around "change-agent" style CHWs, who shape health knowledge and norms within their community. This paper addresses this gap through an analysis of a change agent-staffed program that provided nutrition participatory education through women's groups in three eastern Indian sites. We examine how contextual factors across sites shaped change-agent management, and analyze the implications of each approach for efficacy, empowerment, and equity. Analyzing 68 interviews and 10 focus groups this study advances a typology of 'varieties' of voluntarism that we name laissez faire, active-cultivation, and honorarium-accountability, and uses comparative analysis to examine the equity and empowerment effects within selection, management, and payment. First, we find tensions in the community-based selection of volunteers because rather than selecting highly motivated women, groups selected women in the most favorable socioeconomic position to volunteer. Second, there is a tension around responsibility and expectations in that greater training and responsibility leads women to see more psychosocial empowerment (e.g., knowledge, confidence), but also may create more 'costs' to participation and leads to wider economic inequities in change-agent ranks. Third, we observe a misplaced focus on payments as central to change-agent motivation. While the two volunteer-only sites see payment as 'the answer' to motivation problems, the honorarium site sees payments as 'the problem' because they attract less intrinsically motivated individuals. We conclude that while payments may not make an unmotivated volunteer into a motivated one, this analysis suggests payments would potentially allow more marginalized women to participate, which may be key to making more equitable and efficacious impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Droughts statistically significantly and negatively impact household nutrition. • In a median drought, calorie, protein, and fat intake fall by at most 1.4 percent. • Droughts cause households to move away from a balanced diet. • Droughts reduce crop production and employment but have no effect on food prices. • Lower income appears to be the primary mechanism for the decline in food utilization. This paper investigates the impacts of droughts on food expenditure and macronutrient consumption among rural Indian households. To isolate causal effects, I exploit random year-to-year variation in a dry shock, defined as the absolute deviation of rainfall below its long-run mean. I find that the dry shock has a statistically significant and negative effect on household nutrition. For a median dry shock, I estimate that households spend 1 percent less per capita per month on food and consume up to 1.4 percent fewer calories, protein, and fat. Disaggregating the effects by food group, I demonstrate that household diets become less balanced as a result of droughts: the dry shock leads households to rely primarily on cereals and to purchase less vegetables, fruits, pulses, and animal-sourced foods. Hence, droughts negatively impact not only the quantity but also the quality of rural household diets. Finally, I explore the potential channels for these effects. I argue that rather than higher food prices, a decline in household market and non-market income is the primary reason for lower household food consumption and nutrition during droughts. Taken together, these findings suggest that attaining food security amid extreme weather conditions requires an integrated approach that focuses on food not only for survival but also for leading a healthy and active life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We estimate the impact of self-help groups on local public goods in rural India. • Our approach combines a randomized-controlled trial with a behavioral experiment. • Self-help groups improved quality and access to certain local public goods. • The main mechanisms are information, accountability, and coordination. • Behavioral games show that groups strengthened intra-village cooperative norms. In many low- and middle-income countries, the quality of public goods available to the poor is inadequate. We report findings from a unique combination of a village-randomized controlled trial and a lab-in-the-field behavioral experiment involving the establishment of "self-help" groups in one of the poorest districts in India. The presence of these groups improved villagers' access to and quality of certain critical local public goods, in particular, water. Our evidence suggests that the underlying mechanisms responsible were better information provision through the groups, stronger engagement by members in village governance, and lower coordination costs. Public goods games played in a subset of control and treatment villages four years following the start of the intervention, additionally, indicate that cooperative norms are stronger in villages where self-help groups were present. We find little evidence that membership leads to a convergence of tastes among group members. These results suggest that, in contrast to traditional participatory development programs, self-help groups can build durable social capital that can improve government performance in poor communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Prior appropriation rights have played a unique role in expansion of Greater Mumbai since the 1970s. • Institutions play a key role in the evolution of resource geography in large metropolitan regions in Asia. • Contestation around water has intensified given the new emphasis on urbanization and industrialization in India. Animating the contemporary politics of water governance in India is a combination of institutional path dependence and a neo-liberal restructuring that has extended the ability of Indian cities to establish new forms of water entitlement in rural and peri-urban areas. This paper explores the politics of rural–urban water conflicts that are occurring in this changing political context. Building upon Schlager and Ostrom's conceptualization of operational and collective choice rules, it examines the role of agrarian institutions (primarily in the form of land rights) in shaping the politics of rural–urban water transfers in Mumbai and Chennai, two of India's largest and fastest-growing cities. By doing so, it makes the case that Mumbai's ability to secure water entitlement has been facilitated by an institutional legacy of prior appropriation that has been applied in a context of weak and limited tribal authority over land and resources. Chennai by contrast has become far more dependent upon the commodification of water in the form of quasi-market and allocation contracts, reflecting the riparian rights of commercial farmers in the Chennai region. The paper generates theoretical and empirical insights about the ways in which variations in urban and agrarian institutions affect the politics of rural–urban water allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We offer systematic evidence on the gender gaps in a range of electoral and non-electoral participation metrics in India's largest state. • Non-electoral forms of participation include petitions, contacting public officials and attending village meetings. • Gender gaps in non-electoral forms of participation are larger than those in election-related activities, including political candidacy. • Improving political knowledge, self-confidence and women's mobility can help to bridge the gender gaps, but will not eliminate them. • The presence of a woman leader increases women's propensity to contact government officials, but is not enough to close the gender gap. Abstract Using an original survey conducted in India's largest state, we offer systematic evidence on the gender gaps in a rich set of electoral and non-electoral participation metrics. We find that gender gaps in non-electoral forms of participation (such as involvement in public petitions, interactions with public officials and attendance of village meetings) are larger than those in election-related activities, including political candidacy. These gender gaps in political participation persist even after we account for women's poorer knowledge of political institutions, self-assessment of leadership skills, literacy rates and asset ownership, as well as constraints on their mobility and voice in household decisions. Using a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition approach, we find that bringing women on par with men on these attributes would bridge less than half of the gender gap in political participation. This suggests that external factors, such as the roles played by voters, political parties or societal groups, may constitute important barriers to women's political participation. The presence of a woman leader in the village increases women's propensity to meet with government officials, but is not enough to close the gender gap in this outcome or others. Our evidence points to the need to consider a wider set of policy tools beyond quotas to encourage women's civic and political engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite extensive literature on the complex nature of empowerment, current efforts to measure women’s empowerment in the agricultural development sector are largely limited to assessing visible forms of agency. We take a critical look at current efforts to measure women’s empowerment at the individual/household level through standardized tools. We examine the results of a household survey conducted in Nepal using the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which was developed as a monitoring and evaluation tool for the Feed the Future Initiative. Our interpretation of the results is informed by qualitative fieldwork conducted in the same region. In our quantitative analysis, we regress correlates of empowerment identified in the literature, such as age, education, household wealth, income, and household composition, on individual empowerment as measured by the WEAI. While several factors associated with women’s empowerment are significantly associated, household composition and intra-household relationships, which we expected to be essential factors in the local context, appear to be unrelated to the WEAI empowerment score. A measure of critical consciousness tested alongside the WEAI instrument appears instead to be closely associated with these factors. Our qualitative findings reveal that there is a discrepancy between local meanings of empowerment and definitions of empowerment defined in terms of agency. Based on these results, we suggest that improvements in measurement may be possible if approaches that measure power predominantly in terms of agency or decision-making were to include critical consciousness in their framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines health as a political struggle, where individuals contest and negotiate to secure health in a situated context. In this context, individuals who are socially embedded and exposed to the existing biosocial arena integrate macro-institutional determinants with everyday micro-institutional settings during the life course. Drawing together institutional analysis and a life course approach, the article examines the interplay of institutions in the exposure, action and outcomes behind individuals health in two case study wards in urban India-one planned settlement, and the other a ‘slum-like’ settlement. It applies longitudinal methods of household survey and life course analyses of individuals reporting diseases to understand the interplay of institutions. The analysis reveals statutory rules creating boundary conditions for exposure to infection. The individuals exploit these using the socially embedded norms to contest and negotiate through coalitions and networks. The statutory rules defines the scope and outcomes of the health-seeking decisions. The study in two case study reveals that seemingly ‘planned settlement’ is conducive over the spread of infections than in slum-like settlement. It calls for strategic focus on improving the boundary conditions – the environmental hygiene and public health infrastructure – which might be more effective than contemporary neo-liberal techno-centric and individualized interventions. Failure to promote these actions will provide an environment conducive to the future spread of infectious and non-infectious diseases. Theoretically, it pushes for greater understanding of the socio-political struggle of individuals, rather than focusing on risk factors and dualistic nature of macro- and micro-institutions. The approach leaves room for applying situated political approach in understanding mobility and seasonality of exposure to diseases in urban regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper uses 620 forest plot measurements taken from a nationally representative sample of 130 Nepal community forests combined with information on forest collective action to estimate the effects of collective action on carbon per hectare and three additional measures of forest quality. We use three measures of forest user group collective action, including membership in the Nepal Community Forestry Programme (CFP). Collective action shows large, positive, and statistically significant carbon effects vis-à-vis communities exhibiting no evidence of forest collective action, which do not necessarily correspond with results for other measures of forest quality. We find that depending on the collective action definition and physiographic region, forests controlled by communities exhibiting no evidence of forest collective action may have as little as 34% of the carbon of forests governed under collective action. We do not, however, find evidence that CFP forests, our narrowest measure of collective action, store more carbon than forests outside the CFP. Our results therefore suggest that it is the collective action behavior and not the official CFP label that offers the largest gains. Carbon benefits from collective action are therefore not found to be conditional on CFP participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary I examine the causal effects of long-term exposure to conflict, measured at the micro level, on households’ receipt of remittances, among households residing in areas affected by the 2010 floods in Pakistan. Using a dataset of 7802 households, representative of all flood-affected areas of Pakistan in 2010, I employ IV estimation to overcome the endogeneity of conflict exposure and remittance receipts, and control for a range of confounding factors. I find that, contrary to the literature from country-level case studies, long-term exposure to conflict reduces households’ likelihood of receiving any remittances at all, as well as the average amounts of remittances received. However for households in the lowest food consumption expenditure quintile, conflict has a positive effect on the likelihood of remittance receipts, which provides evidence for the existence of heterogeneous effects as well as a significant micro–macro gap in understanding the causal effects of conflict on remittance receipts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Heralded by both food sovereignty activists and mainstream development practitioners, village seed banks are a rural development phenomenon rapidly gaining attention for their potential to support resilient agricultural systems. This paper presents a case study for examining the power of prevailing narratives of decentralized development to shape and ultimately constrain the operations of village seed banks in Telangana, India. This case demonstrates how visions of tradition, community, and self-reliance can serve to discount the materiality of seeds, the social complexity of village institutions, and even the voices of farmers. The goal of this research is not to criticize village seed banks, as they hold great potential, nor to vilify the narratives in question, but rather to encourage critical reflection on how the assumptions embedded in these narratives shape mechanisms for agricultural development. I argue for a shift away from framing tradition, community, and self-reliance as development solutions and propose an interrogative approach that turns these narratives into questions for engaging more effectively with rural livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Citizens’ aspirations are increasingly recognized as an important dimension of their well-being. Those with high aspirations set ambitious goals for themselves, and those with low aspirations may fall prey to a poverty trap. Do natural disasters negatively impact aspirations? If so, can governments blunt these effects? We consider Pakistan’s devastating 2010 floods—and the government’s uneven relief efforts—to analyze these questions. We first show that the extreme rainfall generating this disaster significantly reduced aspirations, even when current levels of household expenditure, wealth, and education are taken into account. Individuals experiencing 2010 monsoon season rainfall that was one standard deviation higher than average had aspiration levels 1.5 years later that were 0.15 standard deviations lower than those of similar individuals experiencing just average levels of rainfall. This is the same negative shock to aspirations that one would experience as a result of a 50% reduction in household expenditures. Moreover, the negative effect of natural disasters on aspirations is especially strong among the poor, and among those who are most vulnerable to weather shocks. However, exploiting exogenous variation in flood relief access, we show that government social protection can attenuate these negative impacts. Individuals in villages that received Citizens Damage Compensation (Watan Card) Program flood relief—providing cash equivalent to 9.4% of annual household expenditures in each of the three years following the disaster—saw significantly lower declines in aspirations than did those in similarly affected villages without this relief. This offers a new understanding of social protection; it not only restores livelihoods and replaces damaged assets, but also has an enduring effect by easing mental burdens, and thus raising aspirations for the future. The negative effects of natural disasters and the efficacy of government relief programs may thus be underestimated if aspirations are ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Studies that examine the long-run impact of remittances on economic growth in West Africa and the Caribbean show that remittances are not growth enhancing. Money has been used toward consumption rather than investment. Because migrants from these regions are mostly permanent immigrants who settle in the host countries, we ask if there is a difference for South Asia where migrant workers are flooding for short-term, temporary contracts in the Middle Eastern countries. The permanent income hypothesis states that a permanent increase in income raises current consumption while transitory income increase is saved or smoothed over a life time. We argue that the transitory income remitted by short-term migrants is invested to generate future income when they return. We examine a panel data of five South Asian countries—Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri-Lanka—for a period from 1975 to 2011. Using panel cointegration and Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimation of dynamic heterogeneous panels, we show that there is a long-run significant impact of workers' remittances on income while the impact on consumption is not significant. A one-percent increase in remittance receipt per person raises per-capita income by approximately 0.23%. The results are robust across different tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Open defecation is a major global health problem. The number of open defecators in India dwarfs that of other states, and most live in rural places. Open defecation is often approached as a problem scaled at the site of the individual, who makes a choice not to build and/or use a toilet. Attempts to end rural open defecation by targeting individuals, like social marketing or behavior change approaches, often ignore the structural inequalities that shape rural residents’ everyday lives. Our study explores the question, “What is the role of remoteness in sustaining open defecation in rural India?” We deploy the concept of remoteness as an analytical tool that can capture everyday practices of open defecation as a function of physical and social distance. Using ethnographic methods, we interviewed and observed 70 participants in four villages in Uttarakhand, India over a three-month period in 2013. We find that remoteness in general, and its lived nuances, form a context for prevalent open defecation. Structural inequalities across space will need to be addressed to make latrine building and usage viable in remote places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Why don’t microfinance clients use programs the way development planners and funders expect? Why do clients change how microfinance projects function in unanticipated ways? Previous scholarship on microfinance has overlooked the relevance of already existing borrowing practices and norms to how people engage with and use microfinance. Over 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Kumaon region of eastern Uttarakhand state in northern India, I found that Kumaonis altered the microfinance program of a local NGO to make it fit with their already existing borrowing practices, which were intimately tied to their livelihood strategies. Kumaoni livelihoods were based on exchange relationships with family, friends, and neighbors through which they could secure the means for physical and financial survival, as well as social and emotional survival. These relationships were governed by a moral economy that obligated exchange partners to properly assist one another, and ensured balance between partners and across multiple social ties. Rather than abandoning their exchange relationships, Kumaonis and local fieldworkers, who also relied on these ties, altered microfinance so that it fit with this moral economy and became another node in the already existing networks of assistance. If they had not been able to alter projects, Kumaonis would likely have stopped participating, as other groups in similar circumstances around the globe have done. Although the microfinance program was a success in the eyes of beneficiaries, senior staff members and donors remained unaware of why projects changed on the ground. To ensure that development programs can be made relevant to people’s lives and cultural values, development practitioners must relinquish control over the minutiae of development and allow local-level workers to negotiate the details of projects with participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Summary Crop revenues vary greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood, even after controlling for factors including input use, technology adoption, and other agro-climatic factors. One hypothesis that may explain the variation in outcomes among farmers is differential access to information through peers. Using a household survey from India containing detailed information about personal relationships, we estimate peer effects on cash crop revenue using a novel spatial econometric technique to control for reflection. Our results show that 60% of farmers’ revenue is explained by peers. Peer effects are particularly large in pesticide use and in the cultivation of a new crop. However, peer effects in input expenditures and land allocation cannot fully explain the variation in revenue, implying peers may also associate with management, negotiation, and marketing. We find that peer effects are significant among farmers’ self-reported peers, especially among those peers who are farmers’ main advisors for agricultural matters. Although caste-based networks (both within the same and in adjacent villages) are important, their effect is smaller than that of self-reported peer networks. We empirically rule out that our effects are driven by other factors such as geographically correlated unobservables, farmers following a lead farmer or economies of scale. Our findings speak to both the potential and the limitations of peers as sources of agricultural information, and highlight the need for future research about how to best integrate peers into agricultural extension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Land rights equity is seen as an important tool for increasing empowerment and economic welfare for women in developing countries. Accordingly, the objective of this paper is to empirically examine the role of women’s land ownership, either alone or jointly, as a means of improving their intra-household bargaining power in the areas of own healthcare, major household purchases, and visiting family or relatives. Using the 2001 and 2011 Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys and relevant econometric techniques, we find that land ownership has a positive and significant impact on women’s empowerment. In particular, we find two important patterns of results. First, accounting for the endogeneity of land ownership with inverse probability weighting, coarsened exact matching and instrumental variable methods makes its impact on empowerment higher. Previous research in this area had largely ignored the potential endogeneity of land ownership. Second, the impact is generally stronger in 2011 than in 2001. As evidenced in a number of empirical studies, the increase in women’s bargaining power can in turn translate into a redirection of resources toward women’s preferences, including higher investment in human capital of the household such as education, health, and nutrition. Therefore, our study indicates that in places where agriculture is the main source of economy for women, policies enhancing land rights equity have the potential to increase women’s empowerment and associated beneficial welfare effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary In this paper we assess the UNHCR post-return shelter assistance program in Afghanistan during 2009–11, motivated by the fact that the resolution of lost housing and property is commonly understood as a key ingredient in sustainable return and reintegration. We implement a variety of matching techniques in order to insulate our results from selection bias. Adopting a multidimensional approach, our results show that shelter assistance reduces the multidimensional poverty index of benefiting households by three percentage points. Looking at individual indicators of deprivation we find that assistance has the biggest effect on dietary diversity, food security, and heating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary As the post-MDG era approaches in 2016, reducing child undernutrition is gaining high priority on the international development agenda, both as a maker and marker of development. Revisiting Smith and Haddad (2000), we use data from 1970 to 2012 for 116 countries, finding that safe water access, sanitation, women’s education, gender equality, and the quantity and quality of food available in countries have been key drivers of past reductions in stunting. Income growth and governance played essential facilitating roles. Complementary to nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive programs and policies, accelerating reductions in undernutrition in the future will require increased investment in these priority areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Observers have asserted that India’s economic rise coincides with moral change. This study assesses some notable aspects of this claim by using public attitudes toward tax evasion and bribery as indicators of moral values. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the World Values Surveys, I find that tolerance for tax evasion and bribery grew relatively slightly from 1991 to 1996, and then increased rapidly from 2001 to 2006. Double-interaction regression models show tolerance converging by gender and religion, and tolerance diverging between the poor and non-poor. However, the regional patterns are complex. Finally, university educational attainment is associated with decreasing tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Studies have examined whether community-based monitoring systems impact desired program outcomes, but few provide field-based evidence on the implementation process itself. This paper fills the gap using ethnographic data on the community-based monitoring tools developed by an HIV prevention NGO for sex workers in south India. The tool was well conceptualized, with potential to enhance community participation in program design. Yet, despite best intentions, our findings show that the quantification process undermined community ownership, discredited existing and locally informed sex work practices and, rather than empowering, monitoring became a means to discipline and judge sex worker peer educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The impact of remittances on household expenditures is studied using data from the 2010/11 Nepal Living Standards Survey. • Remittances are associated with increases in household expenditures on food, clothing, and education. • Remittances are associated with reductions in household expenditures on alcohol and tobacco. • Male- and female-headed households tend to spend remittance income in similar ways. • Remittance-related increases in food and education expenditures can improve human capital and overall economic development. Lack of economic opportunities in their local communities push many individuals to migrate and send remittances to their families. Remittances can potentially influence household spending in sizeable ways, making it an important source of income. This article investigates the impact of remittances on various categories of household expenditure, including those for food, alcohol and tobacco, clothing, ceremonies, healthcare, education, home improvement, agriculture, and livestock. Using data from 5,987 households observed in the 2010/11 Nepal Living Standards Survey and applying an instrumental variable approach, we show that remittances are positively associated with expenditures on food and education. In contrast, we find a negative association between remittances and expenditures on alcohol and tobacco. We further disaggregate our analysis to investigate any differential impact of remittances by gender of the household head and find qualitatively similar results across both genders, suggesting that both male- and female-headed households generally tend to spend remittances in similar ways. Findings regarding household food consumption and education expenditures are generally consistent with previous research on remittances in Nepal, but expand our understanding by examining the impacts of remittances on expenditures on tobacco and alcohol, ceremony, agriculture, and livestock purchases. Through increased consumption of food and greater expenditures on education, remittances have implications for long-term investments in human capital, which can, in turn, increase labor productivity, wage earnings, and overall economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We use a two-step procedure to assess the effect of urban size on housing deprivation. • We create a measure of housing deprivation based on individual characteristics. • We address urban size by means of high-resolution satellite imagery of population density. • In general, urban size is negatively related to housing deprivation levels in South Asia, but heterogeneity is observed across countries. • In India, the largest country, the association between urban size and housing deprivation is positive but increasing at a decreasing rate. Housing is a basic human need; however, in recent decades slums have become the face of urbanization in developing economies. Urbanization drives economic growth, playing an important role in providing adequate housing and reducing poverty. In this paper, we investigate the association between housing deprivation and the urban size at a regional level for South Asian countries in the year 2015. We use two main sources of data. The first is the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), which provide microdata that allows us to build housing deprivation indexes based on the material characteristics of households and housing assets. The second source is satellite imagery, used to define urban cores and measure the urban size of each region. Then, we use a two-step procedure to identify the relationship between the urban size and housing deprivation. Our results indicate that age and higher levels of education (of the head of household) are negatively associated with our housing deprivation indexes in South Asian households. Furthermore, a greater number of children in South Asian households is related to higher levels of housing deprivation. In the second step, we show that there is a significant negative association between material housing deprivation and the urban size at a regional level for our full sample and for the majority of countries taken individually. An important exception is India, where an inverted-U-shaped relationship between deprivation and urban size is found. This result is robust even when an IV approach is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The paper evaluates an Indian maternal conditional cash transfer scheme. Launched in 2005, the program gives women cash transfers for receiving maternal and child health care services. Data are drawn from India’s District Level Household Survey to evaluate the program’s impact. Results indicate that the program had a limited overall effect: relative to the broader population, the targeted population experienced a 3 percentage point increase in medically supervised births, but no increase in ante-natal or post-natal care. We do however, find evidence of heterogeneity of impact. Women without any formal education and women in rural areas experience disproportionate gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Over last few decades, there has been a growing interest among researchers in understanding the link between trade liberalization and regional disparities within the context of an individual country. In this study, we develop the first ever single-country multiregional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for the Indian economy to investigate this linkage. Overall our results suggest that, in the short run, trade liberalization has a beneficial impact on the rich and fast-growing middle-income states and a marginal or negative impact on the poor states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Efforts by international development agencies to design gender-sensitive projects have sharpened their focus on women’s participation in community-level water governance. In some cases, such goals have enhanced women’s self-confidence and developed their skills despite having negligible impact on project outcomes. In others, they have simply been reduced to tokenism. This paper analyzes community-managed water supply projects for the urban poor in Madhya Pradesh, India, to provide a better understanding of the gap between women’s motivation to participate and their ability or agency to do so. It highlights how bridging this gap could be pivotal in strengthening women’s role in water governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Using a nationally representative survey from Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture, measured using the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, and per capita calorie availability, dietary diversity, and adult body mass index (BMI). Accounting for potential endogeneity of empowerment, we find that increases in women’s empowerment are positively associated with calorie availability and dietary diversity at the household level. Overall, household wealth, education, and occupation are more important than women’s empowerment as determinants of adult nutritional status, although negative impacts of group membership and credit on male BMI suggest that intrahousehold trade-offs may exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Gender quotas, decentralization of irrigation management, and reliance on MGNREGA for labor provision challenge the traditional patriarchal canal management system by institutionalizing women as formal decision-makers and members of the irrigation labor force in northern India. Based on a survey of 592 women in rural Himachal Pradesh, this paper quantitatively analyses how these policies affect women’s engagement in formal political processes. Results indicate that factors from the private and individual domains influence female participation in formal political processes. Most importantly, India’s gender inclusive policies provide women with the opportunity to legitimately engage in formal political processes governing resource management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: While there are many positive societal implications of increased female labor force participation, working may increase a woman’s risk of domestic violence. Using data I collected from Bangladesh, I document a positive correlation between work and domestic violence, but only among women with low education or young age at marriage. These results suggest that women with low bargaining power face increased risk of domestic violence upon entering the labor force as their husbands seek to counteract their increased bargaining power. Consequently, policies that increase women’s baseline bargaining power will decrease the risk that they face domestic violence upon beginning work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accountability of NGOs, particularly their 'downward' accountability to their beneficiaries, affects NGO effectiveness in the process of empowerment for the poor and marginalized in developing countries. While debate about the accountability of NGOs and various pressures they face is well traveled, much less consideration is given to the broad values of the NGO and how they may affect their approach to downward accountability. This paper looks at evidence from a number of case studies of NGO programs with poor women in India, on the role of accountability in empowerment outcomes, and the role NGO values play in these outcomes. Key words--NGOs, accountability, empowerment, India, South Asia, values

This paper reports results from one of the first large, nationally representative surveys of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in a developing country. The NGO sector in Bangladesh is highly organized and relatively homogeneous. Most NGOs utilize a branch and headquarters structure in which branches have limited autonomy from headquarters. At the branch level, most NGOs in the country, whether big or small, focus on credit services, derive more of their income from fees for services than from grants, rely on salaried rather than voluntary staff, keep detailed financial accounts that are externally audited, and hire middle-class college educated men as managers. The convergence to a modal institutional form probably is the result of the persuasive power of ideas, sociological pressures toward acculturation and conformity, as well as material incentives. Key words--Bangladesh, South Asia, NGOs, governance, survey data

The most extreme form of poverty is destitution. As a condition, destitution flows from processes of political economy, some of which become institutionalized within state practice and law. The destitute are not only considered as 'nonpeople' in relation to the institutional functioning of state, market, and civil society institutions, but are often actively expelled from these institutional arenas. Challenging destitution requires the granting of citizenship to the destitute and their recognition in the eyes of political elites. Some politicized forms of social movement activity may be able to realize these and other pressing objectives for the destitute. Key words--destitution, political economy, politics, South Asia, India

• We develop simplified indicator of nutritional empowerment the Abridged Women's Empowerment in Nutrition Index (A-WENI). • We use machine learning techniques (LASSO) to reduce the number of indicators in the index from 33 to 20. • A-WENI is developed for a five-state survey in India and validated with new data from the Indian state of Maharashtra. • A-WENI reproduces well the empowerment status based on WENI and like WENI is a good predictor of nutritional outcomes. • A-WENI can be more easily incorporated into general purpose rural surveys to capture women's empowerment and nutrition. Measuring empowerment is both complicated and time consuming. A number of recent efforts have focused on how to better measure this complex multidimensional concept such that it is easy to implement. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques, specifically LASSO, using survey data from five Indian states to abbreviate a recently developed measure of nutritional empowerment, the Women's Empowerment in Nutrition Index (WENI) that has 33 distinct indicators. Our preferred Abridged Women's Empowerment in Nutrition Index (A-WENI) consists of 20 indicators. We validate the A-WENI via a field survey from a new context, the western Indian state of Maharashtra. We find that the 20-indicator A-WENI is both capable of reproducing well the empowerment scores and status generated by the 33-indicator WENI and predicting nutritional outcomes such as BMI and dietary diversity. Using this index, we find that in our Maharashtra sample, on average, only 35.9% of mothers of children under the age of 5 years are nutritionally empowered, whereas 77.2% of their spouses are nutritionally empowered. We also find that only 14.6% of the elderly women are nutritionally empowered. These estimates are broadly consistent with those based on the 33-indicator WENI. The A-WENI will reduce the time burden on respondents and can be incorporated in any general purpose survey conducted in rural contexts. Many of the indicators in A-WENI are often collected routinely in contemporary household surveys. Hence, capturing nutritional empowerment does not entail significant additional burden. Developing A-WENI can thus aid in an expansion of efforts to measure nutritional empowerment; this is key to understanding better the barriers and challenges women face and help identify ways in which women can improve their nutritional well-being in meaningful ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Microcredit and small and medium enterprise (SME) finance are often pitched as alternative strategies to create employment opportunities in low-income communities. So far, though, little is known about how employment patterns compare. We integrate evidence from three surveys to show that, compared to Bangladeshi microcredit customers, typical SME employees in Bangladesh have more education and professional skills, and live in households that are notably less poor. SME jobs also require long work weeks, clashing with family responsibilities. The evidence from Bangladesh rejects the idea that SME finance more efficiently creates jobs for the population currently served by microcredit. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: We assess the impact of an approach in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh that combines micro-credit with efforts to target the poor, address their specific needs, and enhance their economic potential. Our results support the pro-poor nature of the program and point toward benefits in terms of female empowerment and nutritional intake but not asset formation or income for program participants and other villagers. While study of longer-term effects is desirable, this suggests that even in the short term, the program helped improve consumption smoothing and income diversification. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: While previous studies evaluate the impact of social capital on development outcomes, there are very few empirical studies on determinants of social capital formation. We use unique long panel data from Sri Lanka to examine the mechanism of social capital formation in an imperfect credit market. We show that households facing credit constraints reduce investments in social capital. Furthermore, temporal declines in investment persistently reduce general trust, trust in villagers, and trust in business partners. While previous studies argue that social capital improves access to informal credit, we show the reverse causality. Combining these findings suggests a potential poverty trap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This study investigates the relationship between parental schooling on the one hand, and child health outcomes (height and weight) and parental health-seeking behavior (immunization status of children), on the other. Using unique data from Pakistan, we aim to understand the mechanisms through which parental schooling promotes better child health and health-seeking behavior. The following “pathways” are investigated: educated parents’ greater household income, exposure to media, literacy, labor market participation, health knowledge, and the extent of maternal empowerment within the home. We find that while father’s education is positively associated with the immunization decision, mother’s education is more critically associated with longer term health outcomes in OLS equations. Instrumental Variable (IV) estimates suggest that father’s health knowledge is most positively associated with immunization decisions while mother’s health knowledge and her empowerment within the home are the channels through which her education impacts her child’s height and weight respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper emphasizes bequest motives by evaluating participation patterns in micro life insurance against insurance demand and supply side factors. Based on household survey data from Sri Lanka, it presents evidence on the determinants of micro life insurance participation of low-income households, using probit and tobit models. The results provide evidence that micro life insurance is positively correlated with measures of bequest motives such as the number of children or dependents. Besides, better off households are less excluded from micro life insurance markets than their poorer counterparts. The study finds a convincing need for the microinsurance sector to be more responsive to the needs of the poor, with a key role in providing financial education to understand the need for microinsurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Studies on the effects of gendered policy design in microcredit on spousal violence generally suffer from self-selection and under-reporting bias. I overcome such shortcomings by constructing a new measure of violence. The new measure indicates whether there was a decline in violence by subtracting current-experience of violence from ever-experience. Such differencing eliminates time-invariant sources of bias. Further, sensitivity of the effect of female membership to self-selection is examined by gauging the size of self-selection based on selection on the observables. Once self-selection is addressed, the initial positive effect of membership on violence reduction disappears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The linkage between the formal and informal credit markets in developing countries has largely been unexplored. This paper addresses one important aspect of the linkage by empirically investigating the impact of the intervention of microfinance programs on the moneylender interest rates in northern Bangladesh, and finds that moneylender interest rates increase with microfinance program coverage. Higher microfinance program coverage increases moneylender interest rates in the villages in which more loans are invested in productive economic activities than consumption. Borrowers resort to moneylenders for additional funds probably because of inadequate supply, unavailability of seasonal working capital from MFIs, and tight repayment schedules, which in turn increase demand for moneylender loans. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper documents the extent of inequality of educational opportunity in India spanning the period 1983–2004 using National Sample Surveys. We build on recent developments in the literature that have operationalized concepts of inequality of opportunity theory and construct several indices of inequality of educational opportunity for an adult sample. Kerala stands out as the least opportunity-unequal state. Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh experienced large-scale falls in the ranking of inequality of opportunities. By contrast, West Bengal and Orissa made significant progress in reducing inequality of opportunity. We also examine the links between progress toward equality of opportunity and a selection of pro-poor policies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Up to the 1980s it was generally accepted that many key issues in agrarian development could not be studied without an understanding of market interlinkages. Recently, however, this theory has lost its importance in development literature. Based on a household-level survey from rural Pakistan, this paper seeks to re-introduce the importance of interlinkages by illustrating their exploitative potential, particularly in unequal isolated villages where landlords are essentially monopolist/monopsonist. The solution proposed is to break isolation. Making use of an exogenous shock found in the construction of a motorway, the study finds that while connectivity does not break interlinkages completely, it does significantly reduce their exploitative nature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Women’s empowerment is a dynamic process that has been quantified, measured, and described in a variety of ways. We measure empowerment in a sample of 3,500 rural women in 128 villages of Bangladesh with five indicators. A conceptual framework is presented, together with descriptive data on the indicators. Linear regressions to examine effects of covariates show that a woman’s exposure to television is a significant predictor of three of the five indicators. A woman’s years of schooling is significantly associated with one of two self-esteem indicators and with freedom of mobility. Household wealth has a significant and positive association with a woman’s resource control but a significant negative association with her total decision-making score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In this paper we use data from a unique survey conducted in the aftermath of the 1998 floods in Bangladesh to examine how the household shock–child labor relationship is affected by credit receipts of households. Adopting the ratio of assets lost due to the floods as a likely exogenous shock proxy, we find that child labor increases with the magnitude of the shock but only if households do not receive credit. This suggests that following shocks child labor may be a response to non-availability of credit. The policy implication suggests a distinct and alternative channel in combating the economic incentives behind child labor—access to credit diminishes the immediate financial burden on constrained households, reducing their need for child labor. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: How do ordinary citizens access the state in the world’s largest democracy? This paper examines a critical case from India, exploring the channels—formal and informal—through which residents of two tsunami-affected villages pursued public services following the 2004 disaster. External shocks, such as the proliferation of aid and NGOs, created moments in which individuals interacted differently with public agencies. Different village-level groups attempted to access state resources through distinct sets of intermediaries; marginalized groups (women and caste minorities) appeared most willing and likely to utilize formal government channels, while men from the locally dominant caste turned to informal, non-state channels. [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]