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Refugee sites throughout the world are loci of economic activity, including small enterprises, but limited information exists on these. We advance knowledge by collecting and analysing data on 326 enterprises operating inside and outside Rohingya settlements in southeastern Bangladesh. We find the following: refugees have access to a diverse array of active businesses; Bangladeshis and Rohingya both operate businesses and the two communities interact through transactions in local goods, services, inputs, and labour markets; lending plays an important role in sustaining these economies, as approximately 50 per cent of transactions are on credit; Rohingya-run enterprises face greater challenges than their local counterparts: their businesses are smaller and less profitable, and refugee workers are paid lower wages than local workers; and about half of the difference in performance between Rohingya and Bangladeshis can be explained by levels of start-up capital, scale, location, and education.

Natural disasters impact economies not only through physical damages, but also by affecting survivors emotionally and psychologically. This can alter their economic behavior, in ways that remain poorly understood. We present a model of post-disaster savings that reveals two opposing tendencies: the need to self-insure through increased savings, and the drive to “enjoy life while it lasts” through increased spending. We use panel datasets from China’s Sichuan province, and isolate psychological impacts by focusing on those who lived in quake areas but did not themselves suffer damages or injuries. Although they did not bear economic losses, they saved less, spent more on alcohol, and played majiang (a Chinese game) more often, suggesting that the “no tomorrow” tendency dominated over the precautionary tendency. The magnitude of the savings rate impact, a drop of 0.17 percentage points for each percent of distance closer to the epicenter, is economically significant, and persists in the medium term.

We analyze the effects of the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) on poverty, using micro-level household data from 17 villages in a poor area of China’s Guizhou province. A four-wave panel dataset allows us to follow NCMS through its reforms. First-order impact assessments suggest NCMS helps reduce the poverty rate by up to 3 percentage points, and the poverty gap by up to 15 percentage points. It also reduces the contribution of health expenditures to inequality as measured by Gini coefficient. The benefits of NCMS in terms of poverty and inequality appear considerably larger after major reforms in 2009, which expanded benefits and coverage.

Rural Southeast Asia is undergoing a series profound changes, often referred to as ‘rural transformation’, but recent research is divided as to whether rural transformation is underway in Myanmar. This paper addresses two empirical questions. (1) Is rural transformation taking place in Myanmar? (2) How has rural transformation affected the welfare of rural households in Myanmar's Central Dry Zone? We find evidence of significant rural transformation happening in the Dry Zone. The following features stand out: First, there has been a shift in relative economic status and power between landholders and the landless, in favor of the latter. This rebalancing has occurred mainly due to rising rural wages linked to rapid migration to urban areas. Second, widespread agricultural mechanization has taken place over the same period as migration. However, despite generating some labor savings for farm households, the labor productivity boosting effects of farm machinery appear to have produced insufficient gains to offset the effects of rural wage increases. Third, migration appears to offer the prospect of greater social and economic mobility to landless and marginal farm households. For all groups of households, including the landless, remittance incomes have more than offset income earning opportunities lost in agriculture due to mechanization. Fourth, landownership patterns, gender relations, and the extent of agricultural commercialization all appear largely unaffected by these changes.

The rapid growth of fish farming over the past three decades has generated heated debate over the role of aquaculture in rural development and poverty reduction. Central to these debates is the question of whether and how aquaculture impacts local incomes and employment, yet little empirical evidence exists on the issue. To address this question, we propose a Local Economy-wide Impact Evaluation (LEWIE) model which nests fish farm models within a general-equilibrium model of their local economy. The model is calibrated using primary data collected from 1102 households in Myanmar’s main aquaculture zone, representative of 60% of the country’s aquaculture farms. Using this model, we examine the impact of aquaculture on the incomes and labor market outcomes of fish farming households, but also crop farms and non-farm households in the cluster. Simulating one-acre increases in pond/plot surface we find that: (1) aquaculture generates much higher incomes per-acre than agriculture; (2) aquaculture generates larger income spillovers than agriculture for non-farm households by way of retail and labor markets; (3) small commercial fish farms generate greater spillovers than large fish farms. These results bolster the notion that fish-farming, and in particular small-scale commercial aquaculture, may have a significant role to play in rural development and poverty reduction.

Technological change holds the potential to increase crop output as well as incomes of farmers and the communities in which they live. We carry out a local economy-wide impact evaluation of productivity-enhancing technological change amongst small-scale cotton producers in Tanzania’s Lake Zone. Our analysis reveals that demand constraints shift benefits from farmers to downstream processors, while limiting positive spillovers within local economies. Excess cotton gin capacity does the opposite. Interventions to ensure markets for increased output should complement strategies to raise productivity if a project’s goal is to improve welfare in farm households and the communities in which they live. Published version

Summary Access to international markets provides smallholders with unprecedented opportunities, but also exposes them to world market whims. We use a local economy-wide impact evaluation (LEWIE) model to analyze how the recent global saffron-price variability affected Morocco’s Taliouine–Taznakht region, a specialized agro-export economy with a stark gender division of labor. Prices of saffron increased by 71% per year over the 2007–09 period before falling quickly back to their trend. Our modeling approach allows us to simulate such shocks and evaluate impacts not only on producers but also on the local economies around them. In our simulations, positive price-shocks and increases in productivity both cause large reallocations of labor resources, particularly for female workers at harvest time. We use Monte-Carlo simulations to evaluate how saffron-price variance affects the economy. Female wage income is especially sensitive to global price variability: a 100% increase in saffron-price variance leads to 133% increase in female wage income variance, but only 36% for males. Accounting for general-equilibrium effects is critical for understanding the ramifications of exposure to export price volatility in poor economies.

Objective To examine associations between receipt of an electronic food voucher (e-voucher) compared to food rations on the nutritional status of Rohingya children living in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Methods This is an associational study using cross-sectional data. We measured heights and weights of 523 children aged between 6 and 23 months in households receiving either a food ration consisting of rice, pulses, vegetable oil (362 children) or an e-voucher (161 children) that could be used to purchase 19 different foods. Data were also collected on the characteristics of their mothers and the households in which they lived, including household demographics, consumption and expenditure, coping strategies, livelihoods and income profiles, and access to assistance. Associations between measures of anthropometric status (height-for-age z scores, stunting, weight-for-height z scores, wasting, weight-for-age z scores and mid-upper arm circumference) and household receipt of the e-voucher were estimated using ordinary least squares regressions. Control variables included child, maternal, household and locality characteristics. The study received ethical approval from the Institutional Review Board of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC. Results Household receipt of an e-voucher was associated with improved linear growth in children. This association is robust to the inclusion of maternal, household and location characteristics. The magnitude of the association is 0.38 SD (CI: 0.01, 0.74), and statistically significant at the five percent level. We cannot reject the null hypothesis that these associations differ by child sex. Receipt of an e-voucher is not associated with stunting when a full set of control variables are included. There is no association between receipt of e-vouchers and weight-for-length, weight-for-age or mid-upper arm circumference. We cannot reject the null hypothesis that these associations differ by child sex. Conclusions In a humanitarian assistance setting, Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, household receipt of an electronic food voucher instead of a food ration is associated with improvements in the linear growth of children between 6 and 23 months but not in measures of acute undernutrition or other anthropometric outcomes. Our associational evidence indicates that transitioning from food rations to electronic food vouchers does not adversely affect child nutritional status.

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the role of mechanization in agricultural development. This literature has given rise to debates over the design of institutions and policies to facilitate accelerated mechanization, the role of outsourcing services in overcoming problems of access to machinery, and questions regarding the future of smallholder agriculture. We contribute to these debates using two pairs of complementary demand side (farm household) and supply side (agricultural machinery retailer) surveys, implemented in Myanmar in 2016 and 2017 across two major agro-ecological zones. Our analysis provides evidence that extremely rapid agricultural mechanization took place during the period of political and economic reforms from 2011 to 2020. In both zones surveyed, use of machinery for land preparation, harvesting, and threshing was close to scale-neutral due to a dynamic outsourcing services market. Rather than representing a single transformational change, mechanization’s broad appeal to farm households results from an accumulation of incremental, overlapping, complementary advantages. These include labor savings, reduced drudgery, convenience, increased speed and timeliness of operations, improved ability to manage weather-related risks, and reduced loss of grain during harvesting. We provide examples of policies on trade, finance, and land tenure that contributed to this transformation with practical implications for ongoing policy debates on mechanization in other countries, and suggest some generalizable lessons.

In 2015, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees accommodated over 15 million refugees, mostly in refugee camps in developing countries. The World Food Program provided these refugees with food aid, in cash or in kind. Refugees' impacts on host countries are controversial and little understood. This unique study analyzes the economic impacts of refugees on host-country economies within a 10-km radius of three Congolese refugee camps in Rwanda. Simulations using Monte Carlo methods reveal that cash aid to refugees creates significant positive income spillovers to host-country businesses and households. An additional adult refugee receiving cash aid increases annual real income in the local economy by $205 to $253, significantly more than the $120-$126 in aid each refugee receives. Trade between the local economy and the rest of Rwanda increases by $49 to $55. The impacts are lower for in-kind food aid, a finding relevant to development aid generally.