Search

Globally, humanitarian needs have reached an historically unprecedented scale, undermining the ability of affected children to survive, grow, and thrive. Social protection holds the promise of addressing acute needs and risks faced by children in crisis contexts, while allowing for human capital investments. We review evidence of the impact of emergency cash, food, and other in-kind transfers implemented by governments or humanitarian actors on child development in different contexts. Compared with development settings, rigorous evidence for crises is limited. Most existing studies focus on either schooling or acute malnutrition, highlighting that transfers can mitigate the detrimental effects of crises on these outcomes. Evidence on linear growth, micronutrient deficiencies, health, labor, learning, psychosocial outcomes, and child protection is limited. Also, most studies are set in contexts characterized by high institutional fragility in which emergency social protection is undertaken by international organizations, while evidence from settings where institutional capacity for shock-responsive social protection exists is scarce. Further gaps relate to the cost-effectiveness of alternative program designs and delivery modalities; heterogeneity by child and household backgrounds; and longer-term effects of interventions. Filling these gaps is critical to support child-sensitive approaches to social protection in crises to effectively pursue Sustainable Development Goal 1.

Imperfect capital markets and commitment problems impede lumpy human capital investments. Labeled loans have been postulated as a potential solution to both constraints, but little is known about the role of the label in influencing investment choices in practice. We draw on a cluster randomized controlled trial in rural India to test predictions from a theoretical model, providing novel evidence that labeled microcredit is effective in influencing household borrowing and investment decisions and increasing take-up of a lumpy human capital investment, a toilet.

This paper estimates the effect of international remittances on healthcare expenditures, taking into account both the interdependence with other consumption goods and the effects of health shocks. More precisely, we assess whether the budget allocation decisions of remittance-receiving households reveal different preferences to invest in health capital, even when the simultaneous effect that health shocks may have on the demand of remittances and on other types of nondurable expenditures is accounted for. Using data from the “Peruvian National Survey of Households,” we find that remittances have a positive impact on healthcare budget shares, net of the remittance-related income effect and independently of the occurrance of a health shock. They also have a positive impact on housing and a negative one on other expenditure items, that is, clothing, transport, and education. Hence, our results indicate a “pure” tendency of remittance-receiving households to devote larger shares of their budget to health capital investment, rather than to other types of consumption goods.

Credit constraints are considered to be an important barrier hindering adoption of preventive health investments among low-income households in developing countries. However, it is not obvious whether, and the extent to which, the provision of labelled micro-credit—where the loan is linked to the investment only through its label—will boost human capital investments, particularly when it is characterised by other attractive attributes, such as a lower interest rate. This paper studies a cluster randomised controlled trial of a sanitation micro-credit program in rural India, which made available lower interest loans for sanitation. The loans were linked with sanitation through their name only. The loans were not bundled with any toilet, and loan use was weakly monitored, but not enforced. Hence it is not directly obvious that the loan should boost sanitation investments. A simple theoretical framework indicates that the intervention could increase sanitation ownership through three channels—relaxation of credit constraints, salience of the loan label, or the lower interest rate. The presented empirical evidence, combined with model predictions, allow to conclude that the loan label—which to date has not received much attention in the literature—significantly impacts households borrowing and investment behaviour. Labelling loans is thus a viable strategy to improve uptake of lumpy preventive health investments.

Globally, millions of children receive meals at school through home-grown school feeding (HGSF) programmes that link school feeding programmes with local smallholder farmers. Countries such as Brazil, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria have undertaken HGSF initiatives. However, with a few exceptions, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the effectiveness and economic sustainability of such programmes. This evidence gap is due to the innate difficulties of applying standard impact evaluation approaches to complex programmes that combines two interventions, each of which has specific target populations. This chapter aims to support practitioners by providing methodological guidelines for conducting rigorous impact assessments of HGSF programmes. It presents an overview of the main technical issues to be addressed, depending on the characteristics of the context and of the intervention itself. The chapter focuses on the methodological challenges related to the estimation of the effects of HGSF interventions on farmers

This paper examines how the 2014-2017 'refugee crisis' in Italy affected voting behaviour and the rise of right-wing populism in national Parliamentary elections. We collect unique administrative data throughout the crisis and leverage exogenous variation in refugee resettlement across Italian municipalities induced by the Dispersal Policy. We find a positive and significant effect of the share of asylum seekers on support for radical-right anti-immigration parties. The effect is heterogeneous across municipality characteristics, yet robust to dispersal policy features. We provide causal evidence that the anti-immigration backlash is not rooted in adverse economic effects, while it is triggered by radical-right propaganda.

Imperfect capital markets and commitment problems impede lumpy human capital investments. Labelled loans can alleviate both constraints, but little is known about their effectiveness in practice. We draw on a cluster randomized controlled trial in rural India to provide the first evidence that labelled microcredit is effective in increasing take-up of a lumpy human capital investment, a safe toilet. Testing predictions from a theoretical model provides novel evidence that loan labels influence household borrowing and investment decisions. Not all loans are used for sanitation investments, suggesting that loan labels offer a soft commitment incentive.

This research note analyzes the relationship between language use and children’s Body Mass Index (BMI) growth in the United Kingdom. Making use of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), we assess whether the main language spoken in the household explains BMI divergences between immigrants’ and natives’ children. We provide evidence that the integration process hampers BMI growth and therefore exerts a small protective effect: male children living in English-speaking households gain weight slower than those with less integrated parents. However, the protective effect applies only to sons from higher social origins.

Aims/hypothesis: Diabetic nephropathy is characterised by mesangial extracellular matrix accumulation. Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), a chemokine promoting monocyte infiltration, is upregulated in the diabetic glomerulus. We performed in vitro and in vivo studies to examine whether MCP-1 may have prosclerotic actions in the setting of diabetes, presumably via its receptor, chemokine (C-C motif) receptor 2 (CCR2), which has been described in mesangial cells. Method(s): Human mesangial cells were exposed to recombinant human (rh)-MCP-1 (100 ng/ml) for 12, 24 and 48 h and to rh-MCP-1 (10, 100 and 200 ng/ml) for 24 h. Fibronectin, collagen IV and transforming growth factor, beta 1 (TGF-beta1) protein levels were measured by ELISA and pericellular polymeric fibronectin levels by western blotting. The intracellular mechanisms were investigated using specific inhibitors for CCR2, nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kappaB), p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase and protein kinase C, and an anti-TGF-beta1 blocking antibody. In both non-diabetic and streptozotocin-induced diabetic mice that were deficient or not in MCP-1, glomerular fibronectin accumulation was examined by immunohistochemistry, while cortical Tgf-beta1 (also known as Tgfb1) and fibronectin mRNA and protein levels were examined by real-time PCR and western blotting. Result(s): In mesangial cells, MCP-1 binding to CCR2 induced a 2.5-fold increase in fibronectin protein levels at 24 h followed by a rise in pericellular fibronectin, whereas no changes were seen in collagen IV production. MCP-1-induced fibronectin production was TGF-beta1- and NF-kappaB-dependent. In diabetic mice, loss of MCP-1 diminished glomerular fibronectin protein production and both renal cortical Tgf-beta1 and fibronectin mRNA and protein levels. Conclusions/interpretation: Our in vitro and in vivo findings indicate a role for the MCP-1/CCR2 system in fibronectin deposition in the diabetic glomerulus, providing a new therapeutic target

We worked out an experimental protocol able to purge the stem cell compartment of the SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma clone. This protocol was based on the prolonged treatment of the wild-type cell population with either hypoxia or the antiblastic etoposide. Cell fate was monitored by immunocytochemical and electrophysiologic (patch-clamp) techniques. Both treatments produced the progressive disappearance of neuronal type (N) cells (which constitute the bulk of the tumor), leaving space for a special category of epithelial-like substrate-adherent cells (So). The latter represent a minimal cell component of the untreated population and are endowed with immunocytochemical markers (p75, c-kit, and CD133) and the electrophysiologic "nude" profile, typical of the neural crest stem cells. S0 cells displayed a highly clonogenic potency and a substantial plasticity, generating both the N component and an alternative subpopulation terminally committed to the fibromuscular lineage. Unlike the N component, this lineage was highly insensitive to the apoptotic activity of hypoxia and etoposide and developed only when the neuronal option was abolished. Under these conditions, the fibromuscular progeny of S0 expanded and progressed up to the exhaustion of the staminal compartment and to the extinction of the tumor. When combined, hypoxia and etoposide cooperated in abolishing the N cell generation and promoting the conversion of the tumor described. This synergy might mirror a natural condition in the ischemic areas occurring in cancer. These results have relevant implications for the understanding of the documented tendency of neuroblastomas to regress from a malignant to a benign phenotype, either spontaneously or on antiblastic treatment. ©2007 American Association for Cancer Research.