Developing Economies最新文献

Gross domestic product has been the primary development indicator for nearly a century and has played an important role in designing and evaluating public policies and comparing countries' development levels. On the other hand, the last two decades have seen a growing trend toward alternative well-being indicators. One of these alternative indicators is life satisfaction. We study the relationship between public expenditures such as health, education, and recreation and people's life satisfaction. We employ the OLS and ordered probit models utilizing a large representative household survey with more than 196,000 observations from Turkey. Our findings indicate that health, education, and recreation expenditures are positively associated with individuals' life satisfaction. We also explore potential mechanisms underlying the significant effects of public expenditures on life satisfaction. These significant correlations may be driven by satisfaction with health services, educational services, and social life.

This paper estimates returns to schooling in Thailand by applying the regression discontinuity approach to the change in the compulsory schooling law in 1978. This law enhanced human capital investment on the eve of rapid structural transformation. The returns to schooling based on the instrumental variables estimation were around 8%, while ordinary least squares (OLS) overestimated such returns. Returns were higher for females, urban areas, the services sector, and underdeveloped regions. The findings contrast sharply with studies exploiting similar institutional changes in developed countries where OLS estimates underestimate returns to schooling, implying that former school dropouts tend to have higher returns than those already in school before the law change. Ability bias is more likely to arise in developing countries, possibly because parents might be forced to keep children only with higher abilities in school, reinforcing inequality among children within the household.

This paper examines how COVID-19 vaccinations change international trade. We analyze monthly level trade data from January 2020 to March 2022 that cover the bilateral exports from 40 reporting countries to 220 partner countries. Our findings can be summarized as follows. On average, the effects of vaccination rates in importing and exporting countries on exports were found to be insignificant. When considering the income level, we also did not find significant effects of vaccination rates in high- and low-income importing countries on exports. In contrast, the rise of vaccination rates in low-income exporting countries significantly increased their exports though no significant increase in exports was detected when vaccination rates rose in high-income exporting countries. These results imply that since low-income countries are mainly engaged in labor-intensive industries, the relaxation of lockdown orders (i.e., movement and gathering restrictions) driven by the rise of vaccination rates plays a crucial role in production activities in low-income countries.

Nonborrowers are defined as debt averse if they have never borrowed in the past and prefer avoiding debt in the future, even when offered generous borrowing terms such as zero interest rates, zero collateral, and easy debt-forgiveness. Other nonborrower types have either borrowed in the past or are open to doing so in the future. To better understand nonborrowing behavior, credit preference types (CPTs) were measured among 575 low-income farmers in Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Among 208 current nonborrowers, 156 had never borrowed and only seven were credit rationed. Among never-borrowers, 102 were debt-averse. Thus, more than half of eligible nonborrowers (102 out of 201) were debt averse. This high prevalence challenges the assumption of unmet credit demand among the poor. Disaggregating CPTs reveals heterogeneity among nonborrowers that would remain observationally equivalent otherwise. We report reasons for not borrowing and investigate how observable characteristics influence the likelihood of debt aversion.

In Pakistan, one household in six receives remittances from family members working elsewhere. Using household data from a national living standards survey, we find that propensity to receive remittances is strongly associated with a higher number of dependent girls relative to total children in a household. The effect is significant for younger households and for households with lower permanent income, and increases as girls approach expected marriage age. After controlling for other demographic and economic factors known to be associated with migration, we conclude that the need to save for dowry to be paid on the marriage of a daughter is likely to contribute to the labor export decision.