Journal of International Development最新文献

This paper explores how using mobile money services affects food security and nutritional status of households in Tanzania. This study uses data obtained from three waves of the Tanzanian National Panel Surveys and the instrumental variable (IV) approach. The evidence from this paper shows that using mobile money services resulted in household's enhanced nutritional and food security status. Households' receipt of remittances is the main pathway in which using mobile money services influences the food security and nutritional outcomes among households in Tanzania.

This article examines the intersection of humour and humanitarianism in engaging Northern audiences with global Southern poverty issues. It analyses witty social media campaigns that critique humanitarian practices and Africa’s representation, notably What’s Up Africa (WUA) on YouTube, Radi-Aid on YouTube, Humanitarians of Tinder on Tumblr and Barbie Savior on Instagram. Using ‘contraflow’, it shows how humour and positionality shape reception. WUA’s Black African-centric comedy, particualrly, highlights the often-underexplored role of race in development discourse, challenging the White institutional core of humanitarianism. These insights reveal power dynamics and invite further academic inquiry into the transformative potential of comedic humanitarian critique.

This paper adopts a micro-level analysis to assess the effect of aid from China and the World Bank on the wealth of locals residing near aid project sites. We match geospatial data on aid projects financed by China and the World Bank in 35 African countries between 2008 and 2014 to respondents from rounds 5 and 6 of the Afrobarometer survey. The results indicate that aid from these two donors increases the wealth of the local population. Our transmission mechanism test suggests that aid impacts wealth by promoting employment opportunities.

Can ‘health resilience’ explain international differences in COVID-19 mortality? This paper aims to understand the significant diversity in mortality rates between countries in terms of their degree of preparedness for the crisis and the underlying health conditions of the population. We integrate COVID-19 data from the first year of the pandemic with panel data from 2009 to 2017 for 188 countries around the world in order to investigate international variation in COVID-19 mortality rates. Country-level data on health, medical, social and policy variables are compared with COVID-19 mortality rates, with further controls imposed to adjust for infection rate, population and health spending. The results show that prior health conditions, social deprivation and the demography of the country all have significant effects on the mortality rates associated with the virus. The evidence also suggests that countries with higher levels of health-related policy targets demonstrated lower levels of mortality during the crisis. Finally, we confirm that social habits such as smoking, alcohol consumption and over-eating create a highly vulnerable group of individuals who were exposed to a greater risk of mortality during the outbreak.

Though the relevance of grassroots institutions for financial inclusion (FI) is widely recognised, we still do not fully understand its differential effect on FI, particularly in relation to commercial banks. To investigate this issue, we consider the household's moneylender dependence as an indicator of financial exclusion and thus our outcome variable. Further, we have developed FI indices using indicators of commercial and cooperative banks, which we used as explanatory variables in our analysis. Our results show that, while there is a decreased dependence on moneylenders even at low levels of FI through cooperatives, commercial banks show an inverted U-shaped relationship implying a decreasing effect only after a threshold level.

This study analyses the three-way relationship between economic growth and the two aspects of income distribution, namely, functional income distribution (labour income share) and household income distribution (Gini coefficient). One contribution of such three-way analysis is to reveal the ‘decoupling’ pattern of the growth-equity nexus, namely decoupling between functional income distribution and household income distribution, as it finds that economic growth tends to increase labour income share but worsen household income inequality, and also to confirm the reverse relationship that that higher labour income shares and household income inequality lead to a higher rate of economic growth. We show that these findings co-exist with the traditional belief in the literature about the directly reinforcing relationship between functional and household income distribution. These findings are consistent with skilled labour compensated by performance-based higher wages, which is often associated with a skill-biassed technological change. The study confirms the same three-way relationship in both developed and developing countries, but with several different determinants and different trends in the key variables. Given this nuanced trade-off between economic growth and household income equality, coupled with no such trade-off between growth and labour income share, a sensible policy prescription may be a combination of growth-enhancing policy of increasing pre-tax labour income share and a separate redistribution policy to decrease disposable household income inequality, which can mitigate income inequality without harming economic growth.

This study reviewed and compared fentanyl's potential impact on public health in India and China, two nations linked to its production and distribution. A comparison of China and India's governance structures, historical experiences with opioids, ideologies, and drug policies on the potential for domestic fentanyl use showed that fentanyl will likely become a more significant threat to Indian society. India's relatively weak governance, historical acceptance of opium, and permissive drug culture facilitate an environment conducive to the production and use of fentanyl. In contrast, China's strong central government, the Opium Wars, the historical effects of opium addiction, and adherence to conservative Confucian ethics will likely contribute to opposition to fentanyl use. Understanding these disparities is paramount for policymakers and public health officials in both nations to develop and customise strategies to confront the challenges posed by fentanyl.

Rapid urbanisation in developing countries has often resulted in slums with minimal public goods provision, where the poor rely on clientelist networks to provide for their basic needs. Using household-level data, this paper is the first to empirically document how political clientelism operates in Pakistani slums. It finds that urban brokers, unlike their rural counterparts, are unable to claim credit for public goods provision. Instead, they provide personalised and highly targeted services – such as dispute resolution and assistance with documentation. Moreover, unlike traditional clientelism, urban networks are found to be problem-solving and welfare-enhancing for slum dwellers.

Based on data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS), our study examines how geographical remoteness impacts farmers' gift expense burden. Farmers' gift expense burden increases significantly as the distance from the village to the county-level city increases. Two key mechanisms for more remote rural areas exacerbate farmers' gift expense burden: stronger reliance on neighbours and relatives for assistance and more concentrated authority among local officials. Our research offers new perspectives on disparities in gift expense burden among farmers in developing countries and suggests viable avenues to alleviate their financial strain.

In developing countries' manufacturing, the prevalence of small firms poses a conundrum, as few successfully transition to larger categories. Scholarly attention to the reasons behind this limited upward mobility remains scarce. This study, focusing on Indian manufacturing, explores the role of limited financial access as a significant obstacle hindering small firms' transition. Analysing data spanning 2001–2016, encompassing both formal and informal firms, we find robust evidence that access to finance is crucial for small firm transition in Indian manufacturing. The findings are robust to alternate specifications and methods, and also to concerns arising from reverse causality.