Journal of International Development最新文献

This article examines social protection pathways in the former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. We identify five steps to understanding the patterns and dynamics of social protection in these countries that provide evidence of its exogenous construction. First, we characterize the main developments in social protection systems and policies from their inception, covering the colonial era to the present, underlining the role of colonial legacy and the global social policy framework. Second, we document the similarity of national social protection trajectories and lack of national ownership of the policy problem markedly that characterizes social protection pathways.

Bridging the gap between awareness and action on environmental issues such as climate change often requires understanding the moderating roles of individual trust, institutional trust and civic engagement. This paper explores how social capital, through generalaised trust, trust in institutions and civic engagement, can either strengthen or weaken the agency on climate change on environmental behaviour. Linking climate change awareness to environmental behaviour through the mediation of perceived changes in quality of life is the chosen approach to explore the role of social capital. The results suggest that low levels of trust, whether interpersonal or institutional, reduce an individual's sense of agency by firstly reducing the impact of climate change awareness on quality of life, changing perceptions and consequently reducing environmental behaviour. Greater trust in institutions produces a stronger effect of climate change awareness on willingness to pay. On the other hand, civic engagement shows a significant effect when taxes are considered. The study suggests that the impact of social capital on environmental payments varies according to the type of payment (voluntary vs. mandatory). The mapping of the role of social capital in reducing the agency of climate change awareness in quality-of-life changes should be further explored, as the latter has proven to be a promising way to address climate change in developed and developing countries.

Overlapping borrowing – i.e., the practice of taking new loans before old loans have been fully repaid – has become an important phenomenon in the microcredit sector in many developing countries, including Bangladesh. This paper examines the rationale for overlapping and investigates its short-term and long-term consequences by using a panel data set that is representative of Bangladesh as a whole. The study finds that it is useful to distinguish between two broad groups of overlapping borrowers who differ in terms of both the rationale of overlapping and its consequences. The first group – consisting of more than half of all overlapping borrowers – uses it as a promotional strategy, to improve their economic conditions without incurring a sharp discrete jump in debt burden. The other group uses it as a coping strategy, to deal with contingencies that compel them to take loans of a non-productive nature, again by avoiding a sharp discrete jump in the debt burden. Econometric analysis, allowing for the possibility of endogeneity bias, shows that the first group is able to achieve stronger financial viability in the long run in comparison with non-overlapping microcredit borrowers. The second group, in contrast, does not enjoy any significant improvement in their living conditions, but they are able to stave off any decline that otherwise might have befallen them in the face of shocks. Thus, both groups succeed in their respective goals, which are promotion for the first group and protection for the second. Microcredit has always had this duality of promotion and protection; overlapping borrowing serves to strengthen these functions of microcredit.

This study focuses on the relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation, by testing the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis in Vietnam, a main export-oriented country that features a long period of economic growth. The main originality of this work is that, unlike previous studies, it uses ecological footprint as the main indicator for environmental degradation. This allows to reconsider the results from previous studies that only focus on CO₂ emissions performances. The cointegration between the analysed variables is investigated using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. To determine the parameters of the Environmental Kuznets Curve in the sample, this work additionally analyses long- and short-run estimations. The paper shows that the EKC hypothesis holds in the long term for Vietnam when using ecological footprint. Nevertheless, it also shows that not only growth but also primary energy consumption contributes to increased environmental destruction. An active ecological policy and the decrease of fossil energy use seem necessary to allow Vietnam to keep a high level of economic growth and reduce environmental degradation.

The study investigates the effect of the spouse's access to financial services via self-help groups (SHGs) on technical efficiency, technology and managerial gaps. We use farm-level data from rice farming households in eastern India, propensity score matching method and selectivity-corrected stochastic production frontier model. Results show that farms with access to financial services via a spouse's membership in SHGs have slightly higher technical efficiency than their counterparts. Technology and managerial gaps are higher for farms where spouses have access to financial services via SHGs than their counterparts. With access to financial services via spouses, rice farmers reallocated family labour and hired more labour for crop establishment. Thus, women joining SHGs can increase crop productivity, and extension agents should also focus on spouses and their role in farming decision-making, not just financial management.

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.