Journal of International Development最新文献

In the face of increased uncertainty and a slow economic recovery, it is crucial to protect populations from the effects of systemic crises beyond the narrow goal of poverty reduction. In Ecuador, social assistance programs had little effect in reducing earnings losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a renewed discussion on the implementation of a universal basic income (UBI). This study evaluates the potential impact of social assistance reforms using tax-benefit microsimulation techniques. Four simulated counterfactual reforms are assessed, ranging from an extension of current social assistance programs to the implementation of UBI, which would replace existing programs and be partially funded through progressive personal income tax and social security contributions. Our findings demonstrate that poverty and inequality would decrease significantly under the more generous UBI scenarios. This research contributes to the ongoing debate on the potential benefits of UBI in reducing poverty and inequality and emphasizes the importance of considering alternative social assistance reforms in the face of growing systemic challenges.

This paper studies the effect of export stability on the adolescent fertility rate. The test results show that the improvement of export stability will decrease the adolescent fertility rate of exporting countries through four mechanisms: raising female labour income, increasing health expenditure, promoting urbanization and strengthening female education empowerment. Compared to developed or high-income countries, the impact of export stability in developing or low-income countries is more substantial. The increase in export scale will strengthen the impact of export stability on adolescent fertility rates. The findings of this article can help countries to govern the adolescent fertility rate further.

Indian official data points out a progressive decline in child labour during last three decades.Nevertheless, there are several gaps that need to be addressed for targed policy intervention. This paper highlights the key socioeconomic vulnerabilities among children in rural and urban India and also summarize the key focus areas to be prioritized. We posit that children's entry into the labour force is driven by varied access to resources such as education, societal status and gender. The children in Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes households are the most vulnerable. We recommend prioritizing easy-to-access quality education among the key strategies for eradicating child labour.

This paper aims to assess the accelerating role of digital technology in fighting poverty through financial inclusion in the countries of West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). Based on a sample of the adult population from the World Bank's Findex database, we estimate a recursive bivariate probit model that addresses endogeneity. The findings show that the regular usage of mobile money as well as the purpose of mobile money usage including saving, borrowing, remittance and their combinations increase diversely and significantly the probability of short-term poverty alleviation in WAEMU. In addition, the change in poverty status can be indirectly due to certain driving factors of mobile money usage including mainly the ownership of mobile phones.

This study focuses in testing the power of reciprocity and leadership as collective action incentive structures and cooperation economic benefits in explaining collective action initiation in the context of a post-communist transition economy. The paper is based on a structured survey targeting Albanian export-oriented farmers. Different from most previous studies, this paper uses both regression analysis and machine learning procedure which is better suited for analysing non-linear relationships. The empirical findings are at odds with common sense that non-cooperation is the dominant strategy, because the presence of tolerant reciprocators and leadership resources provide promising incentive structures for collective action development.

Expectations about future labour market opportunities are essential for education and labour market decisions. This paper uses data from a survey of youths in seven Latin American and Caribbean countries to explore the role of expected returns to education on schooling decisions. We find substantial variation in subjective expectations partly explained by youths' socioeconomic characteristics. Also, we find that enrolment in tertiary education is positively related to perceived education returns. Furthermore, the association of expectations with schooling choices differs across individuals in relevant domains, including gender, skills, and socioeconomic background. Our results suggest that public policies might impact choices and reduce socioeconomic gaps in schooling by providing information on education returns.

We examine the effect of household tenure choice on adopting self-generation energy technologies in Brazil. We employ microdata from the Household Budget Survey (POF) dataset for 2017 and 2018 from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and matching methodology to evaluate various hypotheses regarding occupancy status, credit availability, purchasing power and life cycle theory. We also use placebo treatments, propensity score weighting, entropy balancing and Rosenbaum's sensitivity analysis to evaluate the robustness of our findings. Results show that leasing a residence negatively and significantly affects families' adoption of self-generating technologies with an estimated probability reduction of around 62%, with greater effects when considering credit, wages and life cycle.

In this paper, I study the causal relationship between violence and human capital accumulation. Due to a power vacuum left in conflict zones of Colombia after the 2016 peace agreement, large spikes in violence were reported in the municipalities of the country dominated by the rebel group FARC. I compare student test scores in municipalities that experienced the increase in violence to the ones that did not, before and after the national peace agreement. I find that a 10% increase in the homicide rate reduces average high school test scores by approximately 0.03 standard deviations. However, this impact is greater in the case of poor students who suffered a reduction of about 0.1 standard deviations per subject area, equivalent to 3.3 percentage points out of the final score. I also consider heterogeneity by gender finding a slightly larger negative impact on female students. This disparate effect on women and on the poorest students adds new evidence to the literature on the effects of armed conflict on learning outcomes.

This study examines the impact of entrepreneur attributes on financing channels of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as the moderating role of firm age on this relationship. It examines a comprehensive dataset of 4139 firm-year observations operating in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region observed over the 2013–2019 period. The results are four-fold. First, our overall findings reveal that experienced entrepreneurs tend to use internal funds. Second, the university education of entrepreneurs positively correlates with debt financing. Third, female entrepreneurs are more eager to use internal funds and less debt. Fourth, firm age is found to moderate these relationships. Indeed, in young SMEs, experienced entrepreneurs are shown to rely on debt, graduated entrepreneurs on internal funds, and in older SMEs, female entrepreneurs use debt. Our results bear on the proposals of upper echelons and organizational lifecycle theories.

The effects of marketization on crop diversity and dietary diversity is very contested. Therefore, more empirical work is needed to unpack the multidimensional factors that underpin these processes. This article expands the analytical understanding of the linkages between these dimensions by looking at the case of Uzbekistan. First, it uses quantitative methods to assess the hypotheses that (a) wealth leads to higher dietary diversity; (b) agricultural marketization leads to lower dietary diversity; and (c) crop diversity leads to higher dietary diversity. Regression analysis shows that only wealth is an independent determinant of dietary diversity. Second, the article uses qualitative data to argue that state policies and social norms, by influencing food availability, knowledge and nutritional values, are key to unpacking the relationships between marketization, crop diversity and dietary diversity.