World Development最新文献

Recent decades have seen progressive reform of inheritance laws towards gender equality, both globally and in South Asia. Yet, a wide gender gap persists in actual ownership due to family resistance to endowing daughters with property. Given this, do women use courts to claim their rights across regions? Who are the opposing parties? What kind of property is most disputed? How long do cases take? To what extent do judgements favour women, and does the language of judgements reveal gender stereotypes? No prior study has addressed these questions.

This paper does so for India. Here, under the Hindu Succession Amendment Act of 2005 (HSAA 2005), Hindu women achieved legal equality in inheritance rights over all property, including agricultural land and coparcenary joint family property (JFP) in which they now have direct shares by birth. To analyse women’s use of courts to claim their coparcenary shares, we draw on the four main online data sources to extract 505 cases (from over 2900 examined) relating to women coparceners, where judgements were delivered in High Courts over 2005–2020.

Brothers were the most commonly listed opponents to women’s claims and most of the disputes related to land, especially agricultural. In 77% of the cases filed by women or against them, the rulings granted women some share in parental property. But only in 52% of these positive rulings did they receive their direct shares in JFP, while receiving property through other rights in the rest. The legal route thus holds some promise of positive outcomes, but progress specifically in the implementation of the HSAA 2005 remains limited. This will require activating new channels of support for women. Located in the interface of social science and law, this paper would also have relevance for other countries, both methodologically and in substance.

Our study introduces a new quantitative dataset of government disaster responses for 183 disasters in Peru from 1900 to 2020. We examine disaster responses in the form of relocation of affected individuals, restrictions on movement, reconstruction of damaged areas, and regulations of third-party disaster relief. Prior analyses of large earthquakes and El Niño events in Peru reveal that government response to hazards shapes the outcomes for social, conflict, and economic outcomes. Our dataset contributes quantitative coding of a much larger sample of disasters to identify useful patterns in disaster response. We show that the Peruvian government is the most active actor in disaster response, although international organizations and non-governmental organizations are active in nearly a third of all disasters. Restrictions and relocation of affected populations occur, but this tends to be temporary, rather than long-term solutions to mitigate risks from future disasters. Relocation of affected people occurs more often for floods and landslides, while regulation of third-party activities occurs more frequently with floods and extreme temperature events; other disaster response policies do not vary across disaster types. Disaster responses have also shifted over time, with the government providing more funds for post-disaster reconstruction and coordinating with outside aid groups more actively in recent decades. The results demonstrate the feasibility and importance of tracking patterns of response across hazard events to fully understand the role of government in disaster response. Our larger data collection project will provide similar data for all countries over time, which will help us situate Peru’s patterns of disaster response in the larger disaster management landscape and understand how government policy choices influence political violence, migration, and other political dynamics.

This study assesses the effects of illegal armed groups on expenditures made by municipal governments in Colombia between 2000 and 2013. Specifically, the study examines how the presence of illegal armed groups seems to affect the level of municipal expenditures, while distinguishing between capital investments and current social spending. Limits on political participation and institutional weaknesses helped to propagate the violence that disrupted Colombia in the 1970s and 1980s. Searching for solutions, Colombia transferred important decision-making responsibilities from the central government to regional and local governments. Paradoxically this decentralization opened an opportunity for illegal armed groups to play meaningful roles in local political and economic life, eventually taking control over local resources in several municipalities. To assess the role of these non-state armed groups in municipal resource allocation, our empirical analysis exploits annual data on municipal expenditures and local armed conflict. Empirical results suggest a differentiated impact on capital investments and social spending. These results are robust to multiple treatment framings and definitions.

Skills gaps and mismatches are widely documented as a hindrance to inclusive structural transformation across developing countries, especially in Africa. What is often overlooked, however, is the fact that skills development is a complex political economy process challenged by institutional and financing problems on the supply side, and inadequate demand, that is, a shortage of firms that can organise skilled labour and provide on-the-job training effectively. In such adverse contexts, rent seeking and corruption may arise from conflicting objectives, trade-offs and mis-aligned incentives among stakeholders – public sector skills providers and firms. With a focus on Tanzania, we (i) analyse the incentive structures underlying such rule-breaking behaviours and processes, and (ii) empirically test alternative institutional design strategies that would better align the interests of different stakeholders towards improved skills development outcomes. Building on over 30 in-depth stakeholder interviews in 2018, we conducted three Discrete Choice Experiments with over 200 firms to test the feasibility of different incentive packages in 2019. Our main hypothesis is that the successful re-alignment of stakeholders’ incentives must consider both the different and potentially conflicting objectives of public training institutions and the heterogeneity in skills needs and capabilities of different types of firms. We uncover latent preference structures differentiated by observable firm characteristics, most strongly by differences in technical capabilities, existing training provision and firm size. We conclude advancing an evidence-based tailored skills policy reform.

Childhood vaccinations can increase population growth in the short term by improving the survival rates of young children. Over the long run, reductions in child mortality rates are associated with lower demand for children and lower fertility rates (known as “demographic transition”). Vaccination programs could potentially aid demographic transition by lowering child mortality and improving future health, schooling, and labor market outcomes of vaccinated mothers, but these long-term demographic benefits remain untested. We address this major gap in the literature by examining the associations of India’s national childhood vaccination program (the Universal Immunization Programme or UIP) with future demand for children. We combine data on the district-wise rollout of UIP during 1985–1990 with fertility preference data of 625,000 adult women from the National Family Health Survey of India 2015–2016. We include women who were born five years before and after the rollout period (1980–1995) and were cohabiting with a partner at the time of the survey. We divide these 20–36-year-old women into two groups: those who were exposed to UIP at birth (treatment group) and those who were born before the program (control group). After controlling for individual- and household-level factors and age and district fixed effects, treatment group women are 2% less likely to have at least one child and want 2% fewer children in their lifetime as compared with the control group. The negative associations with at least one childbirth are larger for more educated and richer women, while the associations with desired number of children is larger for uneducated and poorer women.

The economic lives of refugees are often viewed as relatively homogeneous, and sources of within-group variation remain largely unexplored. We describe the socio-economic diversity of refugees in one particular region: East Africa. Drawing upon first-hand quantitative and qualitative data collected in Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia (n = 8,996), the article systematically compares 12 refugee subpopulations living in seven refugee camps and the three capital cities. In order to identify sources of variation, we examine three main questions: (1) What variation is there in socio-economic outcomes? (2) What strategies and resources do refugees rely upon, and how do these vary? (3) How are opportunities and constraints shaped by differences in institutions and identity? Overall, we show that, although the economic lives of refugees have some distinguishing and common features, they are also heterogeneous by host country, urban/camp context, nationality, and household. We explain why describing and understanding sources of within-group variation matters for research and policy.

We combine remote-sensed data and individual child, mother, and household level data for five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) to design a prototype drought-sensitive targeting framework that may be used in scarce-data contexts. To accomplish this we: i) develop simple and easy-to-communicate measures of drought shocks; ii) show that droughts have a large impact on child growth faltering in these five countries -- comparable, in size, to the effects of mother’s illiteracy, living in a house with a primitive roof, or to a fall to a lower wealth quintile; and iii) show that, in this context, decision trees and regressions predict growth faltering as accurately (out-of-sample) as machine learning methods that are not interpretable. Taken together, our analysis lends support to the idea that a data-driven targeting approach may contribute to the design of policies that alleviate the impact that climate change has on the world’s most vulnerable populations.

In the past two decades India experienced an unprecedented expansion of the rights-based welfare. This expansion cut across a range of sectors − education, employment, public health, poverty reduction − but was also accompanied by a dramatic expansion and deepening of state institutions and a shift from patronage politics to citizen empowerment. In this paper we show that India was a least likely case for welfare expansion and that contrary to what the traditional welfare state literature suggests, civil society was a key driver of reform, but even more vitally has played a significant role in institutionalizing reforms, especially at the local level. We focus on the case of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the world’s largest public works program, to discuss how civil society in India effectively framed welfare issues, mobilized to defend the law, helped institutionalize new governance structures like social audits by working with the state and are ensuring continuous accountability by cultivating what we call “user publics”. We draw on the existing literature, fieldwork on village level welfare reform in different subnational regions of India, direct involvement in civil mobilization around rights based laws for over a decade and an ongoing project in which we are collaborating with some of the key architects of the reforms including an archive of over 3000 primary documents.

This paper examines the effectiveness of income protection and job protection policies for the post-pandemic economic recovery of the second half of 2020 through 2021. The paper is based on a new dataset of the budgets of social protection programs implemented as a part of the pandemic stimulus package in 154 countries. The empirical analysis shows that the effect of the social protection response is heterogeneous. In the short run, higher expenditure on job protection measures is associated with more robust GDP growth, increased employment, and decreased inactivity and poverty rates compared to the expansion of income protection programs. Both policies had a significant economic impact only in countries with weaker pre-pandemic social insurance systems. In countries with broader coverage of the social insurance system, the income and job protection programs appear to have a limited impact on post-pandemic recovery. Because the structural economic changes induced by the pandemic are expected to fully materialize in several years, more research is needed to understand the longer-term effects of job protection and income protection policies on labor markets and economic recovery.

Motivated by a recent setback in the fight against child malnutrition, this study explores whether aid projects help reduce stunting or impaired growth among children close to project sites. Focusing on Malawi, a country with a very high stunting prevalence for which we have access to geo-referenced data on aid projects from a broad range of donors, we geographically match spatial data on 778 aid project sites of 22 different donors with anthropometric and background data on 26,604 children under the age of five. The detailed data allows for a disaggregated analysis comparing local aid impacts by types of aid, donor- and recipient groups. To identify the effect of aid, we rely on spatial and temporal variation in aid project coverage and survey rollout, coupled with variation in the child’s age at aid exposure. The empirical results consistently indicate a positive impact of early-life aid exposure on child growth. The positive treatment effect is seemingly driven primarily by multilateral aid and is stronger in rural areas. On the other hand, we observe little heterogeneity by aid type and across socio-economic recipient groups, signaling that the treatment effect stems from improvements across the board in aid receiving areas rather than by interventions targeting the most vulnerable groups. In terms of mechanisms, the results of the mediation analysis underscore the influence of distal determinants of stunting, such as the improved economic conditions of households, which are likely to impact more proximal determinants downstream.