World Development最新文献

We investigate the impact of the real exchange rate (RER) on the growth of import-substituting sectors using the quasi-natural experiment of Argentina’s large and lasting RER depreciation following the end of the Convertibility regime. To this end, we developed an episode detection algorithm to identify sectors with substantial import reductions from 2003 to 2008, while controlling for changes in aggregate income. Our analysis examines the theoretical transmission mechanisms through which the RER influences the performance of the tradable sector competing with imports. The results reveal three main findings: First, labor-intensive sectors showed a higher probability of occurrence of import substitution episodes during 2003–2008. This is in line with our expectations and the traditional trade theory, given that the RER should increase profitability in these kinds of sectors more. Second, we find that the higher level of the RER increases the probability of an import substitution episode when the sector shares a higher number of similar capabilities with sectors in which the country is already internationally competitive. Last, we find complementarities between the sectors with import substitution episodes and those that achieved the status of export surge episodes during the same period (2003–2008). In this sense, and in contrast to the traditional consensus view about import substitution policies, we do not observe any tension between developing sectors for the domestic market and the incentive to export growth when the level of the RER is used to promote growth and diversification in the tradable sector.

State intervention has long affected the stability of the global mineral and raw material markets. Global energy transition has continued to boost demand for copper, lithium, cobalt, and nickel. It has exacerbated the global prevalence of resource nationalism. Research on resource nationalism has focused on the interaction of economic, political, cultural, and social elements within countries. The lack of understanding of the global economic effects of resource nationalism limits our flexibility in responding to upheavals in the global resource order. We combine time series counterfactual analysis and input–output modeling to advance our understanding of the worldwide supply chain effects of resource nationalism. We analyze the impacts of resource political behavior on global supply chains based on several representative episodes of resource nationalism. While major industrialized countries suffer more absolute welfare losses, formerly developed countries in the Global South face higher price effects. Moreover, nationalist resource shocks are not the only cause of welfare losses in the metals supply chain sector. Still, they are also harming various industries and groups, from food and energy to services. Such differences in price and welfare effects depend on the type of mineral and the resource power of the event-initiating country, on the one hand, and are influenced by the global industrial division of labor, on the other. More losses in developing countries come from the agricultural sector and primary manufacturing than from the severity of the losses suffered by the manufacturing and service sectors in industrial and rich countries. This is a reminder to pay more attention to the unequal distribution of economic pressures across countries and sectors in the global energy transition.

Since the Industrial Revolution, modern economic growth has made the world increasingly (if unevenly) rich. This trajectory led to unprecedented improvements in human wellbeing but, at the same time, produced environmental impacts which threaten material prosperity itself. Against this background, the great challenge of the 21st century is to continue to improve global wellbeing while mitigating environmental impacts. For most international organizations and scholars this can be achieved by decoupling economic growth from its environmental costs (as in green growth proposals). However, other scholars question the feasibility of sustaining growth with a sufficiently large fall in its ecological footprint, arguing instead for decoupling wellbeing from economic growth (as in post-growth strategies). How common were these two forms of decoupling in the past? When and where did societies manage to separate wellbeing improvements from environmental impacts? The answers to these questions can allow us to trace the long-run direction of travel of the global economy and to rethink the historical narrative of the emergence and consolidation of modern economic growth by considering its impacts on human wellbeing and environmental change at the same time. We offer the first long-term analysis of decoupling patterns between an augmented human development index (AHDI) and greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe). Moreover, we identify when these patterns were explained by ‘growth decoupling’ (GDP grows faster than GHGe), by ‘wellbeing decoupling’ (AHDI grows faster than GDP per capita), by both, or by neither. Our results show that at low income levels all world regions experienced episodes of wellbeing decoupling; as they became richer, growth decoupling became more common. Nevertheless, we find that such decoupling episodes have proved reversible and that no country in the world has yet managed to achieve very high levels of human wellbeing within planetary boundaries.

Mega-events such as the Olympic Games, the World Cup, the World Expos, and the G20 Summit play important roles in international political economy in the age of globalization. But we know little about how they shape domestic politics and policy processes in their host countries. China has emerged as the leading host of various sports, cultural, economic, and political mega-events in the past decades. Employing an original panel dataset of Chinese cities from 2001 to 2019, we find that cities that host mega-events gain an advantage in bargaining with central bureaucracies for policy resources. Using subway investments as an example, we demonstrate that host cities not only obtained centrally regulated infrastructure investments that directly serve the needs of the events, but also achieve development that they otherwise could not. The result is robust with two-way fixed effects models and after accounting for various alternative explanations. We show that host cities gain advantage because the events capture the attention of national leaders. National leaders have power over central bureaucrats’ careers and thus steer their decisions, and they see the success of mega-events as an opportunity to project national strengths. Our findings highlight the domestic policy consequences of international events in the age of China’s rapid rise and integration with the world.

In low- and middle-income countries, the absence of formal health insurance often forces households to resort to credit for covering healthcare expenses and stabilising consumption. Traditional microcredit offerings frequently impede swift access to funds, limiting households’ ability to mitigate unforeseen health costs. Through a cluster-randomised controlled trial across 24 microfinance branches in northern Bangladesh, we investigated how modifying the features of an existing health credit scheme and reducing transaction costs could enhance credit accessibility. Our findings indicate that relaxing specific scheme features led to increased credit accessibility. This heightened access, triggered by health shocks, corresponded with a rise in utilising formal healthcare services. While we observed an overall uptick in out-of-pocket expenditures, this remained unchanged when excluding the borrowed amount. Our study suggests health credit initiatives promote formal healthcare-seeking behaviours and stimulate higher health-related spending. Immediate access to financial resources alleviates liquidity constraints, enabling increased health spending, facilitating consumption smoothing, and potentially enhancing welfare, particularly where efficient and equitable healthcare financing options are limited.

Despite efforts by governments, industry, civil society and other key stakeholders to ensure fairer farmer incomes, eradicate child labour, and address causes of cocoa-related deforestation, results on the ground in Côte d’Ivoire are limited. Given the less tangible social dimensions that evade quantitative methods and unfold over time in complex ways, knowledge and methodological gaps remain. Using Comparative Historical Analysis (CHA), this study analyses social sustainability priorities, statuses, and gaps in the Ivorian cocoa sector, providing a contextual reflection of current social outcomes. Findings highlight underlying social structures that (a) show slow progress (e.g., weak infrastructure, disparities in access to basic services, especially in rural areas); (b) amplify (e.g., structural poverty magnified by demographic changes, power held by a few firms); and (c) erode (e.g., institutional decay dynamics). Analysis shows that structural factors that increase vulnerability in the Ivorian cocoa sector are not adequately addressed. Thus, cocoa producers are highly vulnerable to price shocks and production related risks, ultimately unable to achieve a decent standard of living. Addressing research and knowledge gaps while making complex social issues a more explicit part of the policy and practice agenda is crucial for successful long-term multi-sectoral and multi-actor planning.

Latin America is often portrayed as a global exception to the rising or consolidating income inequality trends of the early twenty-first century. In this paper we revisit this exceptionalism by innovatively combining harmonised surveys, social security and tax data, and national accounts for ten countries. The reconciliation of micro and macro incomes present us with a critical dilemma: either the region is more unequal or it is not as rich as officially reported. Distributing the data gaps shows a more heterogeneous region in terms of inequality trends. Falling inequality is most visible among the bottom 99%, but the trend flattens or reverses in the largest economies once the top 1% and capital incomes are better accounted for. Taxes and transfers do not alter the main picture, except when in-kind social spending is considered. These results confirm the strengths and highlight the limits of Latin America’s redistributive policies during the period.

Do politicians target the benefits of social programs to party loyalists or to swing voters? Traditional tests of this question are clouded by an identification problem caused by the simultaneity of politician and voter choices to participate in the exchange of assistance for votes. I use the holding of an unanticipated repeat gubernatorial election in the Venezuelan state of Barinas in 2022 as a natural experiment to identify the effects of elections on the distribution of government assistance. I estimate that the holding of the election led to an increase in the probability of voters in Barinas receiving food packages in comparison with the control group of voters in the state of Apure. I also find that moderate opposition and third-party voters received larger increases in food benefits. These results are consistent with the predictions of the spatial model of distributive politics, according to which elections lead governments to direct more benefits to swing voters instead of core supporters. The findings illustrate why investigation of cross sectional correlations is insufficient to test the implications of theories of voting if it is not accompanied by a clear identification strategy to help isolate the source of the underlying shocks.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a weakly secularized region, where religions play an important place in the lives of individuals and communities. In many countries, religious currents are involved in the structuring of educational offer, while the increase in women’s level of education is considered as a major driver of the fertility decline. In this article, we raise the question if and in how far the association between female education and fertility depends on religion. We test this interaction by using Demographic and Health surveys (earliest and most recent available) for a corpus of 23 Sub-Saharan African countries.

We find that the association between female education and fertility does not differ between religious groups in the vast majority of Sub-Saharan countries, implying that globally, religion does not weaken the negative educational gradient of fertility in this region. Our results strongly suggest that education takes on an emancipatory function by modifying the reproductive norms of women, independent of their religious background.

Droughts can affect people’s trust in political leaders positively, through rallying effects, or negatively, through blame attribution. We examine how drought conditions affect trust in leaders in the context of Africa. We link high-precision exogenous climate data to survey respondents, 2002–2018, and report moderate negative effects of drought conditions on people’s trust in their president. These negative effects increase with the severity of drought conditions. The political economy of favoritism, where some regions are preferentially treated by rulers, should result in heterogeneous effects across territories. We find that trust in leaders increases in capital regions and in leader birth regions during dry conditions. In contrast, when droughts take place in such regions, trust levels fall in other regions. This is in line with the idea that capital regions and leader birth regions could be preferentially treated in the aftermath of droughts. Understanding these processes further is important given their salience because of global warming.