World Development最新文献

Providing a sustainable supply of safe drinking water in rural Africa depends on sufficient revenue from user payments to maintain services. While handpumps have been the primary source of drinking water for rural Africans for decades, local revenue generation has been unstable, contributing to service disruptions and welfare losses. We examine the effect of upgrading manual handpumps to solar kiosks in rural Mali from 2019 to 2023. We model 452 monthly records of observed payments and metered water usage to estimate changes in volumetric use and revenue generation. Average revenues increase four-fold indicating stronger financial performance with solar kiosks. In contrast, we find no significant increase in the volume of water people use when a handpump is upgraded to a solar kiosk. We estimate that a 1 °C temperature increase is associated with a $9 increase in average monthly revenue and 366 more litres of water used every day per waterpoint. Our study suggests that rural Malians are more inclined to pay for water from professionally managed solar kiosks. However, seasonal volatility in water demand and uncertainty in the long-term revenue effect suggests caution in assuming solar kiosks are a definitive solution to the nuanced and dynamic nature of water user behaviours in rural Africa.

South East Asia is generally considered to be a relatively successful part of the Global South, yet wealth distribution remains socially and spatially skewed. This calls for a better understanding of how middle-income countries can improve the quality of economic growth. This article investigates rural inequality through the concepts of the multi-scalar middle-income trap and immiserizing growth. In addition to rural–urban differences there are stark disparities in rural and coastal villages. We compare processes of inequality and exclusion within and between fishing and farming communities in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Our empirical inquiry focuses on livelihood challenges, inequality, and coping mechanisms based on 438 interviews in four coastal and four inland research sites covering 26 villages. We show that apart from the farming area in Vietnam, the personalized and spatial dimensions of the middle-income trap keep fishers and farmers in vulnerable settings and rural inequality is widening. This is particularly the case among farmers in Indonesia and fishers in Thailand and Vietnam. A chain of events can be identified from exclusion to immiserizing growth to in situ coping (Southern Thailand and Malang) and circular migration (Sukabumi and migrants from Central Vietnam). Our comparative investigation also reveals a substantial degree of resignation: villagers neither expect transformational change nor do they consider permanent outmigration. Based on these results we advocate for a reconceptualization of the middle-income trap and seek a more effective integration of territorial, sectoral, and welfare policies in South East Asia.

This study investigates the economic impact of China’s “stadium diplomacy” in Sub-Saharan Africa. Exploiting the staggered timing of the construction in a difference-in-differences framework, we analyze the effect of Chinese-built and financed stadiums on local economic development. Employing nighttime light satellite data, we provide both an aggregate and spatially disaggregated assessment of these investments. We find that a stadium’s city nighttime light intensity increases by about 24 percent, on average, after stadium completion. The effects can be attributed to the stadiums but are not only visible close to the stadium’s location. Estimates on nighttime light activity are mirrored by individual-level employment effects in the stadiums’ surrounding area. For stadiums not built or financed by China, we cannot find similar effects. Our results contrast with the widely held notion that China’s development finance projects constitute “white elephants”.

Elephant populations have declined by half since 1979. In response, activists have promoted destroying confiscated and stockpiled ivory to “send a message” to reduce elephant poaching and ivory demand. As a result, more than 280 tons of ivory has been destroyed between 1989 and 2017. This is the first paper to estimate the causal effect of the amount and location of these destructions on the elephant poaching rate across African and Asian countries with elephants. I use data from CITES’ Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants program from 2003 to 2019, paired with information on ivory destruction events. The main result is that the destruction of ivory does not reduce poaching rates. On the contrary, in African countries with elephants, ivory destructions increase poaching rates, with negative spillover effects from in-country events on the rest of the continent. This suggests the negative supply shock from the destructions dominate and incentivize poaching by increasing the (illicit) ivory price. For sites in Asia there is no evidence that elephant poaching rates respond to ivory destructions.

We propose Talent Portfolio Theory (TPT) as a new framework for studying human resource development. Drawing insights from Modern Portfolio Theory in financial investment, TPT views a nation’s talent development as creating a “talent portfolio” composed of four “B”s: brain train, brain gain, brain circulation, and brain linkage. TPT attends to how a talent portfolio, like a financial one, is diversified to minimize risk, and how diversification can be maintained via rebalancing. As such, TPT provides a framework that captures the overall picture of a country’s talent strategy and offers a lens through which to understand how a country changes or “rebalances” its talent portfolio over time. It also provides a tool for examining cross-national variation in talent development strategy. We illustrate the utility of TPT with the cases of Japan and Singapore. While human resource development was crucial to the economic rise of both countries, TPT demonstrates that Japan’s and Singapore’s approaches to constructing and rebalancing their talent portfolios took different routes with diverging outcomes. We conclude with discussions of theoretical and policy implications of this new approach for the study and implementation of talent development.

In global talent flows, developing countries tend to experience large brain drain to developed countries. To strengthen scientific capacity, many countries have initiated programs to attract overseas scientists to return in recent years. This study evaluates the effect of a large-scale talent recruitment program on return migration and scientific productivity in the home country. We focus on the Thousand Young Talents Program in China, the major source country of global talents in this century. We use unique data on institution-, publication-, and citation-based measures for faculty hired between 2000 and 2017 in the top mathematics departments in China. Regression results show that the recruitment program leads to significant increases in hires’ overseas educational background and scientific productivity. The effects of the program are concentrated in universities in the top tier and those located in the economically developed coastal regions. This implies that the recruitment initiative has widened the gaps in hire quality across universities. Somewhat surprisingly, scientific output of incumbents declined after being exposed to returnees, likely due to lack of collaboration. For policy implications, our study suggests that incentive-based talent programs can be an effective tool to turn brain drain into brain gain for developing countries. Furthermore, complementary policies to encourage faculty collaboration could magnify the benefits from return migration to knowledge production in the home country.

This paper investigates the nexus between women’s empowerment and child health, in particular examining whether having more rights, and which rights, leads to improvements in the well-being of children, as reflected by child mortality rates. We distinguish between civil rights, political rights, and economic rights. In our sample of 134 countries over the period 1950–2018, and employing 27 separate rights-based measures of empowerment, women’s empowerment commonly contributes to a reduction in child mortality in high-income countries, however, low- and middle-income countries reveal striking differences across some measures. For example, while women’s participation in public administration or employment in the public sector is associated with reduced child mortality, the opposite is observed for the right to run a business and access to banking. Results suggest that strong institutions are needed to ensure rights are translated into better welfare.

Vendors in traditional urban food markets in West Africa offer locally produced vegetables. These may be unsafe, carrying pathogens and posing potential risks to consumers’ health; or safe, being free from pathogens. Safe produce is rarely differentiated from unsafe produce through certification or price differentiation. Consequently, there is no market data on consumers’ actual payments for certified safe vegetables. Therefore, we aimed to find out whether there is a demand for certified safe vegetables and whether such safety certification is profitable for small-scale farmers. Previous studies have used experiments to elicit price premia consumers’ state to be willing to pay. In contrast, we offered pathogen-free cabbage certified as safe on traditional food markets in Tamale, Ghana, and observed what consumers actually paid. We noted consumer’s actual purchases, who – at the same market stalls – chose between ordinary cabbage of unknown safety status and certified safe cabbage, which carried a price premium to be paid in addition to the price of ordinary cabbage. Our results show that 176 consumers purchased certified safe cabbage and 123 bought ordinary cabbage during the test sales. Consumers’ probability to buy certified safe cabbage is explained by the size of the price premium charged, households’ characteristics and perceptions of local production modes. Estimating customers’ demand function for certified safe cabbage revealed that a pioneer farmer should charge a monopolistic price premium of GHS 1.48 (+46 % on top of the average price for ordinary cabbage valid during the test sales) to maximise the profits from introducing certified safe cabbage into the market. We find that the most promising certification option is for groups of geographically concentrated farmers to jointly apply for safe vegetable certification.

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the officials’ performance evaluation system on ecological environment quality, as well as the effect of ecological improvements on officials’ promotion prospects. Analyses are conducted using the changes in the officials’ evaluation mechanism in China’s ecological function counties in 2013 as a quasi-natural experiment, incorporating a newly developed set of county-level comprehensive ecological environment index data and manually collated data on county leaders. Multiple methods are employed to address issues such as sample selection bias, reverse causality, and heterogeneity of treatment effects. The empirical analysis shows that the adjustment of officials’ performance evaluation indicators contributes to the improvement of ecological environment quality. This effect is more pronounced in regions where GDP evaluation is abolished, regions with lower economic development but better ecological environment foundations, regions closer to provincial capitals, and officials with shorter tenure, younger age, and male gender. The rationale behind this policy is that post-reform improvements in the ecological environment will increase the promotion prospects of officials in ecological function counties, enable these areas to secure additional ecological transfer payments, thereby enhancing their capacity for environmental expenditure, and establish a credible commitment mechanism for central-local contracts. This study not only examines the relationships between political incentives for officials and environmental protection, but also enriches the literature on environmental decentralization, multi-target governance, and environmental political economy.

With this article, we propose an analytical and conceptual tool to illuminate connections between capital development and environmental injustices. The research examines how capital-driven industrial policies foster changes in social metabolisms and cause new socio-environmental impacts, leading to ecological distribution conflicts. It also explores why diverse actors mobilise and resist these changes. Building on Kapp’s ecological economics theory of social costs and David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession, we highlight the role of capital accumulation in environmental injustices through cost-shifting strategies, terming it “Accumulation by Contamination” (AbC). In this context, AbC refers to the process wherein capital socialises the costs of contamination, degrading the means of existence and bodies of human beings who oppose these processes of capital valorisation and engage in environmental conflicts. We make a compelling case for AbC by exploring waste-related conflicts at various industrial developmental stages. Waste, viewed as a ’common bad,’ emerges as a strategic realm for capitalists seeking to expand the scale and scope of accumulation. The intricacies of waste management, its market potential, and guaranteed profitability through subsidies and processes of financialisation attract significant investments globally. Quantitative and qualitative waste management assessments demonstrate that waste policies often favour businesses, leading to cost-shifting of waste management to society (in Naples, Italy; and Delhi, in India) and the dispossession of waste-pickers (in Delhi). More broadly, we emphasise the importance of integrating ecological economics and Marxist critical geography to address environmental challenges. We also analytically study the diverse actors responding to various capital strategies, fostering transformative political actions for a sustainable future. Climate change is arguably the most significant waste disposal conflict due to excessive carbon dioxide production, representing a quintessential example of Accumulation by Contamination (AbC).