World Development最新文献

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can be uniquely vulnerable to exogenous shocks and crises. In many Latin American cities, SMEs also face endemic challenges related to urban violence that can inhibit their operations and survival. Drawing on theory related to how small business vulnerability and resilience is shaped by firm capacity, dynamics of violence and businesses’ networks and relationships, this article examines SMEs self-reported business outcomes in fragile urban contexts. We do so by utilising a novel primary survey of urban SME owners in Venezuela, El Salvador and Honduras conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results highlight how firms that were smaller, informal and faced increasing violence and extortion tended to suffer; while those that increased engagement with both the State and non-state criminal actors and those who supported their communities tended to fare better. While SMEs may face distinct liabilities in complex institutional settings, our findings suggest they can also exercise some agency in navigating urban violence and exogenous shocks by utilising both formal and informal support networks and fostering community linkages as resilience strategies.

To evaluate the effects of a negative oil price shock on individual labor market outcomes, we leverage the interaction of exogenous changes in global oil prices with predetermined geographical variation in oil dependency across Ecuadorian cantons. Difference-in-differences estimates show a significant decline in wages and non-labor earnings, moderate adjustments in working hours, but no impact on labor market participation following the resource bust. Decreased labor demand from public and private sectors in oil-producing areas, along with increased exposure of informal workers to oil-price volatility, serve as the main mechanisms explaining our findings. While we observe occupational sorting, we cannot exclude the possibility of homogeneous effects across socio-demographic groups, nor the existence of industry and geographic spillover effects.

Cash transfers are shown to improve production, increase investment, and induce productive practices by farmers. Despite rich literature showing these desired outcomes, little is known about the pathways that produce these impacts. We use Lesotho’s Child Grants Program, a large-scale cash transfer program, to study if cash transfers affect input utilization by farmers through their impact on intertemporal choice. We exploit the random assignment of treatment to identify the indirect and total effect of the program and to isolate the influence of the time discounting channel. We find that cash transfers make it six percentage points more likely for households to use pesticides. Based on our preferred method, eleven percent of this effect is mediated through the increase in the patience of recipients.

Food insecurity and poverty are of major concern for farmers and rural households in Tanzania. Innovations to increase the sustainability of households must be carefully investigated by integrating, in the analysis, the effect on crop yields with a holistic view on the overall sustainability and its components. Rainwater harvesting and fertilizer micro-dosing can increase food security, particularly in water-limited contexts, but they can also significantly increase labor requirements and the availability and use of water resources in villages and watersheds. The purpose of this study was to quantify the impacts of rainwater harvesting and fertilizer micro-dosing on environmental, social and economic sustainability of households in two regions in Tanzania – semi-arid Dodoma and semi-humid Morogoro. We selected and calculated 40 sustainability indicators for 892 households in 2013 and 2016, and we applied Difference-in-Difference Propensity Score Matching to identify relative changes in household sustainability. We show that in the dry region of Dodoma, economic sustainability increased less for adopters of the innovations in comparison to non-adopters between the years 2013 and 2016, with 6 percentage points and 11 percentage points respectively. In contrast, in the humid region, the adoption of innovations increased food security by 14 percentage points compared to 6 percentage points in the case of non-adoption. These results highlight that innovations must fit the context and should not be scaled without prior analysis of multiple impact dimensions as they may trigger significant trade-offs. By moving the focus from field to farm scale, this study contributes to providing a more rigorous assessment of the spillover effects that in-field innovations can have on the overall sustainability of households, which is a prerequisite for the advancement of sustainable intensification of agricultural production in the region.

This study presents quantitative insights into the willingness of women and men to hide income from their spouse, how socio-demographic and psycho-social factors correlate to the willingness to hide income, and how hiding that income influences expenditure patterns. Using data from 422 households in rural Uganda and employing an established revealed preference approach, the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism, we show that both women and men seek to hide income from their spouse at substantial potential cost. We report an average willingness to pay (WTP) of 49% of the endowment offered, with 99% of the participants stating a positive WTP for hidden income. The correlates with demand for hidden income differ in terms of size and significance across genders and include perceived marriage quality, self-control, savings group membership, and empowerment over purchasing decisions. Results show that women who received income in private have a higher public to private spending ratio and higher transfers to their social network. Our study contributes to the literature on intra-household resource allocation in developing countries by studying the demand for hidden income between co-habiting spouses, correlates with the demand for hidden income, and the link between hidden income and subsequent spending patterns in rural Uganda.

Three-quarters of the global migrant population have fled fragile contexts, with 64 percent hosted by similarly vulnerable countries. These contexts account for about 75 percent of those living in extreme poverty. Despite the scale of this phenomenon, the extent to which the self-selection of South–South migrants differs from those migrating to more developed countries remains poorly understood. In this paper, I investigate the self-selection of Venezuelan migrants during the 2015–2021 crisis, which led to greater migration to less developed countries such as Colombia and Peru, compared to more developed ones like the United States and Chile. Using individual-level data representative of the Venezuelan population and similar data on Venezuelan migrants in these key destination countries, the study finds that migrants are generally positively selected in terms of education compared to those who remain in Venezuela, with migrants to developed countries being positively sorted with respect to those to developing countries. However, comparing the cumulative distribution functions of pre-migration predicted earnings reveals that migrants to developing countries are negatively selected relative to stayers, while migrants to developed countries are positively selected. This highlights the significant role of unobserved abilities in shaping South–South migration patterns. Furthermore, a discrete choice model shows that women and college graduates face lower migration costs, independent of expected earnings at the destination. Factors such as the distance to the destination country and pre-crisis networks also play a crucial role in shaping migration decisions.

The number of people who have been forcibly displaced has increased steadily over the past decade. The recent Rohingya refugee exodus of an estimated 700,000 individuals surging into Bangladesh from Myanmar is just one example of this growing issue. Refugees generally affect the economic and social conditions and the local environment where they resettle. This study aims to examine the impacts of the Rohingya refugee influx on livelihood choice and income status in the host community as well as local environmental degradation. We conducted a questionnaire survey in all 147 villages of the Teknaf Upazila before and after the Rohingya refugee influx that included 5,769 and 6,825 households respectively. We used land cover maps created from remote sensing images to assess the region’s environmental degradation in a holistic fashion. Inherent regional characteristics may affect livelihood choice and income; therefore, we applied two statistical modeling approaches to mitigate such inherent regional biases—Multilevel Modeling and Multilevel Intrinsic Conditional Autoregressive Modeling. The statistical analyses used a combination of the household survey results and the land cover maps. Our study found significant income decreases between the two study periods, specifically among those engaged in farming and miscellaneous labor work. Furthermore, farmers with small agricultural land were crowded out of farming as a livelihood. The results also revealed the natural resource dependency of the host community and its association with ongoing environmental degradation. We located those who were left behind and did not benefit from relief interventions in the middle-south area and the middle of the west coast—this was likely due to geographical and topographical disadvantages. Our results illuminated the limitations of the current humanitarian system and emphasized the need for a sustainable perspective to be more strongly incorporated into future humanitarian efforts.

What explains prison recidivism? Relying on previously unavailable data on prison inmates in Uruguay, we study how external factors, such as employment dynamics on labor-intensive low-skilled jobs, and internal, such as prison-related factors, affect recidivism. Whereas the literature on recidivism has mostly focused on developed countries, we bring its study to the developing world and find that greater employment opportunities in labor-intensive, low-skill sectors, such as construction and domestic services, reduce recidivism. Consistent with the logic of economic opportunities, we also find heterogeneous effects by type of crime (property vs non-property). Finally, we find that prison-specific factors are also relevant, pointing to the importance of understanding prisons as part of the illegal ecosystem and the crime repression system. This analysis is novel to Latin America, a region besieged by the growing influence of criminal organizations that usually extend their influence and power to prisons.

The recent literature on financial inclusion has demonstrated the importance of several characteristics of the local and national infrastructure, including the physical proximity of local banking services. However, inclusion may also depend on another characteristic of the banking sector: the number of different banks operating in the local area. If more banks are operating in the area, there is likely to be a higher level of competition, lowering costs to customers. Using data from Ethiopia, we show that, conditional on the proximity of a household to banking services, the number of local banks is strongly associated with the probability that the household will have access to those services. Further statistical analysis suggests that this may be a causal effect. Our results indicate that promoting competition in the banking sector is likely to raise the level of financial inclusion.

How do host communities evaluate the fairness of how economic assistance is distributed between themselves and refugees in low- and middle- income countries? I argue that in these contexts, where host communities are often economically vulnerable, they perceive themselves as more deserving of aid than refugees, despite the fact that refugees are often unable to formally work or move about freely. I draw upon original descriptive and experimental survey data in Kenya to illuminate how members of the host community perceive the fairness of the distribution of economic assistance between themselves and refugees as well as how they assess deservingness of aid along a number of dimensions. The descriptive evidence reveals that what hosts consider a fair distribution of aid between themselves and refugees is vastly different from how they perceive the current distribution. A conjoint experiment provides causal evidence that hosts perceive themselves as more deserving of aid than refugees, but that group membership matters less than marital status, age, and ability when determining deservingness. Counter to expectations, assessments of deservingness of refugees and hosts do not vary based on the level of interaction with refugees or income level.