World Development最新文献

Political parties engage in extortion across the developing world. However, discussion of this phenomenon is largely absent from existing research. Drawing upon hundreds of in-depth interviews with local political party leaders, bureaucrats, journalists, and the police in regions of India and Pakistan, we articulate political parties’ economic and political objectives for extracting rents through extortion. We argue that party institutionalization plays an important role in how parties choose to extort and whether they ally with non-state or state actors. We also introduce an orders of political party extortion typology which explains how variation in competition with other armed actors over informal rights to extort a population has distinct downstream effects. Our study yields two key implications. First, extortion constitutes an entrenched coercive tie between political parties and voters in many developing democracies. Second and relatedly, it violates the rule of law, subverting democratic institutions in the process.

This paper examines the evolution of women’s participation in the labor market from 1960 to 2018, shedding light on the complex factors that influence their labor opportunities. The study emphasizes the significance of the historical context in understanding these factors. This research uncovers nuanced insights using a two-step methodology involving principal component analysis and Time-Varying Effect Modeling (TVEM). The results indicate that the transition from high to low fertility rates significantly influenced female labor participation until the mid-1980s. Educational advancements, economic growth, and changing marital dynamics also played a role in shaping evolving patterns. From 1980 to 1995, factors such as diminishing fertility, declining infant mortality, and varying economic conditions influenced women’s labor involvement. From 1995 to 2010, higher education emerged as a key driver, accompanied by shifting societal norms, and from 2010 to 2018, there were positive contributions from fertility rates, minimum wage, and male labor participation. This study underscores the intricate relationship between education, demographics, social norms, and economics in shaping women’s labor force participation, providing valuable insights for gender-inclusive policies and promoting women’s economic empowerment.

Exposure to crime and violence associated with drug trafficking has been shown to have negative consequences on students’ health, peer relationships, and educational outcomes. However, little attention has been devoted to analyzing the effects of exposure to drug trafficking on students’ truancy behavior, a critical outcome with a high cost at an individual and societal level. This study investigates the connection between exposure to drug trafficking (an increasingly common form of chronic crime and subsequent violence in Latin America) and school truancy in Costa Rica. To do so, we use a unique and comprehensive microdata set that merges detailed information on a specific measure of exposure to drug trafficking (cocaine seizures) and socioeconomic characteristics of Costa Rican districts with student and school data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In total, we obtain a sample of 4,584 students in secondary education attending 195 schools in 147 districts. Using logistic regression, we find that students in districts with higher exposure to drug trafficking (measured by cocaine seizure rate) are more prone to school truancy. This finding suggests that strategies to tackle school truancy should consider a neighborhood context perspective.

Accumulated literature on the social license to operate (SLO) of mining has called attention to procedural fairness, which assumes that fair treatments enhance acceptance from people involved in mining projects. However, what procedural improvement means is theoretically underdeveloped, especially in two critical aspects. First, previous studies on SLO have always modeled procedural fairness separately from its outcomes, such as benefit and cost distribution, and failed to spot the separability in the context of acute socioeconomic needs. Under such unclarity, mining companies are less open to participatory opportunities in fear of inflated social demands. Second, institutional inventions in the last decades that attempt to enhance people’s participation in the decision-making of mining projects, such as popular consultation, free, prior, and informed consent to indigenous peoples, and public hearings in environmental impact assessments, are overlooked in the SLO literature. This paper tests the causal effect of procedural and outcome factors on people’s acceptance with a conjoint experiment that portrays hypothetical mining projects. Participants are recruited by an original household survey in four Peruvian regions where mining is a lively experience. The findings report that procedures are viewed separately from material benefits but not separately from reported environmental risks. Prior consultation with voting increases the acceptability of a mining project to some degree. The result suggests the participatory assessment of environmental risk will benefit all stakeholders, and mining companies have no reason to shy away from listening to and respecting local opinions due to a suspected increase in benefit demands.

Although researchers increasingly recognize the significant impact of institutional dysfunction on emerging economies, there remains a major gap regarding its influence on firms’ upstream and downstream activities in scaling up renewable efforts. Drawing on data from solar photovoltaic (PV) intermediary business owners/entrepreneurs and regulators in Ghana, this paper examines the mechanisms through which these activities interact to facilitate the scaling-up efforts of renewable energy. The study uncovers three unique interactive processes through which institutional dysfunctions shape scaling-up efforts. Phase 1 focuses on unmasking institutional dysfunctions as impeding forces on both upstream and downstream activities. Phase 2 signifies a paradigm shift towards proactively re-engaging and reshaping institutional dysfunctions. This phase entails a range of organizational actions, including strategic interventions, dismantling ineffective practices, and wider concerted efforts geared towards turning dysfunctional institutions into potential sources of opportunity. Phase 3 represents the final stage in the evolution towards scaling up, focusing on deficiencies in the aftermarket support environment, specifically maintenance and repair services after sales. The insights derived from the study offer valuable implications for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars.

Public Goods aim to improve individual welfare. We investigate the causal consequences of roads on well-being in 24 African countries, instrumenting paved roads by 19th Century hypothetical lines between major ports and cities. We have data on over $32000$ individuals, and consider both their objective and subjective well-being, via access to four basic needs and the subjective evaluation of living conditions respectively. Our instrumental-variable analysis suggests that roads reduce material deprivation, by improving access to basic needs, but that there is no causal relation between the distance to a road and subjective living conditions. The benefit of roads in providing basic needs then seems to be offset by worse outcomes in other domains.

This paper investigates the relationship between import protection and export performance employing firm-level data from Peru. We exploit product-specific information on anti-dumping (AD) measures imposed by Peru along with several indicators on the performance of Peruvian exporting firms across and within destination markets. Findings indicate that the impact of protection on export performance depends on which economies are targeted by domestic AD protection. Duties towards China are associated with substantially higher prices by exporting firms. Firms also reduce their shipments, as suggested by frameworks stressing the role of adjustment costs. These effects are mostly concentrated among small firm. In contrast, when AD measures are imposed on competitors from middle- or high-income countries, exporters ship larger quantities and tend to reduce unit values which is consistent with the existence of scale economies.

Radical climate intervention technologies such as carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management pose difficult questions as potential remedies for destructive climate change. The effect these technologies could have on Indigenous peoples and minority groups, and those living in rural areas, could be profound and potentially calamitous. Drawing on a large-scale, cross-country set of nationally representative surveys (n = 30,284 participants, with at least 1,000 in each country) in 30 countries and 19 languages, this article examines public preferences for climate intervention technologies through the three dimensions of minority groups, Indigenousness, and place. The survey explores 10 climate intervention or geoengineering technologies: stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, space-based geoengineering, afforestation and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, blue carbon and marine biomass, direct air capture with carbon storage, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, enhanced rock weathering, and biochar. Comparing the full sample of respondents with a subsample self-identifying as ethnic minorities or Indigenous peoples, it finds this latter category of respondents has greater familiarity with these technologies than non-members, are more positive about small-scale trials and have more positive attitudes towards engineered options (versus nature-based options). Those in cities also expressed stronger support for small-scale field trials. Moreover, members of Indigenous groups or ethnic minorities expressed significantly higher levels of support for small-scale trials for nearly all technologies, were more supportive of policy incentives, and, inter alia, less supportive of policy restrictions. Conversely, non-members of Indigenous or ethnic minority groups expressed small but significantly greater support for independent national restrictions being placed on solar radiation management and engineered forms of carbon removal.

The Sustainable Development Goals are intended to be implemented in an indivisible manner, underlining the importance of interlinkages and interdependencies between different SDG-relevant policy areas. The complexity of synergies and trade-offs that are inherent to SDG interactions increases the risk that governments cherry-pick the SDGs that align with current policy interests and priorities, while neglecting others. No development actor can single-handedly ensure the integrated implementation of sustainable development’s economic, environmental and social dimensions. To advance integrated development processes, we therefore seek to answer the following question: what governance mechanisms enable development actors, located in different sectors, in different jurisdictions and at different governance levels, to align their efforts? Drawing on public governance and international development literature we identify ten alignment mechanisms that can be used to create inter-departmental alignment, public–private alignment, donor-recipient alignment and inter-donor alignment. To understand how the different mechanisms manifest themselves in practice, we illustrate how they are used to create synergies and negotiate trade-offs in forest and landscape restoration governance in Ethiopia. Through 20 interviews with public and private actors in Ethiopia, we observe a movement toward more integrated forest and landscape restoration efforts, but also that important mechanisms to create synergies and negotiate trade-offs between different objectives are still missing or do not function as intended. In the discussion and conclusion, we provide insights on how the ten mechanisms can contribute to greater multi-actor alignment at different stages of the policy cycle.

We study the potential impact of the commodity price boom of 2003 to 2013 on public social spending in Latin America. We estimate structural vector autoregressions and local projections for 16 Latin American countries over the period from 1990 to 2019 and investigate if we can attribute increases in public spending on health, education, and social protection to increases in a country’s net commodity terms-of-trade. By focusing on the impulse responses derived from country-specific estimations, we find a huge variety in response patterns. Our study finds that two countries experienced lasting increases in public social spending due to the commodity boom (Argentina, Ecuador). Some others observed at least temporary increases of few years (Brazil, Mexico), reacted first with declines and then rises (Chile), and yet others did not respond at all (Bolivia, Colombia, Peru). As expected, we cannot relate public social spending with commodity prices in countries without commodity price boom. Among countries with positive responses, there is no clear tendency concerning the function of spending that benefits most. We discuss potential explanations behind the heterogeneity of our country-wise results and conclude that the presence of left-wing governments, fiscal rules, natural resource funds and economic diversification provide plausible explanations for single country cases, but no general patterns emerge. We conclude that the commodity price boom was neither necessary nor sufficient for social policy expansion in Latin America, and factors explaining its effects differ from country to country. Our study highlights the importance of in-depth examinations of country-specific factors and the need of (currently lacking) high-quality time series data in development research.