World Development最新文献

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.

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.