C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Regional Convergence in Bangladesh Using Night Lights (Published online: 10 Jul 2022)
(Taylor and Francis, 2023-10-12)We analyse economic convergence across 64 districts of Bangladesh using newly harmonized satellite night light data over 1992–2018. The growth in night lights – taken as a proxy for regional economic activity – reveals overwhelming evidence of absolute convergence. Regional differences in night light (or income) growth have been shrinking at an annual convergence rate of 4.57%, corresponding to a half-life of 15 years. Net migration plays a relatively prominent role in the regional convergence process. -
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Relationships between Christian Schools and the State: A Comparative Analysis for Five sub-Saharan African Countries
(Taylor and Francis, 2022-01-28)This article provides a comparative analysis of Christian faith-based schooling in five African countries, including data on the proportions of faith-based schools, financing models, and forms of organization vis-à-vis the state. The case studies represent different forms and models. In all of the countries, at least one in six schools is run by a church. Christian churches do not see themselves as ‘private schools’ but as public providers working for the public common good. Faith-based schools contribute not only to making sure that children go to school and learn while in school, but also to sharing ideals ranging from social justice and equity, to peace and democracy, and social participation and inclusion. The article concludes with some reflections on future challenges for faith-based schools, mainly related to their funding and the lack of data to assess challenges and opportunities. -
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Siting Priorities for Congestion-Reducing Projects in Dhaka: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Traffic Congestion, Travel Times, Air Pollution, and Exposure Vulnerability
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-08-30)Traffic congestion increases travel time and is a major source of pollution and health damage in developing-country cities. Data scarcity frequently confines traffic improvement projects to sites where congestion can be easily measured. This article uses spatiotemporal data from new global sources to revisit the siting problem in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where local congestion measures are augmented by estimates of citywide travel time, pollution exposure, and pollution vulnerability. We combine Google Traffic data with an econometric model linking traffic, pollution readings from a local monitoring station, and weather data to estimate the spatial distribution of vehicular pollution. We explore pollution-vulnerability implications by incorporating spatial distributions of poor households, children, and the elderly. Using the Open Source Routing Machine and OpenStreetMaps, we estimate systemwide travel-time gains from reducing congestion at each point in a grid covering the Dhaka metro area. We find a large divergence of siting priorities in single-dimensional exercises that focus exclusively on local congestion, citywide travel time, vehicular pollution, or vulnerable-resident pollution exposure. By implication, optimal siting requires a social objective function with explicit weights assigned to each of the four dimensions. The new global information sources permit extending this multidimensional approach to many cities throughout the developing world. -
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Curse of the Mummy-ji: The Influence of Mothers-in-Law on Women in India
(John Wiley and Sons, 2020-08-23)Restrictive social norms and strategic constraints imposed by family members can limit women's access to and benefits from social networks, especially in patrilocal societies. We characterize young married women's social networks in rural India and analyze how inter-generational power dynamics within the household affect their network formation. Using primary data from Uttar Pradesh, we show that co-residence with the mother-in-law is negatively correlated with her daughter-in-law's mobility and ability to form social connections outside the household, especially those related to health, fertility, and family planning. Our findings suggest that the mother-in-law's restrictive behavior is potentially driven by the misalignment of fertility preferences between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. The lack of peers outside the household lowers the daughter-in-law's likelihood of visiting a family planning clinic and of using modern contraception. We find suggestive evidence that this is because outside peers (a) positively influence daughter-in-law's beliefs about the social acceptability of family planning and (b) enable the daughter-in-law to overcome mobility constraints by accompanying her to health clinics. Wiley Terms and Conditions, https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/licensing/self-archiving.html -
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Supporting Electrification Policy in Fragile States: A Conflict-Adjusted Geospatial Least Cost Approach for Afghanistan
(MDPI, 2020-01-21)Roughly two billion people live in areas that regularly suffer from conflict, violence, and instability. Infrastructure development in those areas is very difficult to implement and fund. As an example, electrification systems face major challenges such as ensuring the security of the workforce or reliability of power supply. This paper presents electrification results from an explorative methodology, where the costs and risks of conflict are explicitly considered in a geo-spatial, least cost electrification model. Discount factor and risk premium adjustments are introduced per technology and location in order to examine changes in electrification outlooks in Afghanistan. Findings indicate that the cost optimal electrification mix is very sensitive to the local context; yet, certain patterns emerge. Urban populations create a strong consumer base for grid electricity, in some cases even under higher risk. For peri-urban and rural areas, electrification options are more sensitive to conflict-induced risk variation. In this paper, we identify these inflection points, quantify key decision parameters, and present policy recommendations for universal electrification of Afghanistan by 2030. -
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Water Resources Management in the Ganges Basin: A Comparison of Three Strategies for Conjunctive Use of Groundwater and Surface Water
(Springer, 2014-03)The most difficult water resources management challenge in the Ganges Basin is the imbalance between water demand and seasonal availability. More than 80 % of the annual flow in the Ganges River occurs during the 4-month monsoon, resulting in widespread flooding. During the rest of the year, irrigation, navigation, and ecosystems suffer because of water scarcity. Storage of monsoonal flow for utilization during the dry season is one approach to mitigating these problems. Three conjunctive use management strategies involving subsurface water storage are evaluated in this study: Ganges Water Machine (GWM), Pumping Along Canals (PAC), and Distributed Pumping and Recharge (DPR). Numerical models are used to determine the efficacy of these strategies. Results for the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh (UP) indicate that these strategies create seasonal subsurface storage from 6 to 37 % of the yearly average monsoonal flow in the Ganges exiting UP over the considered range of conditions. This has clear implications for flood reduction, and each strategy has the potential to provide irrigation water and to reduce soil waterlogging. However, GWM and PAC require significant public investment in infrastructure and management, as well as major shifts in existing water use practices; these also involve spatially-concentrated pumping, which may induce land subsidence. DPR also requires investment and management, but the distributed pumping is less costly and can be more easily implemented via adaptation of existing water use practices in the basin. -
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Ten Fundamental Questions for Water Resources Development in the Ganges: Myths and Realities
(IWA Publishing, 2013-03)This paper summarizes the results of the Ganges Strategic Basin Assessment (SBA), a 3-year, multi-disciplinary effort undertaken by a World Bank team in cooperation with several leading regional research institutions in South Asia. It begins to fill a crucial knowledge gap, providing an initial integrated systems perspective on the major water resources planning issues facing the Ganges basin today, including some of the most important infrastructure options that have been proposed for future development. The SBA developed a set of hydrological and economic models for the Ganges system, using modern data sources and modeling techniques to assess the impact of existing and potential new hydraulic structures on flooding, hydropower, low flows, water quality and irrigation supplies at the basin scale. It also involved repeated exchanges with policymakers and opinion makers in the basin, during which perceptions of the basin could be discussed and examined. The study’s findings highlight the scale and complexity of the Ganges basin. In particular, they refute the broadly held view that upstream water storage, such as reservoirs in Nepal, can fully control basin wide flooding. In addition, the findings suggest that such dams could potentially double low flows in the dry months. The value of doing so, however, is surprisingly unclear and similar storage volumes could likely be attained through better groundwater management. Hydropower development and trade are confirmed to hold real promise (subject to rigorous project level assessment with particular attention to sediment and seismic risks) and, in the near to medium term, create few significant tradeoffs among competing water uses. Significant uncertainties, including climate change, persist, and better data would allow the models and their results to be further refined. -
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Interdependence in Water Resource Development in the Ganges: An Economic Analysis
(IWA Publishing, 2013-03)It is often argued that the true benefits of water resource development in international river basins are undermined by a lack of consideration of interdependence in water resource planning. Yet it has not been adequately recognized in the water resources planning literature that overestimation of interdependence may also contribute to lack of progress in cooperation in many systems. This paper examines the nature and degree of economic interdependence in new and existing water storage projects in the Ganges River basin based on analysis conducted using the Ganges Economic Optimization Model. We find that constructing large dams on the upstream tributaries of the Ganges would have much more limited effects on controlling downstream floods than is thought and that the benefits of low-flow augmentation delivered by storage infrastructures are currently low. A better understanding of actual and prospective effects of interdependence not only changes the calculus of the benefits and costs of different scenarios of infrastructure development, but might also allow riparian countries to move closer to benefit sharing positions that are mutually acceptable. -
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Implications of Climate Change for Water Resources Development in the Ganges Basin
(IWA Publishing, 2013-03)This paper presents the first basin-wide assessment of the potential impact of climate change on the hydrology and production of the Ganges system, undertaken as part of the World Bank’s Ganges Strategic Basin Assessment. A series of modeling efforts, downscaling of climate projections, water balance calculations, hydrological simulation and economic optimization, inform the assessment. The authors find that projections of precipitation across the basin, obtained from 16 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-recognized General Circulation Models are highly variable, and lead to considerable differences in predictions of mean flows in the main stem of the Ganges and its tributaries. Despite uncertainties in predicted future flows, they are not, however, outside the range of natural variability in this basin, except perhaps at the tributary or sub-catchment levels. The authors also find that the hydropower potential associated with a set of 23 large dams in Nepal remains high across climate models, largely because annual flow in the tributary rivers greatly exceeds the storage capacities of these projects even in dry scenarios. The additional storage and smoothing of flows provided by these infrastructures translates into enhanced water availability in the dry season, but the relative value of this water for the purposes of irrigation in the Gangetic plain, and for low flow augmentation to Bangladesh under climate change, is unclear. -
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Investment Climate Assessment in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand: Results from Pooling Firm-Level Data
( 2009)Investment Climate surveys (ICs) are a recent instrument used by the World Bank to identify key obstacles to country competitiveness and to guide policy reforms and government interventions in developing countries. In this paper, panel data from four ICs of four South East Asian (SEA) countries namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, and Thailand, are pooled to estimate total factor productivity (TFP) and allocative efficiency aspects of firms in each country, using variants of the Olley and Pakes (1996) productivity decomposition. Several economic performance results are disaggregated to obtain country-specific evaluation of the IC impacts. To establish priorities for policy reforms, the corresponding key IC results are organized in five categories: infrastructures, red tape, corruption and crime, finance and corporate governance, quality, innovation and labor skills, and other control variables.