C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Institutional Fragmentation and Metropolitan Coordination in Latin American Cities: Are There Links with City Productivity?
(Wiley, 2020-07-08)This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of institutional fragmentation and metropolitan coordination on urban productivity in Latin American Cities. The use of night-time lights satellite imagery and high resolution population data allow us to use a definition of metropolitan area based on the urban extents that result from the union between the formally defined metropolitan areas and the contiguous patches of urbanized areas with more than 500,000 inhabitants. Initial results suggest that the presence of multiple local governments within metropolitan areas generate opposite effects in urban productivity. On the one hand, smaller governments tend to be more responsive and efficient, which increases productivity. But, on the other hand, multiple local governments face co-ordination costs that result in lower productivity levels. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions. https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/licensing/self-archiving.html -
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Flies without Borders: Lessons from Chennai on Improving India's Municipal Public Health Services
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-05)India’s cities face key challenges to improving public health outcomes. First, unequally distributed public resources create insanitary conditions, especially in slums – threatening everyone’s health, as suggested by poor child growth even among the wealthiest. Second, devolving services to elected bodies works poorly for highly technical services like public health. Third, services are highly fragmented. This paper examines the differences in the organisation and management of municipal services in Chennai and Delhi, two cities with sharply contrasting health indicators. Chennai mitigates these challenges by retaining professional management of service delivery and actively serving vulnerable populations − while services in Delhi are quite constrained. Management and institutional issues have received inadequate attention in the public health literature on developing countries, and the policy lessons from Chennai have wide relevance. -
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Building Road Safety Institutions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: The Case of Argentina
(Taylor and Francis, 2019-03-08)Traffic injuries remain a leading health concern in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, most LMICs have not established institutions that have the legislative mandate and financial resources necessary to coordinate large-scale interventions. Argentina provides a counterexample. Argentina is a federal country where the decentralization of authority to provincial governments was a key barrier to effective national interventions. In 2008, Argentina passed a law establishing a national road safety agency and subsequently received a World Bank loan to build the agency’s capacity to coordinate actions. Although traffic injuries in Argentina have not yet begun to decline, these developments raise important questions:Why did Argentina come to view road safety as a problem?Why was institutional reform the chosen solution? What was the political process for achieving reform? What are the broader implications for institutional reform in LMICs?We explore these questions using a descriptive case study (single-case, holistic design) of Argentina. The case illustrates that focusing events, like the Santa Fe tragedy that killed nine children, and advocacy groups are important for raising political attention and creating an opportunity for legislative reform. It highlights the importance of policy entrepreneurs who used the opportunity to push through new legislation. Though the political dynamic was predominantly local, international actors worked with local advocates to build demand for safety and develop solutions that could be deployed when the opportunity arose. Most important, the case emphasizes the importance of developing institutions with the resources and authority necessary for managing national road safety programs. -
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Gendered Incidence and Impact of Tenure Insecurity on Agricultural Performance in Malawi’s Customary Tenure System
(Taylor and Francis, 2019)Malawi’s recent passage of Land Acts provide an opportunity to clarify different aspects of the country’s land tenure in an integrated way. To assess whether doing so might be economically justified, we explore incidence and impact of tenure insecurity among smallholders. Insecurity is not only widespread with 22 per cent of land users being concerned about losing their land but is also associated with a productivity loss of 12 per cent for female operators, equivalent to US$ 14 million per year at the national level, enough to pay for a nation-wide tenure regularization program in two to three years. -
Publication
Formalization without Certification?: Experimental Evidence on Property Rights and Investment
(Elsevier, 2018-01-03)We present evidence from the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization program. We examine the link between land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. The tenure security improvement through demarcation induces a 23 to 43 percent shift toward long-term investment on treated parcels. We explore gender and parcel location as relevant dimensions of heterogeneity. We find that female-managed landholdings in treated villages are more likely to be left fallow—an important soil fertility investment. Women respond to an exogenous tenure security change by shifting investment away from relatively secure, demarcated land and toward less secure land outside the village to guard those parcels. -
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Land Values, Property Rights, and Home Ownership: Implications for Property Taxation in Peru
(Elsevier, 2017-12-30)This paper evaluates the effect of property rights on property values in Peru. Previous research on squatting has shed light on how the provision of formal land titles affects a number of socioeconomic outcomes and a subset of this research has provided estimates on how the provision of formal titles affects property values. However, the phenomenon of squatting encompasses a variety of informal property rights distinct from the possession of a legal title. Using an exceptionally rich household data set including geo-location at the community level we study the effects of both formal and informal property rights on property values. Having a title increases property values by almost 7 percent and squatting on the land by invasion reduces values by about 6 percent. Using these estimates, we determine the potential losses of property tax revenue and are able to study the issue of squatting in the context of public finance. -
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Tenure Security Premium in Informal Housing Markets: A Spatial Hedonic Analysis
(Elsevier, 2017-01)This paper estimates slum residents’ willingness to pay for formalized land tenure in Pune, India. The results show that the legal assurance of slum residents’ occupancy of their lands could benefit them. Previous studies have discussed the legal and non-legal factors that substantially influence the tenure security of residents in informal settlements; however, it remains unclear how and to what extent the assignment of legal property rights through the formalization of land tenure improves the tenure security of residents in informal settlements and living conditions, even in the presence of other legal and non-legal factors that also contribute to their tenure security. To address this question, this study focuses on the city of Pune, India, where government agencies have formalized slums by legally ensuring the occupancy of the residents under the “slum declaration.” Applying a hedonic price model to an original household survey, this paper investigates how slum residents evaluate formalized land tenure. A spatial econometrics method is also applied to account for spatial dependence and spatially autocorrelated unobserved errors. The spatial hedonic analysis shows that the premium of slum declaration is worth 19.2% of the average housing rent in slums. The associated marginal willingness to pay is equivalent to 6.7% of the average household expenditure, although it is heterogeneous depending on a household’s caste and other legal conditions. This finding suggests that the assurance of occupancy rights is a vital component of land-tenure formalization policy even if it does not directly provide full property rights. -
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Can Regulations Make It More Difficult to Serve the Poor?: The Case of Childcare Services in istanbul, Turkey
(Taylor and Francis, 2016-11-03)Private and community-driven efforts can be an important resource to expand early childhood education and care (ECEC) services to poor children, under the right conditions and design. The regulations imposed on private ECEC provision, while having an impact on quality, may increase costs of provision and in return prices of services, reducing accessibility and affordability for poor households. This paper considers the impact of regulations on private ECEC in a highly regulated childcare market in a developing country. Using data from a recently fielded survey that sampled 141 private ECEC facilities in Istanbul, Turkey, the paper looks at the impact of fixed regulations on prices and poor children’s access to services, in particular the outdoor space requirement that was originally imposed on private providers in the 1960s and has over time become more difficult to fulfill in densely populated districts of the city. The paper estimates that controlling for other provider characteristics, in districts where such requirement is more binding, the price of childcare services increases by 376.2 TL per child per month and the percentage of children enrolled coming from poor backgrounds lowers by 15.1% points than in districts where such standard proves less challenging. -
Publication
Impact of Long Run Exposure to Television on Homicides: Some Evidence from Brazil
(Taylor and Francis, 2016-05-25)This paper focuses on the link between television coverage and violent crime, in particular, homicides in Brazil, a country where crime has grown dramatically in recent decades. Using Census data for the period 1980–2000, the paper finds that people living in areas covered by television signal have significantly lower rates of homicides. The effect is strongest for men of lower socioeconomic status. -
Publication
Developing an Adaptive Global Exposure Model to Support the Generation of Country Disaster Risk Profiles
(Elsevier, 2015-09-08)Corresponding to increased realization of the impacts of natural hazards in recent years and the need for quantification of disaster risk, there has been increasing demand from the public sector for openly available disaster risk profiles. Probabilistic disaster risk profiles provide risk assessments and estimates of potential damage to property caused by severe natural hazards. These profiles outline a holistic view of financial risk due to natural hazards, assisting governments in long-term planning and preparedness. A Country Disaster Risk Profile (CDRP) presents a probabilistic estimate of risk aggregated at the national level. A critical component of a CDRP is the development of consistent and robust exposure model to complement existing hazard and vulnerability models. Exposure is an integral part of any risk assessment model, capturing the attributes of all exposed elements grouped by classes of vulnerability to different hazards, and analyzed in terms of value, location and relative importance (e.g. critical facilities and infrastructure). Using freely available (or available at minimum cost) datasets, we present a methodology for an exposure model to produce three independent geo-referenced databases to be used in national level disaster risk profiling for the public sector. These databases represent aggregated economic value at risk at 30 arc-second spatial resolution (approximately 1 × 1-km grid at the equator) using a top-down (or downscaling) approach. To produce these databases, the models used are: 1) a building inventory stock model which captures important attributes such as geographical location, urban/rural classification, type of occupancy (e.g. residential and non-residential), building typology (e.g. wood, concrete, masonry, etc.) and economic (replacement) value; 2) a non-building infrastructure density and value model that also corresponds to the fiscal infrastructure portion of the Gross Capital Stock (GCS) of a country; and 3) a spatially and sectorially disaggregated Gross Domestic Product (GDP) model that relates to the production (flow) of goods and services of a country. These models can be adapted to produce - independently or cohesively - a composite exposure database. Finally, we provide an example of the model's use in economic loss estimation for the reoccurrence of the 1882 Mw 7.8 Panama earthquake.