C. Journal articles published externally
2,064 items available
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Addressing declining female labor force participation in India: Does political empowerment make a difference?
(Taylor & Francis, 2022-02)Despite income growth, fertility decline, and educational expansion, female labour force participation in rural India dropped precipitously over the last decade. Nation-wide individual-level data allow us to explore if random reservation of village leadership for females affected women’s access to job opportunities, their demand for participation in the labour force, and income as well as intra-household bargaining in the short-and medium term. Gender reservation of local leadership affected female but not male participation in public works and regular labour markets, their income, and their influence on key household decisions with a lag, suggesting that such reservation affected social norms and stereotypes. -
Publication
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. -
Publication
Inheritance Law Reform, Empowerment, and Human Capital Accumulation: Second-Generation Effects from India
(Taylor and Francis, 2019)Although many studies point towards significant positive impacts of Hindu Succession Act (HSA) reforms on females’ empowerment and access to human and physical capital, the fact that this reform also led to increased female mortality raises questions about long-term sustainability of reform effects. We use evidence from three states, one of which amended the HSA in 1994, to assess first- and second-generation effects of this reform using a triple-difference strategy. First-generation effects include greater likelihood of completing primary education, more assets brought into marriage, improved access to bank accounts, a lower share of female births, and higher female survival rates. Second-generation effects on education, time use, and health are robust and point estimates of education are larger than first-generation ones even after mothers’ endowments are controlled for, pointing to a sizeable and sustained empowerment effect. -
Publication
Who Should Be at the Top of Bottom-Up Development? A Case-Study of the National Rural Livelihoods Mission in Rajasthan, India
(Taylor and Francis, 2018-05-31)It is widely acknowledged that top-down support is essential for bottom-up participatory projects to be effectively implemented at scale. However, which level of government, national or sub-national, should be given the responsibility to implement such projects is an open question, with wide variations in practice. This paper analyses qualitative and quantitative data from a natural experiment of a large participatory project in the state of Rajasthan in India comparing central management and state-level management. We find that locally managed facilitators formed groups that were more likely to engage in collective action and be politically active, with higher savings and greater access to subsidized loans. -
Publication
Management and Financing of e-Government Projects in India: Does Financing Strategy Add Value?
(Elsevier, 2017-06)How do managers structure e-government projects and address challenges of risks, lack of technical expertise, and mitigation of strategic error for preventing loss of investments? Our aim was to compare the traditional finance approach and the strategy-driven, innovative financing approaches under the PPP model, to examine their managerial value-addition. We found that e-government projects require a carefully crafted structuring strategy and that innovative financing is more suitable in facilitating flexible decision making, building core capabilities, managing and sharing project risks, providing funds needed for growth and innovation, and customising tailor-made project governance strategy. Based on our findings, we develop five theoretical propositions. -
Publication
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.