C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Why Should We Care about Child Labor? The Education, Labor Market, and Health Consequences of Child Labor
( 2009-10) Beegle, Kathleen ; Dehejia, Rajeev ; Gatti, RobertaDespite the extensive literature on the determinants of child labor, the evidence on the consequences of child labor on outcomes such as education, labor, and health is limited. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation among children in school on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy. Five years subsequent to the child labor experience we find significant negative impacts on education, and also find a higher probability of wage work for those young adults who worked as children while attending school. We find few significant effects on health. -
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The Poverty Impact of Rural Roads: Evidence from Bangladesh
( 2009) Khandker, Shahidur R. ; Bakht, Zaid ; Koolwal, Gayatri B.A rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to employ labor and capital more efficiently. Significant knowledge gaps persist, however, as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into household outcomes as well as distributional consequences. This study examines the impacts of two rural road-paving projects in Bangladesh using a new quasi-experimental household panel data set surveying project and control villages before and after program implementation. A household panel fixed-effects methodology controlling for initial area conditions is used to estimate the impact of paved roads on household and individual outcomes and account for potential bias in program placement at the village level. Rural road investments are found to reduce poverty significantly through higher agricultural production, lower input and transportation costs, and higher agricultural output prices at local village markets. Rural road development has also led to higher secondary schooling enrollment for boys and girls, as compared to primary school enrollment. We find that road investments have also benefited the poor, meaning the gains are significant for the poor and in some cases disproportionately higher than for the nonpoor. -
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The Impact of Gender Inequality in Education and Employment on Economic Growth : New Evidence for a Panel of Countries
( 2009) Klasen, Stephan ; Lamanna, FrancescaUsing cross-country and panel regressions, we investigate to what extent gender gaps in education and employment (proxied using gender gaps in labor force participation) reduce economic growth. Using the most recent data and investigating an extended time period (1960-2000), we update the results of previous studies on education gaps on growth and extend the analysis to employment gaps using panel data. We find that gender gaps in education and employment considerably reduce economic growth. The combined "costs" of education and employment gaps in the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia amount respectively to 0.9-1.7 and 0.1-1.6 percentage point differences in growth compared to East Asia. Gender gaps in employment appear to have an increasing effect on economic growth differences between regions, with the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia suffering from slower growth in female employment. -
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A Theory of Urban Squatting and Land-Tenure Formalization in Developing Countries
( 2009) Brueckner, Jan K. ; Selod, HarrisThis paper offers a new theoretical approach to urban squatting, reflecting the view that squatters and formal residents compete for land within a city. The key implication is that squatters "squeeze" the formal market, raising the price paid by formal residents. The squatter organizer ensures that squeezing is not too severe, since otherwise, the formal price will rise to a level that invites eviction by landowners. Because eviction is absent in equilibrium, the model differs from previous analytical frameworks, where eviction occurs with some probability. It also facilitates a general equilibrium analysis of squatter formalization policies. -
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Nutrient Consumption and Household Income in Rural Mexico
( 2009) Skoufias, Emmanuel ; Di Maro, Vincenzo ; Gonzalez-Cossio, Teresa ; Rodriguez Ramirez, SoniaWe estimate the income elasticity for a variety of macro- and micronutrients using a sample of poor rural households in Mexico. The nutrient-income elasticity is estimated using both parametric and semiparametric methods. A special focus is placed on the nonlinearity of the relationship between nutrient intake and income and on measurement error and endogeneity issues. One major finding is that income elasticity for calories is close to zero when we control for measurement error issues. For some nutrients, namely fats, vitamin A and C, calcium, and heme iron, we find a sizeable positive income elasticity robust to the choice of the estimator and percentiles at which it is evaluated. These nutrients are also those for which we find the largest deficiency in our sample. In addition, we find that for the poorest households in our sample, the deficiency of total energy, protein, and zinc is not accompanied by a positive income elasticity. -
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Europe and Central Asia's Great Post-communist Social Health Insurance Experiment : Aggregate Impacts on Health Sector Outcomes
( 2009) Wagstaff, Adam ; Moreno-Serra, RodrigoThe post-Communist transition to social health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax-financed health systems. This paper employs regression-based generalizations of the difference-in-differences method on panel data from 28 countries for the period 1990-2004. We find that, controlling for any concurrent provider payment reforms, adoption of social health insurance increased national health spending and hospital activity rates, but did not lead to better health outcomes. -
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AIDS Treatment and Intrahousehold Resource Allocation: Children's Nutrition and Schooling in Kenya
( 2009) Zivin, Joshua Graff ; Thirumurthy, Harsha ; Goldstein, MarkusThe provision of antiretroviral medications is a central component of the response to HIV/AIDS and consumes substantial public resources from around the world, but little is known about this intervention's impact on the welfare of children in treated persons' households. Using longitudinal survey data from Kenya, we examine the relationship between the provision of treatment to adults and the schooling and nutrition outcomes of children in their households. Weekly hours of school attendance increase by over 20% within 6 months after treatment is initiated for the adult patient. We find some weak evidence that young children's short-term nutritional status also improves. These results suggest how intrahousehold allocations of time and resources may be altered in response to health improvements of adults. -
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Benefits to Local Communities from Community Conservancies in Namibia: An Assessment
( 2009) Bandyopadhyay, Sushenjit ; Humavindu, Michael ; Shyamsundar, Priya ; Wang, LiminThis article evaluates the benefits of community-based activities in wildlife conservancies in Namibia by asking three questions. Do community conservancies contribute to an increase in household welfare? Are such programmes pro-poor; that is, do they improve welfare more for poorer households than for the less poor? Does participation in conservancy increase household welfare more for participants than non-participants? This study bases the analyses on a 2002 survey covering seven conservancies and 1192 households. The results suggest that community conservancies have a positive impact on household welfare. The authors also conclude that this impact is poverty-neutral in some regions and pro-poor in others. Further, welfare benefits from conservancies appear to be fairly evenly distributed between participant and non-participant households. -
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Women's Use of Private and Government Health Facilities for Childbirth in Nairobi's Informal Settlements
( 2009) Bazant, Eva S. ; Koenig, Michael A. ; Fotso, Jean-Christophe ; Mills, SamuelThe private sector's role in increasing the use of maternal health care for the poor in developing countries has received increasing attention, yet few data exist for urban slums. Using household-survey data from 1,926 mothers in two informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, collected in 2006, we describe and examine the factors associated with women's use of private and government health facilities for childbirth. More women gave birth at private facilities located in the settlements than at government facilities, and one-third of the women gave birth at home or with the assistance of a traditional birth attendant. In multivariate models, women's education, ethnic group, and household wealth were associated with institutional deliveries, especially in government hospitals. Residents in the more disadvantaged settlement were more likely than those in the better-off settlement to give birth in private facilities. In urban areas, maternal health services in both the government and private sectors should be strengthened, and efforts made to reach out to women who give birth at home. -
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Inequality and Education Decisions in Developing Countries
( 2009) Gutierrez, Catalina ; Tanaka, RyuichiIn this paper, we analyze the effect of inequality on school enrollment, preferred tax rate and expenditure per student in developing countries; when parents can choose between child labor, public schooling, or private schooling. We present a model in which parents make schooling decisions for their children, weighing the utility benefit of having a child with formal public or private education versus the forgone income from child labor or household work. Parents vote over the preferred tax rate to finance freely provided public education. The utility benefit of an educated child is proportional to expenditure per student, so that there is congestion in public school. We find that when parents can send their children to work or to private school, high inequality leads to exit from public education at both ends of the income distribution. Thus high inequality reduces the support for public education, leading to a low tax rate and expenditure per student. Exit from public education results in both high child labor and a large fraction of students attending private school. In fact there is a threshold level of inequality above which there is no longer support for public education. In addition we explore the implications for the design of foreign aid. The results suggest that foreign aid policies should focus on promoting school attendance rather than increasing school resources, as the later policy might be offset by a reduction in the recipient country's fiscal effort, with little impact on outcomes.