03. Journals

2,963 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210

These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 17

Factors Associated with Educational and Career Aspirations of Young Women and Girls in Sierra Leone

(Taylor and Francis, 2021-09-05) Allmang, Skye ; Rozhenkova, Veronika ; Khakshi, James Ward ; Raza, Wameq ; Heymann, Jody

Empirical data on the aspirations of young women and girls in post-conflict settings are scarce. This article analyses the factors associated with the educational and career aspirations of 2,473 young women and girls in Sierra Leone. Findings indicated that over three-quarters of our sample aspired to continue their studies up to the university level, and two-thirds aspired to obtain a formal sector job requiring an education. These findings are important for discussions of aid which can accelerate economic advances and opportunities within advanced economies for both women and men.
Predicting Dynamic Patterns of Short-Term Movement

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02) Milusheva, Sveta

Short-term human mobility has important health consequences, but measuring short-term movement using survey data is difficult and costly, and use of mobile phone data to study short-term movement is only possible in locations that can access the data. Combining several accessible data sources, Senegal is used as a case study to predict short-term movement within the country. The focus is on two main drivers of movement—economic and social—which explain almost 70 percent of the variation in short-term movement. Comparing real and predicted short-term movement to measure the impact of population movement on the spread of malaria in Senegal, the predictions generated by the model provide estimates for the effect that are not significantly different from the estimates using the real data. Given that the data used in this paper are often accessible in other country settings, this paper demonstrates how predictive modeling can be used by policy makers to estimate short-term mobility.
Is Informal Redistribution Costly? Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment in Senegal

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02) Botlz, Marie ; Marazyan, Karine ; Villar, Paola

In Sub-Saharan Africa, individuals frequently transfer a substantial share of their resources to members of their social networks. Social pressure to redistribute, however, can induce disincentive effects on resource allocation decisions. This paper measures and characterizes the costs of redistributive pressure by estimating individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) to hide their income. The study estimates a social tax due to informal redistribution of 10 percent. Moreover, it shows that individuals are willing to escape from the redistributive pressure exerted mainly by extended family members.
How to Target Households in Adaptive Social Protection Systems? Evidence from Humanitarian and Development Approaches in Niger

(Taylor and Francis, 2019-12-06) Schnitzer, Pascale

The methods used to identify the beneficiaries of programs aiming to address persistent poverty and shocks are subject to frequent policy debates. Relying on panel data from Niger, this report simulates the performance of various targeting methods that are widely used by development and humanitarian actors. The methods include proxy-means testing (PMT), household economy analysis (HEA), geographical targeting, and combined methods. Results show that PMT performs more effectively in identifying persistently poor households, while HEA shows superior performance in identifying transiently food insecure households. Geographical targeting is particularly efficient in responding to food crises, which tend to be largely covariate. Combinations of geographical, PMT, and HEA approaches may be used as part of an efficient and scalable adaptive social protection system. Results motivate the consolidation of data across programs, which can support the application of alternative targeting methods tailored to program-specific objectives.
Leaving, Staying or Coming Back? Migration Decisions During the Northern Mali Conflict

(Taylor and Francis, 2019-10) Hoogeveen, Johannes G. ; Rossi, Mariacristina ; Sansone, Dario

This paper uses a unique data set to analyse the migration dynamics of refugees, returnees and, internally displaced people from the Northern Mali conflict. Individuals were interviewed monthly using mobile phones. Our results cast light on the characteristics of these three groups before and after displacement. In addition, we test how employment and security were related to migration status, as well as the willingness to go back home. Individuals who were employed while displaced were less willing to go back to the North, while those who owned a gun were more likely to plan to go back. Additional indicators of personal safety played a lesser role.
The Role of Social Ties in Factor Allocation

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-10) Beck, Ulrik ; Bjerge, Benedikte ; Fafchamps, Marcel

We investigate whether social structure helps or hinders factor allocation using unusually rich data from the Gambia. Evidence indicates that land available for cultivation is allocated unequally across households; and that factor transfers are more common between neighbors, co-ethnics, and kinship-related households. Does this lead to the conclusion that land inequality is due to flows of land between households being impeded by social divisions? To answer this question, a novel methodology that approaches exhaustive data on dyadic flows from an aggregate point of view is introduced. Land transfers lead to a more equal distribution of land and to more comparable factor ratios across households in general. But equalizing transfers of land are not more likely within ethnic or kinship groups. In conclusion, ethnic and kinship divisions do not hinder land and labor transfers in a way that contributes to aggregate factor inequality. Labor transfers do not equilibrate factor ratios across households. But it cannot be ruled out that they serve a beneficial role, for example, to deal with unanticipated health shocks.
Competing Priorities: Women’s Microenterprises and Household Relationships

(Elsevier, 2019-09) Friedson-Ridenour, Sophia ; Pierotti, Rachael S.

Recent studies have suggested that women’s business decisions are influenced by members of their household, especially their spouse, and that these intrahousehold dynamics contribute to gender gaps in entrepreneurship outcomes. This in-depth qualitative study among microentrepreneurs in urban Ghana sought to understand the connections between women’s businesses and their households’ management of economic resources. The findings show that women’s business decisions are influenced by: 1) a desire to reinforce their partner’s responsibilities as a primary provider; 2) attempts to fulfil normative expectations of meeting the daily basic-needs of the family; and 3) a need to prepare for long-term security. To reinforce their husband’s responsibilities as a provider, women hid income and savings, and sometimes explicitly limited business growth. To ensure their ability to smooth household consumption and respond to emergencies, women prioritized savings over business investment. And, to plan for their long-term security, women opted for cautious business investment, instead maintaining pressure on their partner to meet current needs and investing in children and property for the future. Previous studies document gender differences in microenterprise business management. This research builds on those studies by examining how intrahousehold inequalities affect women’s business decisions. The findings demonstrate the contextual importance of social relations for understanding women’s business decisions. More broadly, the findings illustrate that interpersonal interactions concerning the management of economic resources are an integral part of how household members negotiate their rights and responsibilities in relation to each other.
The Risk of Polygamy and Wives’ Saving Behavior

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-02) Boltz, Marie ; Chort, Isabelle

In a polygamous society, all monogamous women are potentially at risk of polygamy. However, both the anthropological and economic literatures are silent on the potential impact of the risk of polygamy on economic decisions of monogamous wives. We explore this issue for Senegal using individual panel data. We first estimate a Cox model for the probability of transition to polygamy. Second, we estimate the impact of the predicted risk of polygamy on monogamous wives’ savings. We find a positive impact of the risk of polygamy on female savings entrusted to formal or informal institutions suggestive of self-protective strategies. This increase in savings comes at the cost of reduced consumption, both in terms of household food expenditures and wives’ private nonfood expenses.
Vulnerability to Stunting in the West African Sahel

(Elsevier, 2019-02) Alfani, Federica ; Dabalen, Andrew ; Fisker, Peter ; Molini, Vasco

This paper presents a simple simulation framework for understanding and analyzing vulnerability to stunting. We utilize Demographic and Health Surveys merged with satellite data on climatic shocks. Children aged 0–5 years are grouped into three categories: consistently stunted, vulnerable, and non-vulnerable. The first group constitutes those who are stunted and will also be stunted in any hypothetical period. Non-vulnerable are those whose likelihood to be stunted is zero. The vulnerable face a probability between 0 and 1 of being stunted. The probability is calculated as the share of years in which the child would be stunted, given the village level distribution of weather shocks over the period 2000–2013. We provide estimates of vulnerability to stunting in Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, Mali, Northern Nigeria, and Senegal by aggregating over villages, districts and countries.
All that Glitters is not Gold: Polarization Amid Poverty Reduction in Ghana

(Elsevier, 2018-02) Clementi, Fabio ; Molini, Vasco ; Schettino, Francesco

Ghana is an exceptional case in the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) landscape. Together with a handful of other countries, Ghana offers the opportunity to analyze the distributional changes in the past two decades, since four comparable household surveys are available. In addition, unlike many other countries in SSA, Ghana’s rapid growth translated into fast poverty reduction. A closer look at the distributional changes that occurred in the same period, however, suggests less optimism. The present paper develops an innovative methodology to analyze the distributional changes that occurred and their drivers, with a high degree of accuracy and granularity. Looking at the results from 1991 to 2012, the paper documents how the distributional changes over time hollowed out the middle of the Ghanaian household consumption distribution and increased the concentration of households around the highest and lowest deciles; there was a clear surge in polarization indeed. When looking at the drivers of polarization, household characteristics, educational attainment, and access to basic infrastructure all tended to increase over time the size of the upper and lower tails of the consumption distribution and, as a consequence, the degree of polarization.