03. Journals
2,963 items available
Permanent URI for this collection
These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.
Sub-collections of this Collection
Items in this collection
1 - 10 of 90
-
Publication
Tackling psychosocial and capital constraints to alleviate poverty
(Springer Nature, 2022-04-27)Many policies attempt to help extremely poor households build sustainable sources of income. Although economic interventions have predominated historically 1,2, psychosocial support has attracted substantial interest 3,4,5, particularly for its potential cost-effectiveness. Recent evidence has shown that multi-faceted ‘graduation’ programs can succeed in generating sustained changes 6,7. Here we show that a multi-faceted intervention can open pathways out of extreme poverty by relaxing capital and psychosocial constraints. We conducted a four-arm randomized evaluation among extremely poor female beneficiaries already enrolled in a national cash transfer government program in Niger. The three treatment arms included group savings promotion, coaching and entrepreneurship training, and then added either a lump-sum cash grant, psychosocial interventions, or both the cash grant and psychosocial interventions. All three arms generated positive effects on economic outcomes and psychosocial well-being, but there were notable differences in the pathways and the timing of effects. Overall, the arms with psychosocial interventions were the most cost-effective, highlighting the value of including well-designed psychosocial components in government-led multi-faceted interventions for the extreme poor. -
Publication
Lives and Livelihoods: Estimates of the Global Mortality and Poverty Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic
(Elsevier, 2021-09)We evaluate the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic. Additional years spent in poverty (PY) are conservatively estimated using growth estimates for 2020 and two different scenarios for its distributional characteristics. Using years of life as a welfare metric yields a single parameter that captures the underlying trade-o between lives and livelihoods: how many PYs have the same welfare cost as one LY. Taking an agnostic view of this parameter, we compare estimates of LYs and PYs across countries for different scenarios. Three main findings arise. First, we estimate that, as of early June 2020, the pandemic (and the observed private and policy responses) had generated at least 68 million additional poverty years and 4.3 million years of life lost across 150 countries. The ratio of PYs to LYs is very large in most countries, suggesting that the poverty consequences of the crisis are of paramount importance. Second, this ratio declines systematically with GDP per capita: poverty accounts for a much greater share of the welfare costs in poorer countries. Finally, a comparison of these baseline results with mortality estimates in a counterfactual herd immunity scenario suggests that welfare losses would be greater in the latter in most countries. -
Publication
Invitations and Incentives: A Qualitative Study of Behavioral Nudges for Primary Care Screenings in Armenia
(Springer Nature, 2020-12)Non-communicable diseases account for a growing proportion of deaths in Armenia, which require early detection to achieve disease control and prevent complications. To increase rates of screening, demand-side interventions of personalized invitations, descriptive social norms, labeled cash transfers, and conditional cash transfers were tested in a field experiment. Our complementary qualitative study explores factors leading to the decision to attend screening and following through with that decision, and experiences with different intervention components. An individual’s decision to screen depends on 1) the perceived need for screening based on how they value their own health and perceive hypertension and diabetes as a harmful but manageable condition, and 2) the perceived utility of a facility-based screening, and whether screening will provide useful information on disease status or care management and is socially acceptable. Following through with the decision to screen depends on their knowledge of and ability to attend screenings, as well as any external motivators such as an invitation or financial incentive. Personalized invitations from physicians can prompt individuals to reconsider their need for screening and can, along with financial incentives, motivate individuals to follow through with the decision to screen. The effect of descriptive social norms in invitations should be further studied. Efforts to increase preventive screenings as an entry point into primary care in Armenia may benefit from implementation of tailored messages and financial incentives. -
Publication
Girl Empower – A Gender Transformative Mentoring and Cash Transfer Intervention to Promote Adolescent Wellbeing: Impact Findings from a Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial in Liberia
(Elsevier, 2020-04)We evaluated Girl Empower – an intervention that aimed to equip adolescent girls with the skills to make healthy, strategic life choices and to stay safe from sexual abuse using a cluster-randomized controlled trial. Girl Empower led to sustained improvements in several important domains, including sexual and reproductive health, but did not reduce sexual violence among the target population. -
Publication
Preventing More 'Missing Girls': A Review of Policies to Tackle Son Preference
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02)In parts of Asia, the South Caucasus, and the Balkans, son preference is strong enough to trigger significant levels of sex selection, resulting in the excess mortality of girls and skewing child sex ratios in favor of boys. Every year, an estimated 1.8 million girls go “missing” because of the widespread use of sex selective practices in these regions. The pervasive use of such practices is reflective of the striking inequities girls face immediately, and it also has possible negative implications for efforts to improve women's status in the long term. Recognizing this as a public policy concern, governments have employed direct measures such as banning the use of prenatal sex selection technology, and providing financial incentives to families that have girls. This study reviews cross-country experiences to take stock of the direct interventions used and finds no conclusive evidence that they are effective in reducing the higher mortality risk for girls. In fact, bans on the use of sex selection technology may inadvertently worsen the status of the very individuals they intend to protect, and financial incentives to families with girls offer only short-term benefits at most. Instead, what seems to work are policies that indirectly raise the value of daughters. The study also underscores the paucity of causal studies in this literature. -
Publication
Predicting Dynamic Patterns of Short-Term Movement
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02)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. -
Publication
Early Rainfall Shocks and Later-Life Outcomes: Evidence from Colombia
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02)This paper uses birth cohorts spanning several hundred locations over 40 years to examine the long-term consequences of in utero exposure to abnormal rainfall events in Colombia. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in extreme droughts or floods experienced by individuals while in utero in their birth location. The results indicate that individuals prenatally exposed to adverse rainfall shocks are more likely to report serious mental illness, have fewer years of schooling, display increased rates of illiteracy, and are less likely to work. These results are larger in magnitude for individuals born in areas with a higher risk of malaria, which is consistent with the notion that exposure to infectious and parasitic diseases may play an important role. -
Publication
Cash Transfers and Health: Evidence from Tanzania
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-06)How do cash transfers conditioned on health clinic visits and school attendance impact health-related outcomes? Examining the 2010 randomized introduction of a program in Tanzania, this paper finds nuanced impacts. An initial surge in clinic visits after 1.5 years—due to more visits by those already complying with program health conditions and by non-compliers—disappeared after 2.5 years, largely due to compliers reducing above-minimal visits. The study finds significant increases in take-up of health insurance and the likelihood of seeking treatment when ill. Health improvements were concentrated among children ages 0–5 years rather than the elderly, and took time to materialize; the study finds no improvements after 1.5 years, but 0.76 fewer sick days per month after 2.5 years, suggesting the importance of looking beyond short-term impacts. Reductions in sick days were largest in villages with more baseline health workers per capita, consistent with improvements being sensitive to capacity constraints. These results are robust to adjustments for multiple hypothesis testing. -
Publication
Vulnerability to Stunting in the West African Sahel
(Elsevier, 2019-02)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. -
Publication
The World Bank Human Capital Index: A Guide
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-02)This paper provides a guide to the new World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI), situating its methodology in the context of the development accounting literature. The HCI combines indicators of health and education into a measure of the human capital that a child born today can expect to achieve by her 18th birthday, given the risks of poor education and health that prevail in the country where she lives. The HCI is measured in units of productivity relative to a benchmark of complete education and full health, and ranges from 0 to 1. A value of x on the HCI indicates that a child born today can expect to be only x×100 percent as productive as a future worker as she would be if she enjoyed complete education and full health.