03. Journals
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These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.
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Publication
Factors Associated with Educational and Career Aspirations of Young Women and Girls in Sierra Leone
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-09-05)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. -
Publication
Assessing Gender Gaps in Employment and Earnings in Africa: The Case of Eswatini
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-07)Persistent gender gaps characterize labor markets in many African countries. Utilizing Eswatini’s first three labor market surveys (conducted in 2007, 2010, and 2013), this paper provides first systematic evidence on the country’s gender gaps in employment and earnings. We find that women have notably lower employment rates and earnings than men, even though the global financial crisis had a less negative impact on women than it had on men. Both unadjusted and unexplained gender earnings gaps are higher in self-employment than in wage employment. Tertiary education and urban location account for a large part of the gender earnings gap and mitigate high female propensity to self-employment. Our findings suggest that policies supporting female higher education and rural-urban mobility could reduce persistent inequalities in Eswatini’s labor market outcomes as well as in other middle-income countries in southern Africa. -
Publication
Housing Finance and Inclusive Growth in Africa: Benchmarking, Determinants and Effects
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-04)Using a panel database of 48 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2012 that we partially constructed, this paper analyses the structure of housing finance in Africa, its determinants, and its impact on inclusive growth. We find that market capitalization and urbanization are key positive determinants of housing finance, while a post-conflict environment is conducive to greater housing finance development. This result suggests that housing finance is driven by standard market forces of demand and supply. Besides, we find that housing finance development in Africa is not yet an effective tool for reducing economic inequality, at its current, very earlier stage. However, we show that above a given threshold, housing finance could be efficient at reducing inequality. Finally, there is a slightly positive relationship between housing finance and greater economic development in Africa. All these findings suggest that policies to boost housing finance development in Africa would be fruitful in the medium to long terms. -
Publication
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)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. -
Publication
We Forgot the Middle Class! Inequality Underestimation in a Changing Sub-Saharan Africa
(Springer Nature, 2020-01-11)The creation of national middle classes and the changes in consumption patterns in many Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries suggest reconsidering the way welfare and consequently inequality is typically measured. Using only consumption to measure welfare can lead to an important loss of information regarding the real welfare of the top 10–20% of the welfare distribution that is generally referred as “middle class” in these countries. This paper proposes a method capable of correcting the middle-class part of the consumption distribution using information coming from the income distribution of the same surveys. Results from 6 SSA countries indicate an increase of about 20% in the Gini index. -
Publication
Leaving, Staying or Coming Back? Migration Decisions During the Northern Mali Conflict
(Taylor and Francis, 2019-10)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. -
Publication
The Role of Social Ties in Factor Allocation
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-10)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. -
Publication
Redistribution and Group Participation: Experimental Evidence from Africa and the UK
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-10)We investigate whether the prospect of redistribution hinders the formation of efficiency-enhancing groups. We conduct an experiment in a Kenyan slum, Ugandan villages, and a UK university town. We test, in an anonymous setting with no feedback, whether subjects join a group that increases their endowment but exposes them to one of three redistributive actions: stealing, giving, or burning. We find that exposure to redistributive options among group members operates as a disincentive to join a group. This finding obtains under all three treatments—including when the pressure to redistribute is intrinsic. However the nature of the redistribution affects the magnitude of the impact. Giving has the least impact on the decision to join a group, while forced redistribution through stealing or burning acts as a much larger deterrent to group membership. These findings are common across all three subject pools, but African subjects are particularly reluctant to join a group in the burning treatment, indicating strong reluctance to expose themselves to destruction by others. -
Publication
Competing Priorities: Women’s Microenterprises and Household Relationships
(Elsevier, 2019-09)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. -
Publication
The Devil is in the Detail: Growth, Inequality and Poverty Reduction in Africa in the Last Two Decades
(Oxford University Press, 2019-08)The present paper, starting from evidence of low growth-to-poverty elasticity characterizing Africa, purports to identify the distributional changes that limited the pro-poor impact of the last two decades’ growth. Distributional changes that went undetected by standard inequality measures were not showing a clear pattern of inequality on the continent. By applying a new decomposition technique based on a non-parametric method—the ‘relative distribution’—we found a clear distributional pattern affecting almost all analysed countries. Nineteen out twenty four countries experienced a significant increase in polarization, particularly in the lower tail of the distribution, and this distributional change lowered the pro-poor impact of growth substantially. Without this unfavorable redistribution, poverty could have decreased in these countries by an additional five percentage points.