Journal Issue: World Bank Economic Review, Volume 17, Issue 1

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Volume
17
Number
1
Issue Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
1564-698X
Journal
Journal
World Bank Economic Review
1564-698X
Journal Volume
Articles
Publication
Grandmothers and Granddaughters : Old-Age Pensions and Intrahousehold Allocation in South Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-01) Duflo, Esther
This article evaluates the impact of a large cash transfer program in South Africa on children's nutritional status and investigates whether the gender of the recipient affects that impact. In the early 1990s the benefits and coverage of the South African social pension program were expanded for the black population. In 1993 the benefits were about twice the median per capita income in rural areas. More than a quarter of black South African children under age five live with a pension recipient. Estimates suggest that pensions received by women had a large impact on the anthropometric status (weight for height and height for age) of girls but little effect on that of boys. No similar effect is found for pensions received by men. This suggests that the efficiency of public transfer programs may depend on the gender of the recipient.
Publication
Particularism around the World
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-01) Wallack, Jessica Seddon; Gaviria, Alejandro; Panizza, Ugo; Stein, Ernesto
This article presents a new data set on electoral systems and outlines its potential uses in research on the links between electoral systems and economic outcomes. The data measure the extent to which politicians can advance their careers by appealing to narrow geographic constituencies on the one hand or party constituencies on the other.
Publication
Benefits on the Margin : Observations on Marginal Benefit Incidence
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-01) Younger, Stephen D.
Benefit incidence analysis has become a popular tool over the past decade, especially for researchers at the World Bank. Despite or perhaps because of the popularity of this method, recent research has pointed out many of its limitations. One of the most common criticisms of benefit incidence analysis is that its description of average participation rates is not necessarily useful in guiding marginal changes in public spending policies. This article considers a variety of methods for analyzing the marginal benefit incidence of policy changes. A key conceptual point is that despite the fact that the various methods measure marginal incidence, they do not measure the same thing nor are they intended to do so. There are many possible policy changes and thus many margins of interest. Each method captures one of these and so is of interest for some analyses and inappropriate for others. Empirically, the precision of the methods differs substantially, with those relying on differenced data or aggregations of households yielding standard errors that are quite large relative to the estimated shares.
Publication
Economic, Demographic, and Institutional Determinants of Life Insurance Consumption across countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-01) Webb, Ian; Beck, Thorsten
Life insurance has become an increasingly important part of the financial sector over the past 40 years, providing a range of financial services for consumers and becoming a major source of investment in the capital market. But what drives the large variation in life insurance consumption across countries remains unclear. Using a panel with data aggregated at different frequencies for 68 economies in 1961-2000, this article finds that economic indicators such as inflation, income per capita, and banking sector development and religious and institutional indicators are the most robust predictors of the use of life insurance. Education, life expectancy, the young dependency ratio, and the size of the social security system appear to have no robust association with life insurance consumption. The results highlight the importance of price stability and banking sector development in fully realizing the savings and investment functions of life insurance in an economy.
Publication
Public Policy and Extended Families : Evidence from Pensions in South Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-01) Bertrand, Marianne; Mullainathan, Sendhil; Miller, Douglas
How are resources allocated within extended families in developing economies? This question is investigated using a unique social experiment: the South African pension program. Under that program the elderly receive a cash transfer equal to roughly twice the per capita income of Africans in South Africa. The study examines how this transfer affects the labor supply of prime-age individuals living with these elderly in extended families. It finds a sharp drop in the working hours of prime-age individuals in these households when women turn 60 years old or men turn 65, the ages at which they become eligible for pensions. It also finds that the drop in labor supply is much larger when the pensioner is a woman, suggesting an imperfect pooling of resources. The allocation of resources among prime-age individuals depends strongly on their absolute age and gender as well as on their relative age. The oldest son in the household reduces his working hours more than any other prime-age household member.
Publication
Reducing Child Malnutrition : How Far Does Income Growth Take Us?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-01) Haddad, Lawrence; Alderman, Harold; Appleton, Simon; Song, Lina; Yohannes, Yisehac
How rapidly will child malnutrition respond to income growth? This article explores that question using household survey data from 12 countries as well as data on malnutrition rates in a cross-section of countries since the 1970s. Both forms of analysis yield similar results. Increases in income at the household and national levels imply similar rates of reduction in malnutrition. Using these estimates and better than historical income growth rates, the article finds that the millennium development goal of halving the prevalence of underweight children by 2015 is unlikely to be met through income growth alone. What is needed to accelerate reductions in malnutrition is a balanced strategy of income growth and investment in more direct interventions.
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