Journal Issue: World Bank Economic Review, Volume 37, Issue 1
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Volume
37
Number
1
Issue Date
2023-02-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
1564-698X
Journal
World Bank Economic Review
1564-698X
Journal Volume
Other issues in this volume
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Articles
Women Legislators in Africa and Foreign Aid
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-01-04) Annen, Kurt; Asiamah, Henrietta A.
There has been a significant rise in
the share of women legislators in Africa. What makes this
fact puzzling is that it cannot be attributed to an African
electorate that values gender equality and having women in
political leadership positions. In stark contrast to this,
gender equality and women’s empowerment have successively
moved up in the priority list of the international donor
community over the last two decades. This raises the
question of whether there is a relationship between women
legislators in Africa and foreign-aid allocations. This
study finds a strong and statistically robust relationship:
an increase in the share of women legislators from 15 to 20
percent is associated with an increase of about 4 percent in
aid conditional on current levels of aid. Additionally, the
study finds that democratic countries receive more aid but
does not find an interaction effect between democracy and
the share of women legislators, which suggests that donors
do not tailor their gender selective aid towards more
democratic countries. The results provide evidence in
support of aid selectivity for policies that improve gender
equality in aid-recipient countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Class Size and Learning
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-01-11) Datta, Sandip; Kingdon, Geeta Gandhi
Whether class-size reductions improve
student learning outcomes is an important policy question
for India. This paper investigates the issue using a
credible identification strategy to address the endogeneity
of class size. Pupil fixed effects combined with value-added
estimation show no significant relationship between class
size and student achievement, which suggests that under
current teaching practices, there is no learning gain from
reducing class size. If these findings, based on a small
sample in one city, hold true for the entire country, they
have important policy implications. When generalized, our
findings suggest that India experienced a value-subtraction
from spending on reducing class sizes, and that the US3.6
billion dollars it spends annually on the salaries of the
0.4 million new teachers appointed between 2010 and 2017 is
wasteful spending rather than an investment in improving
learning. These findings imply that India could save US19.4
billion dollars per annum by increasing PTR to 40, without
any reduction in pupil learning.
Method Matters
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-12-08) Cullen, Claire
This paper analyzes the magnitude and
predictors of misreporting on intimate partner violence.
Women in Nigeria were randomly assigned to answer questions
using either an indirect method (list experiment) that gives
respondents anonymity, or the standard, direct face-to-face
method. Intimate partner violence rates were up to 35
percent greater when measured using the list method than the
direct method. Misreporting was associated with indicators
often targeted in empowerment and development programs, such
as education and vulnerability. These results suggest that
standard survey methods may generate significant
underestimates of the prevalence of intimate partner
violence, and biased correlations and treatment effect estimates.
Legal Bans, Female Genital Cutting, and Education
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-10-17) GarcÃa-Hombrados, Jorge; Salgado, Edgar
A law that banned the practice of
female genital cutting (FGC) in Senegal in 1999 reduced its
prevalence and increased educational investments in girls.
These results are not driven by mechanisms like health,
broader changes in empowerment, or child marriage.
Suggestive evidence indicates that results could be driven
by some parents of future brides reacting to the increase in
the cost of FGC caused by the law by abandoning this
practice and investing in their daughter’s education to
compensate for smaller bride prices among uncut women.
The Distribution of Effort
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-01-03) Friedman, Jed; Gaddis, Isis; Kilic, Talip; Martuscelli, Antonio; Palacios-Lopez, Amparo; Zezza, Alberto
Physical effort is a primary
component in models of economic behavior. However,
applications that measure effort are historically scarce.
This paper assesses the differences in physical activity
between men and women through wearable accelerometers and
uses these activity measures as a proxy for physical effort.
Crucially, the accelerometer-generated data measures the
level of physical activity associated with each activity or
task recorded in the data. In this rural setting, women
exert marginally higher levels of physical effort. However,
differences in effort between men and women among married
partners are strongly associated with differences in
bargaining power, with larger husband-wife effort gaps
alongside differences in age, individual land ownership, and
an overall empowerment index. Physical activity can exhibit
an unequal distribution between men and women suggesting
that gender disadvantage, at least within couples, extends
to the domain of physical effort.
Gender Differences in Informal Labor-Market Resilience
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-12-26) Hardy, Morgan; Litzow, Erin; McCasland, Jamie; Kagy, Gisella
This paper reports on the universe of
garment-making-firm owners in a Ghanaian district capital
during the COVID-19 crisis. By July 2020, 80 percent of both
male- and female-owned firms were operational. However,
pre-pandemic data show that selection into persistent
closure differs by gender. Consistent with a cleansing
effect of recessions and highlighting the presence of
marginal female entrepreneurs, female-owned firms that
remain closed past the spring lockdown are negatively
selected on pre-pandemic sales. The pre-pandemic sales
distributions of female survivors and non-survivors are
significantly different from each other. Female owners of
non-operational firms exit to non-employment and experience
large decreases in overall earnings. In contrast,
persistently closed male-owned firms are not selected on
pre-pandemic firm characteristics. Instead, male non
survivors are 36 percentage points more likely than male
survivors to have another income-generating activity prior
to the crisis. Male owners of persistently closed firms
fully compensate for revenue losses in their core businesses
with earnings from these alternative income-generating
activities. Taken together, the evidence is most consistent
with differential underlying occupational choice
fundamentals for self-employed men and women in this context.
Syrian Refugee Inflows, Health-Care Access, and Childhood Vaccination in Turkey
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-11-14) Erten, Bilge; Keskin, Pinar; Omurtak, Miray; Ozen, Ilhan Can
This study explores the impact of the
arrival of Syrian refugees in Turkey on access to
health-care resources and subsequent changes in infectious
disease rates among native children. Employing a
distance-based instrument, it finds that native children
living in regions that received large inflows of Syrian
refugees experienced an increase in their risk of catching
an infectious disease compared to children in less affected
regions. In contrast, there is no evidence of significant
changes in the incidences of noninfectious diseases such as
diabetes, cancer, or anemia. The findings also reveal that
the number of health-care professionals and hospital beds
per capita declined in provinces that received large refugee
inflows. This study also documents a decrease in native
children’s probability of being fully vaccinated in
provinces that received large refugee inflows. Although
contact with potentially infected refugees may increase
disease spread among natives, the migration-induced supply
constraints in health-care access may also worsen health
outcomes in host countries.
Refugees and Housing
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-12-06) Akgündüz, Yusuf Emre; Hacıhasanoglu, Yavuz Selim; Yilmaz, Fatih
This paper investigates the impact of
large-scale Syrian refugee inflows on the Turkish housing
market. Employing a micro-level data set of the population
of mortgaged houses in Türkiye between 2010 and 2017, it
identifies the dynamic effects using a
difference-in-differences approach. As the regional
distribution of Syrian refugees is presumably not exogenous,
it is instrumented in the estimations. The instrument is
constructed using the distance from Turkish provinces to
each Syrian region, while weighting each Syrian region by
their population and distance to Türkiye compared to other
destination countries. The results show that house prices
increased in response to the arrival of Syrian refugees. The
effects are mostly driven by low-priced housing and faded
after 2014. The results further show that construction
permits and sales increased, while the average age of
purchased houses declined, indicating an increase in supply
that may explain the fading-out effect over time. Finally,
the findings provide suggestive evidence that houses that
are sold after the arrival of refugees decline in size,
which further points to a squeeze in the housing market for natives.