Journal Issue: World Bank Economic Review, Volume 19, Issue 2
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Volume
19
Number
2
Issue Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
1564-698X
Journal
World Bank Economic Review
1564-698X
Journal Volume
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Articles
Microfinance and Poverty : Evidence using Panel Data from Bangladesh
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-09-08) Khandker, Shahidur R.
Microfinance supports mainly informal
activities that often have a low return and low market
demand. It may therefore be hypothesized that the aggregate
poverty impact of microfinance is modest or even
nonexistent. If true, the poverty impact of microfinance
observed at the participant level represents either income
redistribution or short run income generation from the
microfinance intervention. This article examines the effects
of microfinance on poverty reduction at both the participant
and the aggregate levels using panel data from Bangladesh.
The results suggest that access to microfinance contributes
to poverty reduction, especially for female participants,
and to overall poverty reduction at the village level.
Microfinance thus helps not only poor participants but also
the local economy.
Has Rural Infrastructure Rehabilitation in Georgia Helped the Poor?
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-08-31) Lokshin, Michael; Yemtsov, Ruslan
This article proposes a research
strategy to deal with the scarcity of data on beneficiaries
for conducting impact assessments of community-level
projects. Community-level panel data from a regular
household survey augmented with a special community module
are used to measure the impact of projects. Propensity
score-matched difference in-difference comparisons are used
to control for time-invariant unobservable factors. This
methodology takes into consideration the purposeful
placement of projects and their interactions at the
community level. This empirical approach is applied to
infrastructure rehabilitation projects, for schools, roads,
and water supply systems, in rural Georgia between 1998 and
2001. The analysis produces plausible results regarding the
size of welfare gains from a particular project at the
village level and allows for differentiation of benefits
between the poor and the non-poor. The findings of this
study can contribute to evaluations of the impact of
infrastructure interventions on poverty by bringing new
empirical evidence to bear on the welfare and equity implications.
The Varieties of Resource Experience : Natural Resource Export Structures and the Political Economy of Economic Growth
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-09-28) Isham, Jonathan; Woolcock, Michael; Pritchett, Lant; Busby, Gwen
Many oil, mineral, and plantation
crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration
in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s
and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries
dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted
from a narrow geographic or economic base, such as oil and
minerals) and plantation crops are predisposed to heightened
economic and social divisions and weakened institutional
capacity. This in turn impedes their ability to respond
effectively to shocks, which previous studies have shown to
be essential for sustaining rising levels of prosperity.
Analysis of data on classifications of export structure,
controlling for a wide array of other potential determinants
of governance, shows that point source and coffee and cocoa
exporting countries do relatively poorly across an array of
governance indicators. These governance effects are not
associated simply with being a natural resource exporter.
Countries with natural resource exports that are diffuse
relying primarily on livestock and agricultural produce from
small family farms do not show the same strong effects and
have had more robust growth recoveries.
Participation in WTO Dispute Settlement : Complainants, Interested Parties, and Free Riders
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-08-24) Bown, Chad P.
What affects a country's decision
of whether to formally engage in a trade dispute directly
related to its exporting interests? This article empirically
examines determinants of affected country participation
decisions in formal trade litigation arising under the World
Trade Organization (WTO) between 1995 and 2000. It
investigates determinants of nonparticipation and examines
whether the incentives generated by the system's rules
and procedures discourage active engagement in dispute
settlement by developing country members in particular.
Though the size of exports at stake is found to be an
important economic determinant affecting the decision to
participate in challenges to a WTO-inconsistent policy, the
evidence also shows that measures of a country's
retaliatory and legal capacity as well as its international
political economy relationships matter. These results are
consistent with the hypothesis of an implicit
'institutional bias' generated by the
system's rules and incentives that particularly affects
developing economy participation in dispute settlement.
Attaching Workers through In-Kind Payments : Theory and Evidence from Russia
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-10-05) Friebel, Guido; Guriev, Sergei
External shocks may cause a decline in
the productivity of fixed capital in certain regions of an
economy. Exogenous obstacles to migration make it hard for
workers in those regions to reallocate to more prosperous
regions. In addition, firms may devise
'attachment' strategies to keep workers from
moving out of a local labor market. When workers are
compensated in kind, they find it difficult to raise the
cash needed for migration. This endogenous obstacle to
migration has not yet been considered in the literature. The
article shows that the feasibility of attachment depends on
the inherited structure of local labor markets: attachment
can exist in equilibrium only if the labor market is
sufficiently concentrated. Attachment is beneficial for both
employers and employees but hurts the unemployed and the
self-employed. An analysis of matched household-firm data
from the Russian Federation corroborates the theory.
Child Health and Economic Crisis in Peru
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-09-21) Paxson, Christina; Schady, Norbert
The effect of macroeconomic crises on
child health is a topic of great policy importance. This
article analyzes the impact of a profound crisis in Peru on
infant mortality. It finds an increase of about 2.5
percentage points in the infant mortality rate for children
born during the crisis of the late 1980s, which implies that
about 17,000 more children died than would have in the
absence of the crisis. Accounting for the precise source of
the increase in infant mortality is difficult, but it
appears that the collapse in public and private expenditures
on health played an important role.
Entrepreneurship Selection and Performance : A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Education in Developing Economies
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-09-28) van der Sluis, Justin; van Praag, Mirjam; Vijverberg, Wim
This meta-analytical review of empirical
studies of the impact of schooling on entrepreneurship in
selection and performance in developing economies looks at
variations impact across specific characteristics of the
studies. A marginal year of schooling in developing
economies raises enterprise income by an average of 5.5
percent, which is close to the average return in industrial
countries. The return varies, however, by gender, rural or
urban residence, and the share of agriculture in the
economy. Furthermore, more educated workers typically end up
in wage employment and prefer nonfarm entrepreneurship to
farming. The education effect that separates workers into
self-employment and wage employment is stronger for women,
possibly stronger in urban areas, and also stronger in the
least developed economies, where agriculture is more
dominant and literacy rates are lower.