Journal Issue: World Bank Economic Review, Volume 35, Issue 3
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Volume
35
Number
3
Issue Date
2021-10-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
1564-698X
Journal
World Bank Economic Review
1564-698X
Journal Volume
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Articles
The Price Elasticity of African Elephant Poaching
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-04-30) Do, Quy-Toan; Levchenko, Andrei A.; Ma, Lin; Blanc, Julian; Dublin, Holly; Milliken, Tom
The objective of this paper is to provide an estimate of the elasticity of elephant poaching with respect to prices. Ivory being a storable commodity subjects its price to Hotelling’s no-arbitrage condition, hence allowing identification of the supply curve. The price of gold, one of many commodities used as stores of value, is thus used as an instrument for ivory prices.The supply of illegal ivory is found to be price inelastic with an elasticity of 0.4, with changes in consumer prices passing-through to prices faced by producers at a rate close to unity. Estimations based on a number of alternative estimation approaches all confirm the conclusion that supply is inelastic. The paper ends with a brief discussionon of what such a finding implies for elephant conservation policies.
Measuring Farm Labor
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
, 2020-05-21) Gaddis, Isis; Palacios-Lopez, Amparo; Pieters, Janneke
This study examines recall bias in farm labor through a randomized survey experiment in Ghana, comparing farm labor estimates from an end-of-season recall survey with data collected weekly throughout the agricultural season. Recall households report 10 percent more farm labor per person-plot, which can be explained by recall households’ under reporting of “marginal” plots and household workers. This “selective” omission by recall households, denoted as listing bias, alters the composition of plots and workers across treatment arms and inflates average farm labor hours per person-plot in the recall group. Since listing bias, in this setting, dominates other forms of recall bias at higher levels of aggregation (i.e., when farm labor per person-plot is summed at the plot, person, or household level), farm labor productivity is overestimated for recall households. Consistent with the notion that recall bias is linked to the cognitive burden of reporting on past events, there is no recall bias among more educated households.
Booms, Busts, and Household Enterprise
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2019-12-17) Adhvaryu, Achyuta; Kala, Namrata; Nyshadham, Anant
Smallholder agricultural commodity suppliers in developing countries are often vulnerable to global commodity price fluctuations. Using panel data on farmers from an area of Tanzania where most farmers grow coffee, this study finds that global coffee prices matter for household outcomes, through their effects on farmgate prices, coffee sales and revenues, and household expenditures. The article documents that households cope with coffee price busts by increasing enterprise ownership, an effect that is greater for households without access to other means of coping. Comparisons of mean outcomes of enterprises operated by coper households (which operated an enterprise only in periods of low coffee price) with those of stayer households (which operated an enterprise throughout the sample period) indicate that the former are less likely to be profitable or to hire workers.
Household Impacts of Tariffs
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-03-19) Artuc, Erhan; Porto, Guido; Rijkers, Bob
How do trade reforms impact households in different parts of the income distribution? This paper presents a new database, the Household Impacts of Tariffs data set, which contains harmonized household survey and tariff data for 54 low- and middle-income countries. The data cover highly disaggregated information on household budget and income shares for 53 agricultural products, wage labor income, non-farm enterprise sales and transfers, as well as spending on manufacturing and services. Using a stylized model of the first-order impacts of import tariffs on household real income, this paper quantifies the welfare implications of agricultural trade protection. On average, unilateral elimination of agricultural tariffs would increase household incomes by 2.50 percentage points. Import tariffs have highly heterogeneous effects across countries and within countries across households, consumers, and income earners; the average standard deviation of the gains from trade within a country is 1.01 percentage points.
School Uniforms, Short-Run Participation, and Long-Run Outcomes
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02-24) Ngatia, Mũthoni; Evans, David K.
In recent decades, the number of evaluated interventions to improve access to school has multiplied, but few studies report long-term impacts. This paper reports the impact of an educational intervention that provided school uniforms to children in poor communities in Kenya. The program used a lottery to determine who would receive a school uniform. Receiving a uniform reduced school absenteeism by 37 percent for the average student (7 percentage points) and by 55 percent for children who initially had no uniform (15 percentage points). Eight years after the program began, there is no evidence of sustained impact of the program on highest grade completed or primary school completion rates. A bounding exercise suggests no substantive positive, long-term impacts. These results contribute to a small literature on the long-run impacts of educational interventions and demonstrate the risk of initial impacts depreciating over time.
Demand-Driven Youth Training Programs
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06-03) Alzúa, Maria Laura; Batbekh, Soyolmaa; Batchuluun, Altantsetseg; Dalkhjav, Bayarmaa; Galdo, José
The effectiveness of a demand-driven vocational-training program for disadvantaged youth in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia is assessed through a randomized controlled trial. Mongolia, a transitional country whose economic structure shifted from a Communist, centrally planned economy to a free-market economy over a relatively short period, offers a new setting in which to test the effectiveness of market-based active-labor-market policies. Results show short-term positive impacts on self-employment and skills match, while positive but uncertain effects emerge for employment and earnings. Substantial heterogeneity emerges as relatively older, richer, and better-educated individuals drive these positive effects. A second intervention, in which participants were randomly assigned to receive newsletters with information on market returns to vocational training, shows statistically meaningful effects on the length of exposure to the program (i.e., number of training days attended). These positive impacts, however, do not lead to higher employment or greater earnings.
Productivity and Health
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06-11) Akogun, Oladele; Dillon, Andres; Friedman, Jed; Prasann, Ashesh; Serneels, Pieter
This paper examines the relationship between physical activity and individual productivity among agricultural workers paid on a piece-rate basis. In the context studied, physical activity has a clear correspondence with worker effort. Agricultural workers’ physical activity is directly observed from accelerometer data and is robustly associated with their daily productivity. In addition the impact of a health intervention, which provides malaria testing and treatment, on physical activity and productivity, indicates that the increased daily productivity of workers who are offered this program is explained by worker effort reallocation from low-intensity to high-intensity work within a fixed time period. This demonstrates, in settings when individual productivity is observed, that physical activity measures can help disentangle productivity effects due to effort. When productivity is unobserved, physical activity measures may proxy for individual productivity in physically demanding tasks. The challenges and limitations of physical activity measurement using accelerometers is discussed including their potential use for alternative contexts and the importance of field and data analysis protocols.
Early-Life Access to a Basic Health Care Program and Adult Outcomes in Indonesia
(Published by Oxford University Press, 2020-06-24) Ahsan, Md Nazmul; Banerjee, Rakesh; Maharaj, Riddhi
Access to primary care during early life can have substantial benefits in developing countries. This study evaluates the long-run impact of the Village Midwife Program in Indonesia. It utilizes the rollout variation of the program and links individual background and community characteristics in early childhood to adult outcomes in the Indonesian Family Life Survey. It finds that the presence of a midwife in a community in utero leads to an improvement in overall health, cognition, and economic outcomes among men, but not women. Greater receipt of antenatal care and skilled birth attendance could, in part, drive these results.
Measuring Employment
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06-12) Heath, Rachel; Ghazala, Mansuri; Rijkers, Bob; Seitz, William; Sharma, Dhiraj
sing a randomized survey experiment in urban Ghana, this paper demonstrates that the length of the reference period and the interview modality (in-person or over the phone) affect how people respond in labor surveys, with impacts varying markedly by job type. Survey participants report significantly more self-employment spells when the reference period is shorter than the traditional one week, with the impacts concentrated among those in home-based and mobile self-employment. In contrast, the reference period has no impact on the incidence of wage-employment. The wage-employed do report working fewer days and hours when confronted with a shorter reference period. Finally, interviews conducted on the phone yield lower estimates of employment, hours worked, and days worked among the self-employed who are working from home or a mobile location as compared to in-person interviews.
Changing Gambling Behavior through Experiential Learning
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06-15) Abel, Martin; Cole, Shawn; Zia, Bilal
This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling. Participants first roll one die until they obtain a six, followed by two dice until they roll 2 sixes. They are then informed that the probability of winning the lottery jackpot is equivalent to rolling all sixes with nine dice. The results show that individuals who need many attempts to roll 2 sixes play the lottery significantly less than the control group, while those who need fewer attempts adopt the opposite behavior. These findings provide practical guidance for designing interventions to give individuals brief experiences that correct biases in their beliefs.
Demand for Information on Environmental Health Risk, Mode of Delivery, and Behavioral Change
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-05-25) Tarozzi, Alessandro; Maertens, Ricardo; Ahmed, Kazi Matin; van Geen, Alexander
Millions of villagers in Bangladesh are exposed to arsenic by drinking contaminated water from private wells. Testing for arsenic can encourage switching from unsafe wells to safer sources. This study describes results from a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted in 112 villages in Bangladesh to evaluate the effectiveness of different test selling schemes at inducing switching from unsafe wells. At a price of about US0.60, only one in four households purchased a test. Sales were not increased by informal inter-household agreements to share water from wells found to be safe, or by visual reminders of well status in the form of metal placards mounted on the well pump. However, switching away from unsafe wells almost doubled in response to agreements or placards relative to the one in three proportion of households that switched away from an unsafe well with simple individual sales.
Assessing Deprivation with an Ordinal Variable
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-01-22) Seth, Suman; Yalonetzky, Gaston
The challenges associated with poverty measurement using a cardinal variable have received much attention over the past four decades, but there is a dearth of literature on how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable. This article proposes a class of simple, intuitive, and policy-relevant poverty measures for ordinal variables. The measures are sensitive to the depth of deprivations, unlike the headcount ratio. Moreover, under appropriate restrictions, the measures ensure that priority is given to the poorest among the poor when targeting, monitoring, and evaluating poverty alleviation programs. To assess the robustness of poverty comparisons to alternative choices of parameters, the article develops various stochastic dominance tests (some of which are novel contributions to the stochastic dominance literature). The empirical illustration documenting changes in sanitation deprivation in Bangladesh showcases the measures’ ability to identify instances in which overall sanitation deprivation improved while leaving the poorest behind.
Does Greater Regulatory Burden Lead to More Corruption?
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-04-13) Amin, Mohammad; Soh, Yew Soh
It is sometimes thought that regulation often creates opportunities for public officials to extract bribes. If this is true, deregulation offers a simple way of combating corruption. However, empirical evidence on the corruption and regulation nexus is limited. Further, the corruption indices used are based on experts’ opinions, which may suffer from perception bias. The present paper attempts to address these shortcomings using firm-level survey data for 131 mostly developing countries on the actual experience of the firms with bribery and regulatory burden. The study examines the level of overall corruption and petty corruption. Exploiting variation in regulatory burden, both within-country and industry-level, a large positive effect of regulatory burden on corruption is found. For the baseline results, the bribery rate is higher by about 0.03 percentage points for each percentage point increase in the regulatory burden. The finding is robust to several controls and endogeneity checks.
Assessing Deprivation with an Ordinal Variable
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-01-22) Suman, Seth; Yalonetzky, Gaston
The challenges associated with poverty measurement using a cardinal variable have received much attention over the past four decades, but there is a dearth of literature on how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable. This article proposes a class of simple, intuitive, and policy-relevant poverty measures for ordinal variables. The measures are sensitive to the depth of deprivations, unlike the headcount ratio. Moreover, under appropriate restrictions, the measures ensure that priority is given to the poorest among the poor when targeting, monitoring, and evaluating poverty alleviation programs. To assess the robustness of poverty comparisons to alternative choices of parameters, the article develops various stochastic dominance tests (some of which are novel contributions to the stochastic dominance literature). The empirical illustration documenting changes in sanitation deprivation in Bangladesh showcases the measures’ ability to identify instances in which overall sanitation deprivation improved while leaving the poorest behind.