Person:
Friedman, Jed
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty, POV,
Health, HEA
Degrees
ORCID
Departments
Development Research Group
Development Economics, DEC
Development Economics, DEC
Externally Hosted Work
sites.google.com/site/decrgjedfriedman
Contact Information
Last updated
August 15, 2023
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 11
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Publication
The Impact of the Food Price Crisis on Consumption and Caloric Availability in Pakistan : Evidence from Repeated Cross-sectional and Panel Data
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-11)Welfare losses from the 2008 food price crisis in Pakistan are deepening the gap between poor and non poor populations and further increasing inequality between the provinces. To estimate welfare losses, the reduction in caloric availability at household level is measured. The analysis of calorie intake by source supports the notion that rural households were shielded from the worst effects of the crisis by their capacity to grow their own food. Compensating variation estimates suggest that the average household would need 38 percent of its total precrisis expenditure to maintain precrisis consumption levels. The impact of the food price crisis (measured as the percentage of total expenditure required to restore consumption to the precrisis level) peaked at the end of 2008 to twice as high as at the start of the year. Average household caloric availability fell by almost 8 percent between 2006 and first half of 2008. Urban households were relatively worse off than rural households during the crisis. Income gains from sales of agricultural commodities produced by rural households presumably offset the negative impact of the food crisis to some degree. The drawdown of assets over 2008-10 was another important coping mechanism, especially for households without access to land. -
Publication
The Challenge of Measuring Hunger
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01)There is widespread interest in the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has advocated for calculating hunger numbers directly from these same surveys. For either approach, embedded in this effort are a number of important details about how household surveys are designed and how these data are then used. Using a survey experiment in Tanzania, this study finds great fragility in hunger counts stemming from alternative survey designs. As a consequence, comparable and valid hunger numbers will be lacking until more effort is made to either harmonize survey designs or better understand the consequences of survey design variation. -
Publication
The Distributional Impacts of Indonesia's Financial Crisis on Household Welfare : A 'Rapid Response' Methodology
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002-09)Analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is an ever more pressing need. If policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely affected, they need to identify those who have been hurt most and estimate the magnitude of the harm they have suffered. They must also respond in a timely manner. This article develops a simple methodology for measuring these effects and applies it to analyze the impact of the Indonesian economic crisis on household welfare. Using only pre-crisis household information, it estimates the compensating variation for Indonesian households following the 1997 Asian currency crisis and then explores the results with flexible nonparametric methods. It finds that virtually every household was severely affected, although the urban poor fared the worst. The ability of poor rural households to produce food mitigated the worst consequences of the high inflation. The distributional consequences are the same whether or not households are permitted to substitute toward relatively cheaper goods. Households with young children may have suffered disproportionately large adverse effects. -
Publication
Development, Modernization, and Son Preference in Fertility Decisions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-09)A family preference for sons over daughters may manifest itself in different ways, including higher mortality, worse health status, or lower educational attainment among girls. This study focuses on one measure of son preference in the developing world, namely the likelihood of continued childbearing given the gender composition of existing children in the family. The authors use an unusually large data set, covering 65 countries and approximately 5 million births. The analysis shows that son preference is apparent in many regions of the developing world and is particularly large in South Asia and in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region. Modernization does not appear to reduce son preference. For example, in South Asia son preference is larger for women with more education and is increasing over time. The explanation for these patterns appears to be that latent son preference in childbearing is more likely to manifest itself when fertility levels are low. As a result of son preference, girls tend to grow up with significantly more siblings than boys do, which may have implications for their wellbeing if there are quantity-quality trade-offs that result in fewer material and emotional resources allocated to children in larger families. -
Publication
Psychological Health Before, During, and After an Economic Crisis : Results from Indonesia, 1993 - 2000
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-11)The 1997 Indonesian financial crisis resulted in severe economic dislocation and political upheaval, and the detrimental consequences for economic welfare, physical health, and child education have been previously established in numerous studies. We also find the crisis adversely impacted population psychological well-being. We document substantial increases in several different dimensions of psychological distress among male and female adults across the entire age distribution over the crisis period. In addition, the imprint of the crisis can be seen in the differential impacts of the crisis on low education groups, the rural landless, and residents in those provinces that were hit hardest by the crisis. Elevated levels of psychological distress persist even after indicators of economic well-being such as household consumption had returned to pre-crisis levels suggesting long-term deleterious effects of the crisis on the psychological well-being of the Indonesian population. -
Publication
Aggregate Income Shocks and Infant Mortality in the Developing World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-09)The diffusion of cost-effective life saving technologies has reduced infant mortality in much of the developing world. Income gains may also play a direct, protective role in ensuring child survival, although the empirical findings to date on this issue have been mixed. This paper assembles data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 59 countries to analyze the relationship between changes in per capita GDP and infant mortality. The authors show that there is a strong, negative association between changes in per capita GDP and infant mortality- in a first-differenced specification the implied elasticity of infant mortality with respect to per capita GDP is approximately -0.56. In addition to this central result, two findings are noteworthy. First, although there is some evidence of changes in the composition of women giving birth during economic upturns and downturns, the observed changes in infant mortality are not a result of mothers with protective characteristics timing fertility to correspond with the business cycle. Second, the association between infant mortality and per capita GDP is particularly pronounced for periods of large contractions in GDP, suggesting the inability of developing country households or health systems (or both) to smooth resources. Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations using the estimates suggest that there may have been more than 1 million "excess" deaths in the developing world since 1980 as a result of large, negative contractions in per capita GDP. -
Publication
Strengthening Malaria Service Delivery through Supportive Supervision and Community Mobilization in an Endemic Indian Setting : An Evaluation of Nested Delivery Models
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)Malaria continues to be a prominent global public health challenge, in part because of the slow population adoption of recommended preventive and curative behaviors. This paper tests the effectiveness of two service delivery models designed to promote recommended behaviors, including prompt treatment seeking for febrile illness, in Odisha India. The tested modules include supportive supervision of community health workers and community mobilization promoting appropriate health seeking. Program effects were identified through a randomized cluster trial comprising 120 villages from two purposively chosen malaria-endemic districts. Significant improvements were measured in the reported utilization of bed nets in both intervention arms vis-à-vis the control. Although overall rates of treatment seeking were equal across the study arms, treatment seeking from community health workers was higher in both intervention arms and care seeking from trained providers also increased with a substitution away from untrained providers. Further, fever cases in both treatments were more likely to have received timely medical treatment (within 24 hours) from a skilled provider. The study arm with supportive supervision was particularly effective in shifting care seeking to community health workers and ensuring prompt diagnosis and treatment. A community-based intervention combining the supportive supervision of community health workers with intensive community mobilization can be effective in shifting care seeking and increasing preventive behavior, and thus may be used to strengthen the national malaria control program. -
Publication
Linking Results to Performance: Evidence from a Results Based Financing Pre-Pilot Project in Katete District, Zambia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04) -
Publication
Decomposing Response Errors in Food Consumption Measurement: Implications for Survey Design from a Survey Experiment in Tanzania
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04)There is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys both across countries and over time. This variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs produce consumption estimates that are differentially influenced by contrasting types of survey response error. Although previous studies have documented the extent of net error in alternative survey designs, little is known about the relative influence of the different response errors that underpin a survey estimate. This study leverages a recent randomized food consumption survey experiment in Tanzania to shed light on the relative influence of these various error types. The observed deviation of measured household consumption from a benchmark is decomposed into item-specific consumption incidence and consumption value so as to investigate effects related to (a) the omission of any consumption and then (b) the error in value reporting conditional on positive consumption. The results show that various survey designs exhibit widely differing error decompositions, and hence a simple summary comparison of the total recorded consumption across surveys will obscure specific error patterns and inhibit the lessons for improved consumption survey design. In light of these findings, the relative performance of common survey designs is discussed, and design lessons are drawn to enhance the accuracy of item-specific consumption reporting and, consequently, the measures of total household food consumption. -
Publication
How Many More Infants Are Likely to Die in Africa as a Result of the Global Financial Crisis?
( 2009-08-01)The human consequences of the current global financial crisis for the developing world are presumed to be severe yet few studies have quantified such impact. The authors estimate the additional number of infant deaths in sub-Saharan Africa likely due to the crisis and discuss possible mitigation strategies. They pool birth-level data as reported in female adult retrospective birth histories from all Demographic and Health Surveys collected in sub-Saharan Africa nations. This results in a data set of 639,000 births to 264,000 women in 30 countries. The authors use regression models with flexible controls for temporal trends to assess an infant s likelihood of death as a function of fluctuations in national income. They then apply this estimated likelihood to expected growth shortfalls as a result of the crisis. At current growth projections, their estimates suggest there will be 30,000 - 50,000 excess infant deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these additional deaths are likely to be poorer children (born to women in rural areas and lower education levels) and are overwhelmingly female. If the crisis continues to worsen the number of deaths may grow much larger, especially those to girls. Policies that protect the income of poor households and that maintain critical health services during times of economic contraction should be considered. Interventions targeted at female infants and young girls may be particularly beneficial.