This paper exploits the social organization of India to revisit the question of education spillovers in farm productivity. The fact that social interactions mainly occur within castes in rural India provides tools to show that the observed correlation between farm productivity and neighbors' education is likely to be a spillover effect.
... See More + In particular, there are no cross-caste and no cross-occupation effects, which underlines that, under specific assumptions, which are stated and explored in the paper, the education of neighbors does not capture the effect of group unobservables. This evidence is complemented by separate estimations by crops, which show results that are consistent with education spillovers. The strategy used in this paper helps understand and interpret previous findings from the literature.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8816 APR 11, 2019
This study analyzes the impacts of the recent rural road development in Ethiopia on welfare and economic outcomes. The identification of the impacts relies on a difference-in-differences matching approach, taking advantage of the nationally representative household survey and the original road database, both of which are panel data spanning between 2012 and 2016.
... See More + The results of the econometric analysis overall suggest that Ethiopia's recent rural road development has substantially increased household welfare and supported households in coping with the recent severe droughts. This study estimates that rural roads increased, on average, household consumption by 16.1 percent between 2012 and 2016 (or 3.8 percent per year). The effects of rural road development were largest in the most remote communities, as it increased household consumption by 27.9 percent. Furthermore, in the communities most affected by the El Niño drought, the likelihood of falling into poverty was 14.4 percent lower between 2012 and 2016 if the community was connected by a rural road. Taken together, the results suggest that, by connecting remote communities to markets, rural roads have substantially increased the welfare and resilience of rural households in shock-prone environments.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8800 APR 01, 2019
Ratings for Project for Agriculture Commercialization and Trade (PACT) of Nepal were as follows: outcome was moderately satisfactory, Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and monitoring and evaluation quality was high.
... See More + Some of the lessons learned include: (i) PACT has left an important footprint on Nepal’s smallholder agriculture and agribusiness Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) landscape; (ii) in designing future projects that focus on creating agricultural markets, it is essential to carefully assess whether the environment is favorable for the pull-effect on productivity at farm-level that is expected to be triggered by investments at market-level; (iii) increasing the competitiveness of smallholder farmers is unlikely to be achieved in a sustainable manner with a matching grant program alone and requires the full involvement of local institutions, private sector, and where required, international expertise; (iv) the additional financing for PACT was premature, and had a detrimental impact on project implementation and disbursement performance for several years; (v) a stronger oversight of the project by government of Nepal (GoN) could have helped with reducing structural delays, improving project performance and ensuring a more strategic, less matching grants-centric project implementation, eventually minimizing PACT’s unfinished business; (vi) Through PACT activities, the magnitude of Nepal’s problem with food safety and food quality has become even more apparent; there is an urgent need for GoN to follow up, in partnership with key players in the agri-food system; and (vii) Despite its challenges, PACT’s Matching Grant Scheme has been largely successful and GoN should remain open to considering matching grants as one of the instruments in projects seeking to achieve growth of smallholder farmers and agribusiness SMEs.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR4552 MAR 05, 2019
Ratings of an Innovative, Integrated Approach to Enhance Smallholder Family Nutrition Project for Uganda were as follows: outcome was satisfactory, Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and monitoring and evaluation quality was modest.
... See More + Some of the lessons learned include: (i) appropriate monitoring and evaluation indicators and a robust TOC are needed to properly assess achievements; (ii) free inputs alone to smallholder farmers do not lead to sustainable production; structural issues need to be addressed, too; (iii) using incentives for antenatal care (ANC) visits is successful; (iv) consumption patterns can be influenced with availability of targeted food and nutrition education; (v) The introduction of financial products for smallholder farmers must be accompanied with more local, context specific knowledge; and (vi) community-based service providers can play a critical role in the success a project.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR00004756 MAR 03, 2019
The development objective of the Geothermal Development Project for Turkey is to scale up private sector investment in geothermal energy development in Turkey.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: (1) cash compensation at full replacement cost regarding all economical values for permanent loss of agricultural lands; (2) the rental agreements are based on prices negotiated at the needs and requests of landowners for temporary loss of agricultural lands; and (3) upon the request from the villagers, the company has agreed to transfer some trees on the acquired land to new locations.
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