Citizens have a right to accept any job offer in their country, but that right is not marketable or automatically extended to foreigners. Yet, some citizens have useful things to do if they could rent out their right-to-work, and there are foreigners who would value the new options for employment.
... Exibir mais + Thus, there is a missing market. A solution is to allow people to rent out their right-to-work for a period of their choice. On the other side of the market, foreigners could purchase time-bound work permits. The market would no longer be missing. This paper formulates and studies this policy proposal.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS9005 SEP 12, 2019
The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries.
... Exibir mais + Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below by a fixed absolute line and above by weakly-relative lines derived from a theoretical model of relative-income comparisons calibrated to data on national poverty lines. Both bounds indicate falling global poverty incidence, but more slowly for the upper bound. Either way, the developing world has a higher poverty incidence but is making more progress against poverty than the developed world.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8170 AUG 24, 2017
Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals.
... Exibir mais + This paper questions this assumption, using nutritional status as a proxy for individual poverty. The comprehensive assessment for Sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and children are spread widely across the distribution of household wealth and consumption. Roughly three-quarters of underweight women and undernourished children are not found in the poorest 20 percent of households, and around half are not found in the poorest 40 percent. The mean joint probability of being an underweight woman and living in the poorest wealth quintile is only 0.03. Countries with higher overall rates of undernutrition tend to have a higher share of undernourished individuals in nonpoor households. The results are consistent with evidence of substantial intrahousehold inequality.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8001 MAR 09, 2017
Brown,Caitlin Susan; Ravallion,Martin; Van De Walle,Dominique InglêsDisclosed
It is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of India's secondary towns or big cities mattered more to recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data deficiencies have made this a difficult question to answer previously.
... Exibir mais + Satellite observations of night lights are used to measure urban growth on the extensive and intensive margins in the context of a spatial Durbin fixed-effects model of poverty measures for rural India, calibrated to a panel of 59 regions observed four times over 1993-2012. The expansion of lit area had greater effect on the rural poverty measures than did intensive margin growth in the brightness of light from urban areas. For India's current stage of development, growth of secondary towns may do more to reduce rural poverty than big city growth, although the theoretical model suggests that cities may eventually take over from towns as the drivers of rural poverty reduction.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS7994 MAR 06, 2017
It is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of India’s secondary towns or big cities mattered more to recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data deficiencies have made this a difficult question to answer previously.
... Exibir mais + Satellite observations of night lights are used to measure urban growth on the extensive and intensive margins in the context of a spatial Durbin fixed-effects model of poverty measures for rural India, calibrated to a panel of 59 regions observed four times over 1993-2012. The expansion of lit area had greater effect on the rural poverty measures than did intensive margin growth in the brightness of light from urban areas. For India’s current stage of development, growth of secondary towns may do more to reduce rural poverty than big city growth, although the theoretical model suggests that cities may eventually take over from towns as the drivers of rural poverty reduction.
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Documento de Trabalho (Série Numerada) 125650 MAR 01, 2017
The authors know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a seventeen-year period, allowing for both internal and external (villagelevel) effects.
... Exibir mais + Under our identifying assumptions, electrification brought significant consumption gains for households who acquired electricity for their own use. We also find evidence of a dynamic effect of village connectivity for households without electricity themselves. This is suggestive of an external effect, which also comes with a shift in consumption spending suggestive of status concerns among those still without electricity. Labor earnings were an important channel of impact. This was mainly through extra work by men. There was no effect on average wage rates.
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Artigo de revista 140526 JAN 01, 2017
Van De Walle,Dominique; Ravallion,Martin; Mendiratta,Vibhuti; Koolwal,Gayatri B.Disclosed
The World Bank Economic Review is a professional journal used for the dissemination of research in development economics broadly relevant to the development profession and to the World Bank in pursuing its development mandate.
... Exibir mais + It is directed to an international readership among economists and social scientists in government, business, international agencies, universities, and development research institutions. The Review seeks to provide the most current and best research in the field of quantitative development policy analysis, emphasizing policy relevance and operational aspects of economics, rather than primarily theoretical and methodological issues. This issue has the following headings: (i)Property Rights for Fishing Cooperatives : How (and How Well) Do They Work?; (ii) When Winners Feel Like Losers : Evidence from an Energy Subsidy Reform; (iii) Does Input-Trade Liberalization Affect Firms' Foreign Technology Choice?; (iv) Long-term Gains from Electrification in Rural India; (v) The Changing Structure of Africa’s Economies; (vi) Does Child Sponsorship Pay Off in Adulthood? An International Study of Impacts on Income and Wealth; (vii) Political Connections and Tariff Evasion Evidence from Tunisia; (viii) Pension Coverage for Parents and Educational Investment in Children : Evidence from Urban China; (iv) Prices, Engel Curves, and Time-Space Deflation : Impacts on Poverty and Inequality in Vietnam; (v) Willing but Unable? Short-Term Experimental Evidence on Parent Empowerment and School Quality; (vi) Providing Policy Makers with Timely Advice : The Timeliness-Rigor Trade-Off; and (vii) On the Effects of Enforcement on Illegal Markets : Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Colombia.
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Publicação 140496 JAN 01, 2017
Aburto-Oropeza, Octavio; Leslie, Heather M.; Mack-Crane, Austen; Nagavarapu,Sriniketh Suryasesha; Reddy, Sheila M.W.; Sievanen. Leila; Calvo-Gonzalez,Oscar; Cunha,Barbara; Trezzi,Riccardo; Bas,Maria; Berthou, Antoine; Van De Walle,Dominique; Ravallion,Martin; Mendiratta,Vibhuti; Koolwal,Gayatri B.; Diao,Xinshen; Harttgen,Kenneth; Mcmillan,Margaret S.; Wydick,Bruce W.; Glewwe,Paul W.; Rutledge, Laine; Rijkers,Bob; Baghdadi,Leila; Raballand,Gael J. R. F.; Mu,Ren; Du,Yang; Gibson,John; Le,Trinh; Kim, Bonggeun; Beasley,Elizabeth Ruth; Huillery,Elise; Bell,Clive L.G.; Mejia,Daniel; Restrepo,Pascual; Rozo,Sandra V.Disclosed
Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information. In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen covariates, which is then implemented for targeting out-of-sample.
... Exibir mais + In this paper, the performance of various proxy-means testing methods is assessed using data for nine African countries. Standard proxy-means testing helps filter out the nonpoor, but excludes many poor people, thus diminishing the impact on poverty. Some methodological changes perform better, with a poverty-quantile method dominating in most cases. Even so, either a basic-income scheme or transfers using a simple demographic scorecard are found to do as well, or almost as well, in reducing poverty. However, even with a budget sufficient to eliminate poverty with full information, none of these targeting methods brings the poverty rate below about three-quarters of its initial value. The prevailing methods are particularly deficient in reaching the poorest.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS7915 DEC 13, 2016
Brown,Caitlin Susan; Ravallion,Martin; Van De Walle,DominiqueDisclosed
Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991.
... Exibir mais + The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991, despite rising inequality. Faster poverty decline came with higher growth and a more pro-poor pattern of growth. Post-1991 data suggest stronger inter-sectoral linkages: urban consumption growth brought gains to the rural as well as the urban poor, and the primary-secondary-tertiary composition of growth has ceased to matter, as all three sectors contributed to poverty reduction.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS7568 FEB 17, 2016
Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991.
... Exibir mais + The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991, despite rising inequality. Faster poverty decline came with higher growth and a more pro-poor pattern of growth. Post- 1991 data suggest stronger intersectoral linkages: urban consumption growth brought gains to the rural as well as the urban poor, and the primary - secondary- tertiary composition of growth has ceased to matter, as all three sectors contributed to poverty reduction.
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Documento de Trabalho (Série Numerada) 125504 FEB 01, 2016
Workfare has often seemed an attractive option for making self-targeted transfers to poor people. But is this incentive argument strong enough in practice to prefer unproductive workfare to even untargeted cash transfers?
... Exibir mais + A nonparametric survey-based method is used to assess the cost-effectiveness of a large workfare scheme in a poor state of India with high unemployment. Forgone earnings are evident but fall short of market wages. For the same budget, unproductive workfare has less impact on poverty than either a basic-income scheme or transfers tied to the government’s assignment of ration cards. The productivity of workfare is thus crucial to its justification as an antipoverty policy.
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Artigo de revista 129197 AUG 05, 2015
Murgai,Rinku; Ravallion,Martin; Van De Walle,DominiqueDisclosed
This brief summarizes the updates from the 2013 paper entitled, Testing information constraints on India's largest antipoverty program, conducted between between 2009 and 2010 in India.
... Exibir mais + The study observed how public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor people's agency and an unresponsive supply side? This paper reports on an information campaign that was designed and implemented in the form of an entertaining movie to inform people of their rights under the scheme. In randomly-assigned villages, the movie brought significant gains in knowledge and more positive perceptions about the impact of the scheme. But objectively measured employment showed no gain on average, suggesting that the movie created a groupthink, changing social perceptions about the scheme but not individual efficacy in accessing it. The paper concludes that awareness generation needs to go hand-in-hand with supply-side changes.
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Informativo 90356 SEP 02, 2014
ravallion, Martin ; Walle, Dominique van de ; Dutta, Puja ; Margai, RinkuDisclosed
In 2006, India embarked on an ambitious attempt to fight poverty by attempting to introduce a wage floor in a setting in which many unskilled workers earn less than the minimum wage.
... Exibir mais + The 2005 national rural employment guarantee act (NREGA) creates a justiciable "right to work" by promising 100 days of wage employment in every financial year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. In attempting to fight poverty in poor places with weak administrative capabilities, the idea of "rights" has often been invoked. This book aims to contribute to the understanding of the efficacy of poor states in fighting poverty using an ambitious rights-based program - the largest antipoverty public employment program in India, and possibly anywhere in the world. The program authors study is India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), which was launched to implement the NREGA. This book presents survey-based estimates for India as a whole as well as results for Bihar. Results for India are based on the 2009-10 national sample survey. Two surveys were carried out in 2009 and 2010 and spanned 150 villages spread across all 38 districts in Bihar. These data are supplemented by qualitative research in six districts to better understand supply-side challenges. A distinctive feature of the methodology is that the authors identify the key counterfactual outcomes of interest - that is, what Bihar Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (BREGS) participants will have done in the absence of the program - by directly asking individual BREGS participants. The advantage of this approach is that it produces an individual-specific estimate of impact - exploiting the information available for each participant - rather than delivering only a mean impact. The authors find compelling evidence that the scheme is reaching relatively poor families. It is important that reform efforts for MGNREGS work on both of these aspects - a stronger, more capable, local administration, plus more effective participation by civil society.
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Publicação 85414 FEB 01, 2014
Dutta,Puja Vasudeva; Murgai,Rinku; Ravallion,Martin; Van De Walle,DominiqueDisclosed
This paper is organized in following headings: can we trust shoestring evaluations?; evaluation of development programs: randomized controlled trials or regressions?
... Exibir mais + ; effects of Colombia’s social protection system on workers’ choice between formal and informal employment; can conditional cash transfers compensate for a father’s absence? collective action and community development: evidence from self-help groups in rural India; excluding the rural population: the impact of public expenditure on child malnutrition in Peru; is small better? a comparison of the effect of large and small dams on cropland productivity in South Africa
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While self-assessments of welfare have become popular for measuring poverty and estimating welfare effects, the methods can be deceptive given systematic heterogeneity in respondents' scales.
... Exibir mais + Little is known about this problem. This study uses specially-designed surveys in three countries, Tajikistan, Guatemala, and Tanzania, to study scale heterogeneity. Respondents were asked to score stylized vignettes, as well as their own household. Diverse scales are in evidence, casting considerable doubt on the meaning of widely-used summary measures such as subjective poverty rates. Nonetheless, under the identifying assumptions of the study, only small biases are induced in the coefficients on widely-used regressors for subjective poverty and welfare.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS6726 DEC 01, 2013
Workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries. This has seemed an attractive idea for self-targeting transfers to poor people. This incentive argument does not imply, however, that workfare is more cost-effective against poverty than even poorly-targeted options, given hidden costs of participation.
... Exibir mais + In particular, even poor workfare participants in a labor-surplus economy can be expected to have some forgone income when they take up such a scheme. A survey-based method is used to assess the cost-effectiveness of India's Employment Guarantee Scheme in Bihar. Participants are found to have forgone earnings, although these fall well short of market wages on average. Factoring in these hidden costs, the paper finds that for the same budget, workfare has less impact on poverty than either a basic-income scheme (providing the same transfer to all) or uniform transfers based on the government's below-poverty-line ration cards. For workfare to dominate other options, it would have to work better in practice. Reforms would need to reduce the substantial unmet demand for work, close the gap between stipulated wages and wages received, and ensure that workfare is productive -- that the assets created are of value to poor people. Cost-effectiveness would need to be reassessed at the implied higher levels of funding.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS6673 OCT 01, 2013
Murgai, Rinku; Ravallion, Martin; van de Walle, DominiqueDisclosed
Public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low.
... Exibir mais + Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor people's agency and an unresponsive supply side? This paper reports on an information campaign that was designed and implemented in the form of an entertaining movie to inform people of their rights under the scheme. In randomly-assigned villages, the movie brought significant gains in knowledge and more positive perceptions about the impact of the scheme. But objectively measured employment showed no gain on average, suggesting that the movie created a "groupthink," changing social perceptions about the scheme but not individual efficacy in accessing it. The paper concludes that awareness generation needs to go hand-in-hand with supply-side changes.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS6598 SEP 01, 2013
Ravallion, Martin; van de Walle, Dominique; Dutta, Puja; Murgai, RinkuDisclosed
This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Does child labour displace schooling? Evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy, conducted between 1995 and 1996, in Bangladesh.
... Exibir mais + The study observed that the subsidy increases schooling, but its effect on child labour is ambiguous. The subsidy increased schooling by far more than it reduced child labour. Substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy. Substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy. The reduction in the incidence of child labour by boys (girls) represents about one quarter (eighth) of the increase in their school enrollment rate.
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This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Estimating the benefit incidence of an antipoverty program by propensity score matching, conducted between 1997 and 1998, in Argentina.
... Exibir mais + The study observed that the average direct gain to the participant is found to be about half the gross wage. Over half of the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally, and 80 percent are in the poorest quintile. The Propensity Score Matching (PSM) estimator is reasonably robust to a number of changes in methodology. Participants are more likely to be poor than non-participants. Participants are less well-educated, live in poorer neighborhoods and are more likely to be members of neighborhood associations and political parties. Average gains are similar between men and women, but are higher for younger workers. Funding for the study derives from the World Bank Research Committee.
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This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Social protection in a crisis : Argentina's plan Jefes y Jefas, conducted between 2002 and 2003 in Argentina.
... Exibir mais + The study observed the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002 on the individual level. It is clear that the eligibility criteria were not enforced. Large shares of the recipients were women. The program reduced unemployment by about 2.5 percentage points. The work requirement represented a positive opportunity cost for participants. The program had a small effect on the poverty rate and a somewhat larger effect on the incidence of extreme poverty. Funding for the study derived from the Government of Argentina.
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