When Do Donors Trust Recipient Country Systems?
April 2012 - The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid. The target is premised on a view that country systems are strengthened when donors trust recipients to manage aid funds, but undermined when donors do not. This study provides an analytical framework for understanding donors' decisions to trust or bypass country systems, and conducts empirical tests using data from three OECD-DAC surveys. Results show that a donor's use of the recipient country's systems is positively related to the donor's share of aid provided to the recipient, perceptions of corruption in the recipient country, and public support for aid in the donor country. Findings are robust to corrections for potential sample selection, omitted variables or endogeneity bias.
Working Paper 6019
Does India’s Employment Guarantee Scheme Guarantee Employment?
March 2012 - In 2005 India introduced an ambitious national anti-poverty program, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The program aims to dramatically reduce poverty by offering up to 100 days of unskilled manual labor per year on public works projects for any rural resident paid at the stipulated minimum wage rate. Analysis of data from India's National Sample Survey for 2009/10 reveals considerable unmet demand for work in all states. Poorer families tend to have more demand for work on the scheme, and (despite the unmet demand) the self-targeting mechanism allows it to reach relatively poor families and backward castes. The extent of the unmet demand is greater in the poorest states – ironically where the scheme is needed most.
Working Paper 6003
The Law’s Majestic Equality? The Distributive Impact of Litigating Social and Economic Rights
March 2012 - Optimism about the use of laws, constitutions, and rights to achieve social change has never been higher among practitioners. But the academic literature is skeptical that courts can direct resources toward the poor. Using data on social and economic rights cases in five countries, the authors examine whether the poor are over or under-represented among the beneficiaries of litigation, relative to their share of the population. They find that the impact of courts varies considerably across the cases, but is positive and pro-poor in two of the five countries (India and South Africa), distribution-neutral in two others (Indonesia and Brazil), and sharply anti-poor in Nigeria. Overall, the results of litigation are much more positive for the poor than conventional wisdom would suggest.
Working Paper 5999
Sexual Behavior Change Intentions and Actions in the Context of a Randomized Trial of a Conditional Cash Transfer for HIV Prevention in Tanzania
March 2012 - Information, education, communication and interventions based on behavioral-change communication have had success in increasing the awareness of HIV. But these strategies alone have been less successful in changing risky sexual behavior. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the link between action and the intention to change behaviors. Based on an incentives-based HIV prevention trial in Tanzania, the longitudinal dataset in this paper allows the exploration of intended strategies for changing sexual behaviors and their results. The authors find that gender, intervention groups and new positive diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections can significantly predict the link between intent and action. The paper examines potential mediators of these relationships.
Working Paper 5997
Weathering a Storm: Survey-Based Perspectives on Employment in China in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis
March 2012 - Evidence from a range of different sources suggests that Chinese workers lost 20-36 million jobs because of the global financial crisis. Most of these layoffs affected migrant workers, who have typically lacked employment protection, tend to be concentrated in export-oriented sectors, and were among the easiest to dismiss when the crisis hit. Although it was severe, the employment shock was short-lived. By mid-2009, the macroeconomic stimulus and other interventions had succeeded in boosting demand for migrant labor. By early 2010, abundant evidence pointed to scarcity in China's labor market, as labor demand was once again leading to brisk growth in wages.
Working Paper 5984 Previous Working Papers
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 | Adam Wagstaff. Yet more on coping with information overload with an iPad
May 2012 - Last year I wrote a couple of posts on coping with information overload using an iPad, one in July and the other in December. The iPad world continues to develop apace, so here's a quick update, this one - as requested - complete with links to the apps. Owen Ozier. Early Childhood Interventions Conference
May 2012 - Why aren't all early childhood interventions most effective at the same age? Should we be checking that our randomizations are balanced according to genes that influence behavior? Should we be gathering biological outcomes, in addition to economic ones, even when the intervention does not involve biology?
Early childhood interventions - usually working through either health or education – can have very long-lasting effects, some of which are even transmitted to the next generation. Two weekends ago, the Chicago Initiative for Economic Development and Early Childhood (CEDEC) held a conference to survey what is known in this area and provide a forum for sharing findings from recent projects. Varun Gauri. The Law’s Majestic Equality?
April 2012 - Literary writers do not think much of the law. In the last century, Anatole France wrote, mordantly: “The majestic equality of the laws prohibits the rich and the poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing bread.” More recently, Aarvind Adiga says, “The jails of Delhi are full of drivers who are there behind bars because they are taking the blame for their good, solid middle-class masters. . . . The judges? Wouldn't they see through this obviously forced confession? But they are in the racket too. They take their bribe, they ignore the discrepancies in the case. And life goes on.” Adam Wagstaff. A vast treasure trove of development knowledge just opened up
April 2012 - Today's launch of the World Bank's Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) and Open Access Policy might not seem a big deal. But it is.
The knowledge bank’s assets are huge, but until today were hard to access
The Bank is a huge producer of knowledge on development. This knowledge surfaces in formal publications of the Bank – the institution publishes books and flagship reports like the World Development Report. It also surfaces in publications of external publishers, including journal articles – up to now, these external publications haven't been seen by the Bank as part of its knowledge output despite the fact they dwarf the Bank's own publications in volume and in citations. The Bank's knowledge also surfaces in reports, and in informal "knowledge products" like briefing notes and other web content. Adam Wagstaff. Are the Knowledge Bank’s staff under-specialized?
March 2012 - Ideas often come from unexpected quarters. Last week, Ricardo Hausmann came to the World Bank to talk about his work on economic complexity. I missed the seminar, but afterwards read his Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity. (I had actually already looked at the stunning – but rather confusing charts – of his coauthor Cesar Hidalgo after reading Tim Harford’s great new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.) Damien de Walque. Rewarding safe sex
March 2012 - Prevention strategies have had limited impact on the trajectory of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. New, innovative approaches to behavioral change are needed to stem the epidemic.
In a joint effort with many colleagues, and in collaboration with the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania and, the University of California at Berkeley, we launched a study with the acronym RESPECT (“Rewarding STI Prevention and Control in Tanzania”). Previous Blogs & Research Briefs
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Wagstaff, A. and A. Culyer (2012). "Four decades of health economics through a bibliometric lens." Journal of Health Economics 31(2): 406–439.
In this paper, we take a bibliometric tour of the last forty years of health economics using bibliographic “metadata” from EconLit supplemented by citation data from Google Scholar and our own topical classifications. We report the growth of health economics (we find 33,000 publications since 1969—12,000
more than in the economics of education) and list the 300 most-cited publications broken down by topic.We report the changing topical and geographic focus of health economics (the topics ‘Determinants of health and ill-health’ and ‘Health statistics and econometrics’ both show an upward trend, and the field has expanded appreciably into the developing world)...
de Walque, D. and R. Kline (2012). "The Association Between Remarriage and HIV Infection in 13 Sub-Saharan African Countries." Studies in Family Planning 43(1): 1-10.
Separated, divorced, and widowed individuals in Africa are at significantly increased risk for HIV infection. Using nationally representative data from 13 sub-Saharan African countries, this study confirms that finding and goes further by examining those who have experienced a marital dissolution and are now remarried. Results show that remarried individuals form a large portion of the population and have a higher-than-average HIV prevalence. HIV-positive remarried individuals are at risk of transmitting the infection to their spouse, because many of the couples are serodiscordant. The large number of high-risk remarried individuals is a source of vulnerability and further infection, and should be acknowledged and taken into account by prevention strategies that rarely address this population... de Walque, D., W. H. Dow, et al. (2012). "Incentivising safe sex: a randomised trial of conditional cash transfers for HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention in rural Tanzania." BMJ 2(1): 1-10.
Objective: The authors evaluated the use of conditional cash transfers as an HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention strategy to incentivise safe sex.
Design: An unblinded, individually randomised and controlled trial.
Setting: 10 villages within the Kilombero/Ulanga districts of the Ifakara Health and Demographic Surveillance System in rural south-west Tanzania.
Participants: The authors enrolled 2399 participants,aged 18-30 years, including adult spouses... Ravallion, M. and A. Wagstaff. (Forthcoming (online December 3, 2011)). "The World Bank’s publication record." The Review of International Organizations
The World Bank claims to be a “knowledge bank,” but do its knowledge products influence development thinking, or is the Bank merely a proselytizer? The World Bank is a prolific publisher; for example, it has published more journal articles in economics than any university except Harvard. But what about their impact on development thinking? Using citation data from Google Scholar it is hard to discern more than a negligible impact for a great many Bank publications. However, a sizeable minority of its journal articles and books have been highly cited. Compared to leading research universities and other international institutions, the Bank’s ranking in terms of widely-used citation-based indices is no lower than for its journal article counts. This suggests that the Bank’s research does much more than proselytize... Previous Journal Articles
| The Elderly and Old Age Support in Rural China. Directions in Development Series
March 2012 - The Elderly and Old Age Support in Rural China examines projected demographic changes that will affect the economic well-being of China’s rural elderly over the next 20 years, taking into account both China’s sharp demographic transition and the continued migration of young adults to cities. The projected old age dependency ratio of 34 percent in China’s rural areas by 2030 suggests that support of the elderly is likely to be an increasing burden on China’s families.
Order | Download Health Equity and Financial Protection: Streamlined Analysis with ADePT Software
May 2011 - ADePT Health is a free-standing computer program that allows users to produce quickly - and with the minimal risk of errors - most tables that have become standard in applied health and equity analysis. ADePT produces summary statistics and charts that allow inequalities to be compared across countries and over time. This manual explains the methods ADePT uses, how to prepare data for it, how to navigate the ADePT interface to generate the desired tables and charts, and how to interpret them.
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Making Schools Work: New Evidence on Accountability Reforms
February 2011 - This book is about the threats to education quality in the developing world that cannot be explained by lack of resources. It reviews the observed phenomenon of service delivery failures in public education: cases where programs and policies increase the inputs to education but do not produce effective services where it counts – in schools and classrooms. It documents what we know about the extent and costs of such failures across low and middle-income countries. And it further develops the conceptual model posited in the World Development Report 2004: that a root cause of low-quality and inequitable public services – not only in education—is the weak accountability of providers to both their supervisors and clients.
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No small matter: the impact of poverty, shocks, and human capital investments in early childhood development
February 2011 - Education is often seen as a fundamental means to improve economic prospects for individuals from low income settings. However, even with increased emphasis on basic education for all, many individuals fail to achieve basic skills to succeed in life. The book presents evidence that one core reason is that by the time a child is old enough to attend school, there is already a wide disparity in cognitive skills and in emotional and behavioral development among children from households of different socioeconomic backgrounds. Low levels of cognitive development in early childhood strongly correlate with low socio-economic status (as measured by wealth and parental education) as well as malnutrition. These disadvantages are often exacerbated by economic crises.
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