Policy Research Working Paper | Communities_and_Human_Settlements | World Bank

What explains big gender disparities in India ? local industrial structures and female entrepreneurship

2012-10-15T04:00:00.000Z

Despite rapid economic growth, gender disparities in women's economic participation have remained deep and persistent in India. What explains these huge gender disparities? Is it poor infrastructure, limited education, and gender composition of the labor force and industries? Or is it deficiencies in social and business networks and a low share of incumbent female entrepreneurs?This paper analyzes the spatial determinants of female entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. Good infrastructure and education predict higher female entry shares. There are strong agglomeration economies in both manufacturing and services, where higher female ownership among incumbent businesses within a district-industry predicts a greater share of subsequent entrepreneurs will be female. Moreover, higher female ownership of local businesses in related industries (similar labor needs, input-output markets) predicts greater relative female entry rates. Gender networks thus clearly matter for women's economic participation. However, there is a need to develop a better understanding of how gender networks influence aggregate efficiency. There is no doubt that gender empowerment can be the escalator to realizing human potential and for creating a robust platform for growth and job creation.

Ahmedabad : more but different government for "slum free" and livable cities

2012-11-14T05:00:00.000Z

This paper analyzes real estate market dynamics over the past decade in the city of Ahmedabad, India, with a view to improving the living conditions of the large population living in slums. The paper combines census data, the National Sample Survey, and slum household surveys to review the demand side of the market. Satellite photography was used to estimate the production of both formal and informal housing over the past ten years. Analysis of the execution of the development plan for the Ahmedabad region and town planning schemes shows how the system of housing supply has evolved. These analyses are used to assess the feasibility of various approaches to achieving "slum free" cities, the goal of the Government of India's planned assistance program Rajiv Awas Yojana. The paper concludes that notwithstanding a substantial increase in public housing production in recent years, providing subsidized formal homes from government or through reservations for lower income groups in private developments would take more than a generation just to handle the current slum population -- representing one-third of households. Providing basic environmental infrastructure services in existing underserved neighborhoods -- a proven approach under the Slum Networking Program -- and bolstering infrastructure networks for the city to accommodate increased demand are affordable and feasible. Addressing issues such as rural-urban land conversion and ambiguous land tenure, and allowing flexibility for realistic building standards and increasing maximum floor space standards in certain neighborhoods can help to ensure a growing supply of housing that is affordable for moderate and low-income households.

Promoting handwashing behavior in Peru : the effect of large-scale mass-media and community level interventions

2012-11-14T05:00:00.000Z

This paper analyzes a randomized experiment that uses novel strategies to promote handwashing with soap at critical times in Peru. It evaluates a large-scale intervention that includes a mass media provincial campaign and a district-level community component. The analysis finds that the mass media intervention alone had no significant effect on exposure to the handwashing promotion campaign messages, and therefore no effect on handwashing knowledge or handwashing behavior. In contrast, the community-level intervention, a more comprehensive intervention that included several community and school activities in addition to the communications campaign, was successful in reaching the target audience with handwashing promotion messages and in improving the knowledge of the treated population on appropriate handwashing behavior. Those improvements translated into higher self-reported and observed handwashing with soap at critical junctures. However, no significant improvements in the health of children under the age of five were observed. The results are consistent with earlier literature, which indicates that substantively changing behavior to improve health is a complex task requiring intensive and more personalized interventions.

Empowering women : evidence from a field experiment in Afghanistan

2012-11-19T05:00:00.000Z

In societies with widespread gender discrimination, development programs that encourage female participation in local governance can potentially redress gender imbalances in economic, political, and social outcomes. Using a randomized field experiment encompassing 500 Afghan villages, this study finds that a development program which incorporates mandated female participation increases female mobility and involvement in income generation, but does not change female roles in family decision-making or attitudes toward the general role of women in society.

Is India's manufacturing sector moving away from cities ?

2012-12-05T05:00:00.000Z

This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. It finds that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban locations. Although the secular trend for India's manufacturing urbanization has slowed down, the localized importance of education and infrastructure has not. The results suggest that districts with better education and infrastructure have experienced a faster pace of urbanization, although higher urban-rural cost ratios cause movement out of urban areas. This process is associated with improvements in the spatial allocation of plants across urban and rural locations. Spatial location of plants has implications for policy on investments in education, infrastructure, and the livability of cities. The high share of urbanization occurring in the informal sector suggests that urbanization policies that contain inclusionary approaches may be more successful in promoting local development and managing its strains than those focused only on the formal sector. Cities are evolving in India from places of goods production to forges of human capital and coping mechanisms for survival.

Rethinking the form and function of cities in post-Soviet countries

2012-12-12T05:00:00.000Z

Eurasian cities, unique in the global spatial landscape, were part of the world's largest experiment in urban development. The challenges they now face because of their history offer valuable lessons to urban planners and policymakers across the world from places that are still urbanizing to those already urbanized. Today, Eurasian cities must respond to three big changes: the breakup of the Soviet Union, the return of the market as the driving force of society, and the emergence of regional powers such as the European Union, China, and India that are competing with the Russian Federation for markets and influence in its former satellites. Several methods of analysis indicate an imbalance across Eurasia, implying a need to readjust Eurasia's urban structure. National policies in Eurasia are still preoccupied with spatial equity. But the concentration of economic activity in large cities is fundamental to national competitive advantage: they foster innovation through their diversity of industries -- and reduce production costs through their economies of scale. This paper suggests some ideas on how policymakers can harness the economic power of cities to drive national economic development, by focusing on four themes: planning, connecting, greening, and financing cities.

Rainfall variability, occupational choice, and welfare in rural Bangladesh

2013-01-14T05:00:00.000Z

This study investigates the choice of occupational focus versus diversification between household members in rural Bangladesh as an autonomous and proactive adaptation strategy against ex ante local rainfall variability risks. The analysis combines nationally representative household level survey data with historical climate variability information at the Upazila level. The authors note that flood prone Upazilas may face reduced risks from local rainfall variability as compared with non-flood prone Upazilas. They find that two members of the same household are less likely to be self-employed in agriculture if they live in an area with high local rainfall variability. However, the occupational diversification strategy comes at a cost to households in terms of consumption welfare. The paper considers the effects of three policy actions, providing access to credit, safety net, and market. Access to market appears to be more effective in reducing the likelihood of costly within-household occupational diversification as an ex ante climate risk-reducing strategy as compared with access to credit and safety net.

Wage effects of high-skilled migration : international evidence

2013-01-15T05:00:00.000Z

The international migration of high-skilled workers may trigger productivity effects at the macro level such that the wage rate of skilled workers increases in host countries and decrease in source countries. The authors exploit data on international bilateral migration flows and provide evidence consistent with this theoretical hypothesis. They propose various instrumentation strategies to identify the causal effect of skilled migration on log differences of GDP per capita, total factor productivity, and the wages of skilled workers between pairs of source and destination countries. These strategies aim to address the endogeneity problem that arises when international wage differences affect migration decisions.

Information and participation in social programs

2013-01-16T05:00:00.000Z

Participation in social programs, such as clubs and other social organizations, results from a process in which an agent learns about the requirements, benefits, and likelihood of acceptance related to a program, applies to be a participant, and, finally, is accepted or rejected. The authors propose a model of this participation process and provide an application of the model using data from a social program in Mexico. Their empirical analysis illustrates that decisions at each stage of the process are responsive to expectations about the decisions and outcomes at the subsequent stages and that knowledge about the program can have a significant impact on participation outcomes.

Challenges and opportunities of mobile phone-based data collection : evidence from South Sudan

2013-01-17T05:00:00.000Z

The proliferation of mobile phones in developing countries has generated a wave of interest in collecting high-frequency socioeconomic surveys using this technology. This paper considers lessons from one such survey effort in a difficult environment -- the South Sudan Experimental Phone Survey, which gathered data on living conditions, access to services, and citizen attitudes via monthly interviews by phones provided to respondents. Non-response, particularly in later rounds of the survey, was a substantial problem, largely due to erratic functioning of the mobile network. However, selection due to non-response does not appear to have markedly affected survey results. Response rates were much higher for respondents who owned their own phones. Both compensation provided to respondents in the form of airtime and the type of phone (solar-charged or traditional) were varied experimentally. The type of phone was uncorrelated with response rates and, contrary to expectation, attrition was slightly higher for those receiving the higher level of compensation. The South Sudan Experimental Phone Survey experience suggests that mobile phones can be a viable means of data collection for some purposes, that calling people on their own phones is preferred to handing out phones, and that careful attention should be given to the potential for selective non-response.

Highway to success in India : the impact of the golden quadrilateral project for the location and performance of manufacturing

2013-01-17T05:00:00.000Z

The infrastructure gap is one of the most significant impediments to India realizing its growth and poverty reduction potential. Although Indias transport network is one of the most extensive in the world, accessibility and connectivity are limited. Only 20 percent of the national highway network (which carries 40 percent of traffic) is four-lane and one-fourth of the rural population does not have access to an all-weather road. It is estimated that the transport sector alone will require an investment of nearly US$500 billion over the next 10 years. This paper investigates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral highway project on the Indian organized manufacturing sector using enterprise data. The Golden Quadrilateral project upgraded the quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. The analysis uses a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to compare non-nodal districts based on their distance from the highway system. It finds several positive effects for non-nodal districts located 0-10 km from the Golden Quadrilateral that are not present in districts 10-50 km away, most notably higher entry rates and increases in plant productivity. These results are not present for districts located on another major highway system, the North-South East-West corridor. Improvements for portions of the North-South East-West corridor system were planned to occur at the same time as the Golden Quadrilateral but were subsequently delayed. Additional tests show that the Golden Quadrilateral projects effect operates in part through a stronger sorting of land-intensive industries from nodal districts to non-nodal districts located on the Golden Quadrilateral network. The Golden Quadrilateral upgrades further helped spread economic activity to moderate-density districts and intermediate size cities.

Buying votes vs. supplying public services : political incentives to under-invest in pro-poor policies

2013-01-28T05:00:00.000Z

This paper uses unique survey data to provide, for the first time in the literature, direct evidence that vote buying in poor economies is associated with lower provision of public services that disproportionately benefit the poor. Various features of the data and the institutional context allow the interpretation of this correlation as the equilibrium policy consequence of clientelist politics, ruling out alternate explanations (such as, for example, poverty driving both vote buying and health outcomes). The data come from the Philippines, a country context that allows for measuring vote buying during elections and services delivered by the administrative unit controlled by winners of those elections. The data reveal a significant, robust negative correlation between vote buying and the delivery of primary health services. In places where households report more vote buying, government records show that municipalities invest less in basic health services for mothers and children; and, quite strikingly, as a summary measure of weak service delivery performance, a higher percentage of children are severely under-weight.

Impact evaluation of a large-scale rural sanitation project in Indonesia

2013-02-13T05:00:00.000Z

Lack of sanitation and poor hygiene behavior cause a tremendous disease burden among the poor. This paper evaluates the impact of the Total Sanitation and Sanitation Marketing project in Indonesia, where about 11 percent of children have diarrhea in any two-week period and more than 33,000 children die each year from diarrhea. The evaluation utilizes a randomized controlled trial but is unusual in that the program was evaluated when implemented at scale across the province of rural East Java in a way that was designed to strengthen the enabling environment and so be sustainable. One hundred and sixty communities across eight rural districts participated, and approximately 2,100 households were interviewed before and after the intervention. The authors found that the project increased toilet construction by approximately 3 percentage points (a 31 percent increase in the rate of toilet construction). The changes were primarily among non-poor households that did not have access to sanitation at baseline. Open defecation among these households decreased by 6 percentage points (or 17 percent). Diarrhea prevalence was 30 percent lower in treatment communities than in control communities at endline (3.3 versus 4.6 percent). The analysis cannot rule out that the differences in drinking water and handwashing behavior drove the decline in diarrhea. Reductions in parasitic infestations and improvements in height and weight were found for the non-poor sample with no sanitation at baseline.

Does a wife's bargaining power provide more micronutrients to females : evidence from rural Bangladesh

2013-02-19T05:00:00.000Z

Using calories in a unitary framework, previous literature has claimed lack of gender inequality in intrahousehold food distribution. This paper finds that while there is lack of gender disparity in the calorie adequacy ratio, the disparity is prominent among children, adolescents, and adults for a number of critical nutrients. Pregnant and lactating women also receive much less of most of these nutrients compared with their requirements. A wife's bargaining power (proxied by assets at marriage), as opposed to her husband's, significantly and positively affects the nutrient allocations of children and adolescents and of adult females. The bargaining effects remain significant after controlling for unobserved household characteristics and the potential nutrition-health-labor market linkage. The findings, which have important policy implications for the growing problem of micronutrient malnutrition in the developing world, also imply that perhaps the nutrition-health-labor market linkage as a key explanation for intrahousehold food distribution has been overemphasized in the previous literature.

Poverty, inequality, and the local natural resource curse

2013-02-20T05:00:00.000Z

The extent to which local communities benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new district-level database to investigate the local impact on socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which grew almost twentyfold in the last two decades. The authors find evidence that producing districts have better average living standards than otherwise similar districts: larger household consumption, lower poverty rate, and higher literacy. However, the positive impacts from mining decrease significantly with administrative and geographic distance from the mine, while district-level consumption inequality increases in all districts belonging to a producing province. The inequalizing impact of mining activity, both across and within districts, may explain part of the current social discontent with mining activities in the country, even despite its enormous revenues.

Weight calculations for panel surveys with sub-sampling and split-off tracking

2013-02-22T05:00:00.000Z

The Living Standards Measurement Study -- Integrated Surveys on Agriculture project collects agricultural and livelihood data in seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to maintain representativeness as much as possible over multiple rounds of data collection, a sub-sample of households are selected to have members that have left the household tracked and interviewed in their new location with their new household members. Since the sub-sampling occurs at the level of the household but tracking occurs at the level of the individual, a number of issues arise with the correct calculation for the sub-sampling and attrition corrections. This paper is based on the panel weight calculations for the initial rounds of the Integrated Surveys on Agriculture surveys in Uganda and Tanzania, and describes the methodology used for calculating the weight components related to sub-sampling, tracking, and attrition, as well as the criteria used for trimming and post-stratification. It also addresses complications resulting from members previously classified as having attrited from the sample returning in later rounds.

Urbanization and (in)formalization

2013-02-26T05:00:00.000Z

Two of the great stylized predictions of development theory, and two of the great expectations of policy makers as indicators of progress in development, are inexorable urbanization and inexorable formalization. Urbanization is indeed happening, beyond the "tipping point" where half the world's population is now urban. However, formalization has slowed down significantly in the past quarter century. Indeed, informality has been increasing. This disconnect raises a number of questions for development analysis and development policy. Is the link between urbanization and formalization more complex than what had been thought? What does this mean for policy? The first core section of this paper asks what exactly is meant by formality and informality. The second core section turns to processes of urbanization and asks how these processes intersect with and interact with the incentives to formalize. The paper examines why cities attract the informal sector and the role that urbanization plays in growth and job creation through both the formal and informal sectors. Cities generate agglomeration benefits in the informal sector, perhaps more so than for the formal sector. The third core section is devoted to policy. At the current conjuncture, agglomeration benefits make a strong case for urbanization as an integral part of development strategy, but concerns about jobless growth and about urban poverty require a focus on the informal sector.

Caught in a productivity trap: a distributional perspective on gender differences in Malawian agriculture

2013-03-11T04:00:00.000Z

In targeting poverty gains, sub-Saharan African governments have emphasized the alleviation of gender differences in agricultural productivity. The empirical studies on the gender gap, however, have frequently used data that were limited regarding geographic and topical coverage, and/or details on intra-household dynamics. The study provides a nationally-representative analysis of the gender gap in Malawi, and decomposes it, for the first time, at the mean and at selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution into (i) a portion driven by gender differences in levels of observable attributes (the endowment effect), and (ii) a portion driven by gender differences in returns to the same set of observables (the structure effect). Sequentially, the authors unpack the relative contributions of different factors towards the gender gap, and suggest future research priorities to inform policy interventions. The authors find that while female-managed plots are, on average, 25 percent less productive, 82 percent of this differential is explained by differences in endowments, mainly due to high-value crop cultivation and levels of household adult male labor inputs. The factors driving the structure effect include child dependency ratio and effectiveness of household adult male labor and inorganic fertilizer. The gender gap increases across the productivity distribution, ranging from 22 percent at the 10th percentile to 37 percent at the 90th percentile. While it is explained predominantly by the endowment effect in the first half of the distribution, the contribution of the structure effect towards the gender gap increases steadily above the median, standing at 34 percent at the 90th percentile.

Foreign job opportunities and internal migration in Vietnam

2013-04-24T04:00:00.000Z

This paper investigates the role of employment opportunities created by foreign-owned firms as a determinant of internal migration and destination choice using the Vietnam Migration Survey 2004 and the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey 2004. Multinomial logit and conditional logit models are estimated to study both origin and destination-specific characteristics of migrants. The paper finds that the migration response to foreign job opportunities is larger for female workers than male workers; there appears to be intermediate selection in terms of educational attainment; and migrating individuals on average tend to go to destinations with higher foreign employment opportunities, even controlling for income differentials, land differentials, and distances between sending and receiving areas.

Eliciting illegal migration rates through list randomization

2013-04-29T04:00:00.000Z

Most migration surveys do not ask about the legal status of migrants due to concerns about the sensitivity of this question. List randomization is a technique that has been used in a number of other social science applications to elicit sensitive information. This paper trials this technique by adding it to surveys conducted in Ethiopia, Mexico, Morocco, and the Philippines. It shows how, in principal, this can be used both to give an estimate of the overall rate of illegal migration in the population being surveyed, as well as to determine illegal migration rates for subgroups such as more or less educated households. The results suggest that there is some useful information in this method: higher rates of illegal migration in countries where illegal migration is thought to be more prevalent and households who say they have a migrant are more likely to report having an illegal migrant. Nevertheless, some of the other findings also suggest some possible inconsistencies or noise in the conclusions obtained using this method. The authors suggest directions for future attempts to implement this approach in migration surveys.