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Publications (539)
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– Re-thinking the use of unit values or community prices
Analysis of household food consumption patterns and welfare requires knowledge of household demand responses to changes in price and income. Estimation of the price and expenditure elasticities requires detailed data on household purchases and prices, which are often not available in many developing...
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The documented under-representation of marginalized groups in business ownership and the labour market is a concerning issue. This study explores how caste disparities in small-firm entrepreneurship impact on firm performance in India, focusing on the informal sector. Our examination shows a...
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– Simulation results for Zambia
The COVID-19 pandemic increased public debt and changed the income distribution in many countries. We use a numerical simulation approach to derive optimal nonlinear marginal tax rates for the pre-crisis and crisis periods. We contribute to the literature by examining optimal tax rates numerically...
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– Evidence from Viet Nam
New developments of existing technologies over time have led to emergent patterns of technology adoption and, accordingly, changing impacts on economy and society. Focusing on the arrival of mobile internet in the early 2010s in developing countries, this paper identifies significant positive...
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We investigate if financial inclusion leads to improved nutrition in rural Rwanda, using Rwandan Integrated Household Living Conditions surveys (2013/14 and 2016/17). Our empirical evidence shows a robust positive impact of financial inclusion efforts undertaken by formal financial institutions...
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– A comparative perspective
We examine the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated tax-benefit measures in seven sub-Saharan African countries, focusing on the onset of the crisis.We evaluate impacts on disposable incomes, considering variations across income groups; assess the effectiveness of tax...
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Throughout 2021, fiscal stimulus packages were introduced to jump-start the COVID-19 ‘post-pandemic’ economic recovery process. While calls for economic recovery packages that promise to ‘build back better’ have come from many directions, the under-allocation of recovery resources directed at...
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– The sub-Saharan experience
COVID-19 cases were first confirmed in March 2020 in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. These countries put in place several stringent measures, including lockdowns, to contain the spread of the virus. Various policies were also rolled out to address the disruption in economic activities, to mitigate...
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– Insights from Kenyan agricultural platforms
Women play a critical yet under-researched role in global digital agri-food value chains, especially in smallholder production, which affects how they are able to economically upgrade (improve crop yields and product quality, and increase product diversification). Research suggests that women’s...
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– The case of ‘Solar Mamas’ who bring light
This paper examines multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa and argues that grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges can help governments and multilateral agencies craft inclusive...
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– Examining the impact of relative income on formal and informal debt in South Africa
How does income inequality impact the propensity for and levels of formal and informal household debt? This paper assesses this question using the two most recent waves of the South African Living Conditions Survey. A range of linear models as well as a zero-inflated Poisson model are employed, and...
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– A rapid scoping review
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries enacted tax and social protection measures to help mitigate the economic hardship faced by individuals and households. This experience underscores the need to better understand the impact of such programmes on incomes and poverty during crises...
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– Evidence from Ecuadorian administrative data
This paper aims to assess the extent to which top earners in Ecuador were affected by the COVID-19 crisis compared to other segments of the population.Our analysis uses administrative data for individuals affiliated to social security between January 2019 and December 2021. We identify the top 10, 1...
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We study the effectiveness of social protection benefits in reducing income and consumption poverty in five sub-Saharan African countries—Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia—in normal times and times of widespread economic crisis. Using tax–benefit microsimulation models with...
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This study investigates the short-term impacts of an aggregate socioeconomic shock on household food consumption and children’s nutrition using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique. In response to the economic downturn, households are expected to adjust their food choices both in terms of...
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– Evidence from household panel data in Uganda
Empirical studies on the effectiveness of aid to the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector (WASH aid) have focused primarily on access to these services as the benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of aid in this sector. Given the importance of WASH services for public health outcomes, the...
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This paper examines the impact of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake on age at marriage and other assortative matching outcomes. Using the 2004–05 wave of the India Human Development Survey and employing a difference-in-differences strategy, we document that the earthquake reduced the age at marriage for...
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The COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected household incomes around the world. In developed economies, pre-pandemic tax–benefit policies and emergency transfers mitigated to a large extent the negative income shock. However, less is known about the effect of government intervention on household...
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Agricultural activities in many African countries are bedevilled by a range of risk factors. Using micro-level household datasets from a range of countries in Africa, we examine the drivers of agricultural risks, while exploring the role of context as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on...
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– Evidence from Viet Nam
In view of the detrimental effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on household welfare, most countries implemented economic stimulus aid packages to support households. The extent to which these packages mitigated the pandemic’s adverse effects on households is not just an intriguing question for researchers...
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– A case of domestic workers in Delhi
Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated that poor women have been the worst sufferers in terms of pay cuts and job losses. Women are the hardest hit also at the household level. They have to bear the brunt of constrained household budgets and have also encountered increasing...
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– Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia
The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries has made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting household consumption data, which is rarely done by phone...
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– A new measure for son preference based on stated preferences and observed measures of parents' fertility decisions
Investigating preference for sons is a continuing focal area of development economics and demographic research. Son preference presents a challenge in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of ‘no poverty’, ‘good health and wellbeing’, and ‘gender equality’ by 2030. It is thus...
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– Estimating the impact of pandemic job loss on poverty in South Africa
Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates, simulating incomes in pre-pandemic household surveys...
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Viet Nam has achieved remarkable economic growth and poverty reduction since the Doi Moi. However, ethnic minorities and the ethnic majority do not benefit equally from the national economic progress. The proportion of poor households that are ethnic minority-headed soared from 18 per cent in the...
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This paper makes the case that current social contracts are often inadequate, irrelevant, or unjust for informal workers. It outlines three possible future scenarios: the bad old contract, an even worse contract, and a better new contract.Under the bad old contract, informal workers lacked legal...
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– Degrees and pathways of impact in 11 cities around the world
This paper presents findings from two rounds (2020 and 2021) of a study on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on informal workers in 11 cities across five regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and North America). The study, carried out by the WIEGO network in partnership...
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– Evidence from Hindu Succession Act in India
This paper examines the impact of the Hindu Succession Act on married women’s time use in India. The Hindu Succession Act was amended between 1976 and 2005 by giving equal inheritance rights to women for inheriting property. To estimate the effect of the equal inheritance reform, I devise a...
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The social and economic impact of COVID-19 has been deep, wide-ranging, and multi-dimensional. While anecdotal evidence of distress among the poor, particularly those with informal occupations, has been widespread, effective policy response has required real-time, researched data disaggregated for...
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– Evidence from Indonesia
Is maternal employment beneficial or harmful for child development? Maternal employment generates income, which is needed to provide core inputs for children’s health and education. However, maternal employment comes at the cost of time spent with children, which is also a critical input into...
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– Evidence from the Indian informal sector
We examine the patterns and correlates of the productivity gap between male-owned and female-owned firms for informal enterprises in India. Female-owned firms are on average 45 per cent less productive than male-owned firms, with the clearest productivity gaps observed at the lower end of the...
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– A reflection of practices, policies, and legislation
This paper assesses the participation of female traders, safety factors, and existing policies and legislation in the informal sector in Tanzania. Primary data were obtained from 11 in-depth interviews, 10 focused group discussions, and 236 structured questionnaires. The primary data were...
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– Evidence from global microdata
This paper investigates gender inequality in vulnerable employment: forms of employment typically featuring high precariousness, inadequate earnings, and lack of decent working conditions. Using a large collection of harmonized household surveys from developing countries, we measure long-term trends...
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– An exploration based on a multidimensional measure of financial inclusion
Using a nationally representative household survey data set from Ghana, this paper provides empirical evidence regarding the role of financial inclusion or financial exclusion in household welfare. We first compute a multidimensional index of financial inclusion, and then we examine the effect of...
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– Rules versus discretionary budgets
Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics in delivery of programme benefits by local governments, or gram panchayats (GPs), and manipulation of GP programme budgets by legislators and elected officials at upper tiers in West Bengal, India.Using household panel survey data...
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This study assesses the impact of four coal mines in Mozambique on the socioeconomic outcomes of the local population. We combine four waves of household surveys with coal mine locations data and employ a difference-in-difference model. The timing of the surveys allows us to control for pre-trends...
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Community or interpersonal support as a critical source of livelihood sustenance in the Global South can exhibit unequal dynamics. An understanding of these practices is primarily tied to the conceptual space of poverty or small communities. Less is known about how social support systems might...
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– A study of the interactions between formal- and informal-sector firms
We consider two vertical links between informal- and formal-sector firms and study their implications. In one case, the final products produced by the formal- and informal-sector firms are vertically differentiated in terms of quality, and the size of the informal sector demand is related to the...
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We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes (continuous outcomes such as potential earnings, or discrete ones such as education groups) and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the...
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This paper explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa. Using a static tax–benefit microsimulation model with input datasets that were adjusted to reflect people’s earned incomes just before the pandemic (March 2020)...
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This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative to pre-pandemic, while their monthly earnings...
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– A view from below
This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy measures on livelihoods in urban South Africa. Using qualitative research methods, we analyse two rounds of semi-structured phone interviews, conducted between June and September 2020 in the township of Khayelitsha, Cape...
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Informal work is often considered a place of employment for marginalized and vulnerable workers who have been rationed out of preferred formal work. However, informality can also be seen as a dynamic sector that budding entrepreneurs and those looking for flexible working conditions enter...
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Several episodes of market-oriented reforms in developing countries have been accompanied by a significant rise in work outside of the formal economy. This paper investigates whether the impact of increased exposure to trade on formal employment is mediated by the strength of labour regulations. We...
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– Insights from the Hrishipara diaries
In this paper, we examine the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of the poor. We use an unusually rich data set from a ‘financial diaries’ study known as the Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project. The data set tracks the economic and financial transactions of 60 individuals and...
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– Evidence from Ghana
Using household data from the latest wave of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, this paper utilizes machine learning techniques to examine the effect of gender wage differences within households on women’s empowerment and welfare in Ghana. The structural parameters of the post-double selection LASSO...
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– Evidence from Latin American countries
We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.Our main contributions are: (i) providing new and...
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Although microfinance started as a movement to improve women’s economic well-being through increased female entrepreneurship in particular, its impact on women’s attitudes toward and participation in the labour market is not fully understood. We fill this gap by combining data on branch locations of...
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– A gender comparison
This study considers how household composition influences the leisure time of men and women in South Africa, using the South African 2010 Time Use Survey. Studying leisure time is important since the allocation of time outside the market provides insights into market behaviour and physical and...
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– Evidence from Ghana
In this paper, we provide causal evidence of the impact of stringent lockdown policies on labour market outcomes at both the extensive and intensive margins, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict stay-at-home orders were issued and enforced in...
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– Evidence from five African countries
This study explores the relationship between household poverty and depth of informality by proposing a new measure of informality at the household level. It is defined as the share of activities (hours worked or income earned) without social insurance for wage workers in the household. We apply...
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– Evidence from a field experiment in India
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention that involves dissemination of publicly available...
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What drives livelihood diversification among predominantly rural households in developing countries and how can welfare-enhancing patterns be established and sustained in the long run? A large literature has focused on whether income diversification is a means of survival or a means of accumulation...
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This paper makes use of tax–benefit microsimulation techniques to quantify the distributional effects of COVID-19 in Ecuador and the role of tax–benefit policies in mitigating the immediate impact of the economic shocks. Our results show a dramatic increase in income poverty and inequality between...
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We measure multidimensional poverty in India using National Sample Survey Organization data from 2014–15 to 2017–18. We use income, health, education, and standard of living to measure the multidimensional poverty index (MPI). The MPI headcount declined from 26.9 to 13.75 per cent over the study...
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– Trends and determinants
Youths in the Middle East and North Africa face the highest unemployment rates in the world. Those who are employed are pushed to accept informal sector jobs that are insecure, unsafe, and lack non-wage benefits. Precarious employment is pervasive among lower socio-economic groups, leading to the...
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– Firm-level evidence from Viet Nam
Using a firm-level panel dataset on private small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Viet Nam’s manufacturing sector, this paper examines productivity dynamics of formal and informal firms. We decompose productivity changes into changes within and between formal and informal firms. We assess...
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The most important determinant of households’ livelihoods is how much they earn for their labour. People in informal work are more likely to be low earners, to live in poverty, and to make fewer transitions into the higher-paying work statuses. The paper is divided into three main sections: what we...
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The informal sector has long been viewed as a locus of the disadvantaged, unskilled, and inexperienced workers in under-developed and developing economies. Workers in the informal sector, however, can learn skills and gain experience that could help them switch to better-paying jobs in the formal...
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This paper examines the impact of the government input subsidy—the National Agriculture Input Voucher—on farmers’ production and welfare in Tanzania as well as the factors that influence agricultural production in the country. The analysis is based on the Living Standards Measurement Study...
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– Evidence from Viet Nam
The literature shows that political connections have different effects on firms’ activities. However, the question of how political connections affect firms’ formalization has not been explored. Using data from three waves of the Vietnam Small and Medium Enterprise Survey for the period from 2007 to...
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– A livelihood analysis
This study evaluates the effects of the informal sector on Nigerian workers’ livelihoods and analyses workers’ transitions within the informal sector and between informal and formal employment. A binary logit model is applied to General Household Survey panel data for the periods 2010/11, 2012/13...
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– India’s informal sector firms
How does informal economic activity respond to increased financial inclusion? Does it become more entrepreneurial? Does access to new financing options change the gender configuration of informal economic activity and, if so, in what ways and what directions? We take advantage of nationwide data...
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This study uses detailed household-level data to analyse off-farm self-employment dynamics in Mali and Niger. It adds to the literature that acknowledges the existence of heterogeneities in informal work and the body of evidence on informal self-employment in fragile and conflict-affected countries...
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