Cows,Missing Milk Markets,and Nutrition in Rural Ethiopia

Abstract

In rural economies encumbered by significant market imperfections, farming decisions may partly be motivated by nutritional considerations, in addition to income and risk factors. These imperfections create the potential for farm assets to have direct dietary impacts on nutrition in addition to any indirect effects via income. We test this hypothesis for the dairy sector in rural Ethiopia, finding that cow ownership raises children’s milk consumption, increases linear growth, and reduces stunting. We also find that household cow ownership is less important where there is good access to local markets, suggesting that market development can substitute for household cow ownership.     

Fairtrade and Labour Markets in Ethiopia and Uganda

Drawing on four years of fieldwork in Ethiopia and Uganda, this paper addresses gaps in knowledge about the mechanisms linking agricultural exports with poverty reduction, the functioning of rural labour markets, and the relevance to the lives of the poorest people of Fairtrade. Statistical analysis of survey evidence, complemented by qualitative research, highlights the relatively poor payment and non-pay working conditions of those employed in research sites dominated by Fairtrade producer organisations. We conclude that Fairtrade is not an effective way to improve the welfare of the poorest rural people.     

School Meals and Educational Outcomes in Rural Ethiopia

We investigate the relationship between providing school meals programmes and educational outcomes in Ethiopia. Using data from school catchment areas across rural Ethiopia, the paper examines the role played by programme modalities and their implementation. The results indicate that supplementing on-site school meals with take-home rations can be beneficial for concentration, reading, writing and arithmetic skills. The timing of the distribution of school meals is also found to play an important role.     

Social Networks and Factor Markets: Panel Data Evidence from Ethiopia

We investigate the role of an indigenous social network in Ethiopia, the iddir, in facilitating factor market transactions among smallholder farmers. We use detailed longitudinal household survey data and employ fixed effects estimation approaches to identify the effect of iddir membership on factor market transactions among farmers. We find that joining an iddir network improves households’ access to land, labour and credit transactions. Our findings also hint that iddir networks may crowd-out borrowing from local moneylenders (locally referred as ‘Arata Abedari’), a relatively expensive credit source. These results suggest that non-market institutions can play crucial roles in facilitating market transactions.     

Growth and Chronic Poverty: Evidence from Rural Communities in Ethiopia

This article employs a computable general equilibrium model for Sandinista Nicaragua to argue that a foreign exchange constrained economy does not necessarily fall prey to the inflation‐devaluation‐inflation vicious cycle characteristic of more mature Keynesian economies. It is seen that when the economy is shocked by a devaluation, prices do not rise proportionately. Output increases and the distribution of income can actually improve. These results support Sandinista policy of raising wages along with devaluation, a policy widely criticised as counterproductive. When the model is structured to account for the combined effects of Sandinista policies, however, including rising government expenditure and multiple effective exchange rates, a host of macroeconomic problems experienced by the regime arise. Stagflation sets in, income distribution deteriorates and the incentives for export production seriously diminish.     

Economic Benefits of Rural Feeder Roads: Evidence from Ethiopia

We estimate households’ willingness-to-pay for rural feeder roads in Ethiopia. Using purposefully collected data, we compare the economic behaviour of households by remoteness to estimate the benefits of access to feeder roads. Although we cannot definitively assert a causal relationship, we cautiously estimate that gravel roads have internal rates of return of 12–35 per cent. These results suggest that rural feeder roads may have relatively high rates of return even in unfavourable settings where (a) small-scale farmers have low levels of marketed agricultural surplus, (b) non-farm earning opportunities are negligible, and (c) motorised transport services are not guaranteed.     

The Complexity of Marriage in Rural Ethiopia: Parental Transfers and Post-marital Residence Choices

This paper examines the relationship between parental transfers and post-marital residence of children in rural Ethiopia. We investigate whether asset transfers to children are an avenue which parents use to secure old age. We model post-marital residence and transfers simultaneously in a two-stage probit least squares estimation framework. We find a positive relationship between transfers and post-marital residence, a proxy for old age support. Children who receive more assets are more likely to stay at birth place after marriage and vice versa. In conditions of scarce or lacking social security mechanisms, parents make strategic transfers to ensure better old age.     

Infrastructure and Cluster Development: A Case Study of Handloom Weavers in Rural Ethiopia

Clustering is an important structure of production in the rural nonfarm sector. Based on a primary survey of rural handloom clusters in Ethiopia, this article examines the mechanism and performance of clustering. Given weak financial institutions, clustered producers and traders use trade credits to ease working capital constraints. Moreover, geographical clustering enables entrepreneurs with limited capital to enter the business through shared workspaces and fine division of labour. An improvement in infrastructure can further enhance firm performance in a cluster. In towns with electricity access, producers work longer hours by sharing lit workspaces at lower rental cost.     

The Bang for the Birr: Public Expenditures and Rural Welfare in Ethiopia

This article explores the impact of different types of public spending on rural household welfare in Ethiopia. The analysis reveals that public spending on road infrastructure is characterised by relatively high, but regionally strongly concentrated, returns in terms of rural household welfare. This is quite in contrast to the returns to public expenditures in education, which have attributes of much wider reach but less intensity. Public investments in agriculture show results that are low in magnitude and in statistical significance, mostly due to a poor link between public expenditures in agriculture and productivity in the sector.     

The Role of Land Certification in Reducing Gaps in Productivity between Male- and Female-Owned Farms in Rural Ethiopia

This paper analyses the impact of a low-cost land certification programme on the productivity of female-headed households. The hypotheses tested in the paper emphasise on the interaction between the constraints that female-headed households face in terms of insecure land tenure, lack of productive resources and suboptimal land market participation, on the one hand, and the tenure security benefits of certification on the other. Our findings show that land certification has a positive effect on land market participation and productivity. Our analysis also suggests higher marginal effects of certification on female-headed households’ productivity, compared to the male ones.     

The Effects of Improved Roads on Wages and Employment: Evidence from Rural Labour Markets in Indonesia

This paper examines the impact of road quality on labour supply and wages using household panel data from rural Indonesia. The analysis uses fixed-effect instrumental variable estimation by first differencing two-round panel data. First, road projects are found to increase the transportation speed. Second, the empirical results from intra-village variations of household endowments and labour-market behaviour show that an increase in transportation speed raised wages in both non-agricultural and agricultural employment, and was associated with a decline in working time in agricultural employment, for the households whose members are relatively educated. The findings support potential complementarity between road quality and education, implying that the government’s public investments in roads and education should be coordinated to capture cross-augmenting positive impacts in the long run.     

The Impact of Drinking Water Quality and Sanitation on Child Health: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

This paper examines the association between stored drinking water quality and sanitation on diarrhoea incidence among under-five children in Ethiopia. Using primary household survey data and microbiological water quality testing for Escherichia coli, our results show that uncontaminated stored drinking water and safe child stool disposal are associated with decreased child diarrhoea incidences of 18 and 20 percentage points, respectively. In contrast, neighbourhood concentration of pit latrine shows an increased incidence of child diarrhoea of 16 percentage points. To protect rural children from the risk of contracting diarrhoea, improving household drinking water quality and changing people’s behaviour towards safe sanitation practices is needed.     

Livestock and Private Tree Holdings in Rural Ethiopia: The Effects of Collective Action Institutions,Tenure Security and Market Access

This article uses househld panel data spanning the period 2000–2007 to test hypotheses from the literature that secure land tenure, market access and collective action promote accumulation of private capital assets in rural highland Ethiopia. The three natural capital assets analysed in the article, livestock, eucalyptus trees and non-eucalyptus trees on households’ farm plots, make up virtually 100 per cent of privately held disposable assets. Incomes and capital stocks are extremely low and constant and tree assets are at least as important as livestock. We find that collective action and secure land tenure have strong positive effects on accumulation of livestock and other trees, but not eucalyptus. We also find evidence that market access promotes eucalyptus holdings and that other types of wealth tend to be positively associated with private natural capital stocks.     

Tariffs and Firm Performance in Ethiopia

We use data on Ethiopian manufacturing firms and commodity-level data on tariffs to examine the effects of trade liberalisation on firm performance. We distinguish the productivity gains that arise from reducing final goods tariffs from those that arise from reducing tariffs on intermediate inputs. We find no evidence that output tariff reduction improves productivity, but we find large positive effects of input tariff reductions. These are robust to alternative productivity measures, treating tariffs as endogenous, and various generalisations of the model. We conclude that policy measures designed to facilitate access to inputs produced abroad may lead to productivity gains.     

Rebellion in Gojam Province,Ethiopia

This article explores how and why the church in South Africa became an important civil society space and actor at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle and yet its civil society role declined following the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the release of political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela. It does this by engaging in a discussion of the nature of the South African church as civil society, followed by a consideration of the church's role at various points during the democratic transition. Specifically, it explores the church as a “site of struggle” during the late stages of the anti-apartheid struggle, as engaging in mediation and negotiation during the democratic transition, and as returning to a predominantly religious organisation in the post-apartheid era. It concludes with a discussion of the reasons for and implications of the church's decreased role in public and political life following the transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy.     

Coping with shocks in rural Ethiopia

Abstract

Using survey data and event history interviews undertaken in Ethiopia, we investigate which shocks trigger which coping responses and why. Relatively covariate natural and economic shocks trigger reductions in savings and in food consumption, while relatively idiosyncratic health shocks prompt reductions in savings and a reliance on borrowing. Surprisingly, across all shocks, households do not rely on gifts from family and friends, highlighting the need for formal protection systems. We argue that the insensitivity of food consumption to health shocks does not imply insurability but indicates that it is not a viable response to such a shock.     

Politics of exclusion and institutional transformation in Ethiopia

Ethiopia experienced a critical juncture in 1991 with the defeat of the military dictatorship, opening up the possibilities of a new political order. Since then the country underwent social engineering and institutional transformation emerging as a leading reformist state under hegemonic-party rule with high institutional state capacity but also a concentration, and even personalisation, of decision-making power. This approximates to a path of ‘authoritarian institutionalisation’. This article argues that Ethiopia’s institutional trajectory can be explained by the nature of coalition politics in the formative years of transition, specifically the extent to which credible challengers were excluded from transitional processes. The strategy of excluding Pan-Ethiopian parties and sideling the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) set the country on the path of establishing a hegemonic rule by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Sustaining hegemonic rule entailed fending off threats from excluded groups in the 1990s but which coalesced into a strong electoral performance in the 2005 elections in whose aftermath the ruling party embarked on aggressive pursuit of state-directed development for political legitimation.     

Road Infrastructure and Enterprise Dynamics in Ethiopia

We analyse the relationship between road infrastructure quality and the location choice and entry size of manufacturing firms in Ethiopia. We use GIS-based panel data on town-level measures of road infrastructure and census-based panel data on firms. Our dataset covers a period of considerable improvements in road infrastructure as a result of major public investments. We find that local infrastructure is important for entry, while more extensive market connectivity is important for the entry of large firms. We conclude that improved infrastructure has been associated with favourable outcomes with respect to entry patterns and firm size in Ethiopia’s manufacturing sector.