The Effects of Child Physical Maltreatment on Nutritional Outcomes: Evidence from Peru

Do children whose parents use physical punishment as a disciplinary method have lower anthropometric measures? Using data for Peruvian children aged 0–5 years, we employ instrumental variables for physical punishment to overcome endogeneity problems common to the household violence literature. Across varying levels of controls, children exposed to physical punishment have significantly poorer short-term nutritional outcomes; although there is no effect on long-term nutrition. We explore heterogeneous effects and potential mechanisms. Children exposed to physical maltreatment fall ill more frequently and are less likely to access preventive and curative healthcare.     

The Disease Environment,Schooling, and Development Outcomes: Evidence from Ethiopia

The disease environment could help explain underdevelopment in Africa. This article shows that local malaria risk is associated with worse local development outcomes. Combining an Ethiopian household survey with satellite-derived topographical information, the article shows that malaria incidence is correlated with village elevation, slope and their interaction; that is, malaria is sensitive to elevation in flatlands, where the habitat is suitable for mosquito breeding, but not in steeper lands. Using topography as a predictor of the disease environment, education levels are found to be negatively correlated with malaria. I find suggestive evidence that some other outcomes are related to malaria risk. Finally, the performance of topography predictors is assessed against other climate-based predictors of malaria.     

Structural reform,institutions and earnings: Evidence from the formal and informal sectors in urban Peru

Reforms undertaken in Peru in the early 1990s might have resulted in a slight reduction of the informal sector. Costs associated with becoming and staying informal, and benefits of becoming formal might have increased. This, when a legalistic definition of informality is used. Earnings differentials between formal and informal self‐employed workers are negligible although they persist between formal and informal salaried workers. Skilled workers are more likely to be found in the formal sector and informal wage earners tend to be younger and less skilled. The earnings generating process for both the formal and the informal self‐employed workers is similar.     

Wealth Inequality,Educational Environment and School Enrolment: Evidence from Mexico

Using data from the extended section of the 2010 Mexican census (2.9 million households), we study how school enrolment is associated with wealth inequality and with the educational environment the child is exposed to at the household and municipal levels. We provide robust evidence of wealth inequality as a negative predictor of school enrolment for children in primary, secondary and high school age ranges while a positive role is played by the educational environment. Through the introduction of interaction terms, we account for how economic and educational variables are intertwined at both the household and the municipal level, and we are able to illustrate the considerable heterogeneity in the role of adult education for households at different standards of living.     

The Impact of Indoor Air Pollution on the Incidence of Life Threatening Respiratory Illnesses: Evidence from Young Children in Peru

This article analyses the impact of indoor air pollution on boys' and girls' health, and the validity of various mitigation strategies using a panel of Peruvian children younger than six years old. It controls for unobserved child heterogeneity and important confounding variables established in the literature, but seldom available in surveys. The analysis finds a negative, statistically significant and considerable impact of indoor air pollution on child respiratory health. This impact is stronger and only significant for boys. To discard a spurious correlation the article shows diarrhoea, a priori not related to pollution, is not affected by cooking fuel choice.     

Pressure,Favours, and Vote-buying: Experimental Evidence from Romania and Bulgaria

This article examines the mix of non-programmatic strategies used by politicians to gain voter support in contemporary Eastern Europe. We use a mixed-method design that combines survey-based experiments and qualitative research in a paired comparison of localities in Romania and Bulgaria. Our article documents that the mix of clientelistic strategies differs across localities with different turnover rates. In both Romania and Bulgaria, we find that the use of clientelistic strategies that politicise state resources is higher in localities with long-term political incumbents.     

Safeguarding Common-Pool Resources in Transition Economies: Experimental Evidence from Central Asia

Empirical evidence suggests that the propensity to cooperate in common pool resource dilemmas is higher for small, homogeneous groups with efficacious monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms. Given that transition from socialist to market economies is associated with larger, more heterogeneous groups with diluted opportunities for monitoring and sanctioning, individuals in later-stage transition economies may be expected to be less cooperative than their early-stage counterparts. However, evidence from experiments conducted with subjects in two economies at different stages of transition suggests that this may not be the case. These findings have implications for both theorists and practitioners alike.     

Short-Term Impacts of Solar Lanterns on Child Health: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

We implemented a 16-month randomised field experiment in unelectrified areas of Bangladesh to identify health impacts of solar lanterns among school-aged children. Our analysis of various health-related indicators – self-reporting, spirometers, and professional medical checkups – showed modest improvements in eye redness and irritation but no noticeable improvement in respiratory symptoms among treated students. Varying the number of solar products received within treatment households did not alter these results. This limited health benefit was not caused by nonutilisation of the products by treated children, spillover effects from treated to control students, or contamination resulting from unfavourable family cooking environments.     

The Benefits and Costs of Microfinance: Evidence from Bangladesh

Using the latest developments from the evaluation literature, namely the technique of matching, this paper shows a positive, but lower than previously thought, effect of microfinance on expenditure per capita, supply of labour, and level of school enrolment for boys and girls. For instance, participants spend 3 per cent more on average than non-participants in control villages. This paper also takes into account repayment delays to calculate the cost of credit provision. It shows how a better investigation at the individual level of the benefits brought and the cost borne could help microfinance institutions to better select their customers.

JEL Classification : C14, D10, G21, I38, O12, O16     

Pedagogy and deliberative democracy: insights from recent experiments in the United Kingdom

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to ‘close the gap’. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse ‘politics as theory’ and ‘politics as practice’. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a ‘pedagogical pyramid’ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens.     

The Intergenerational Effects of Political Influence: Evidence from China

This paper considers the effects of fathers’ political influence on their offspring’s labour market outcomes in China. Political influence refers to the ability to convert political power into economic benefits. This study identifies the dissolution of political influence by exploiting an age-based mandatory retirement rule in urban China. It exploits the variation of political influence in three dimensions: bureaucrat status, retirement status, and offspring gender. A difference-in-differences approach shows that the retirement of a bureaucrat translates into a 13 per cent decrease in offspring’s income. A triple-differences approach suggests retirement of a bureaucrat father translates into a 27 per cent decrease in earnings among sons. Retirement of a bureaucrat father is associated with larger income losses for offspring working in the same industry sector as their father and in industries that have a high concentration of assets or that are controlled by the state. This paper adds evidence to the growing literature estimating the economic benefits of political connections.     

How Does Information About Elite Tax Evasion Affect Political Participation: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

We present results of a randomised field experiment where voters in Tanzania were given information about elite use of tax havens. Information provided in a neutral form had no effect, while information phrased in more morally charged terms led to a reduction in voting intentions. Rather than increase the perceived importance of voting, charged information tends to undermine confidence in political institutions and the social contract. The effects are particularly pronounced among the less well off, indicating that increased transparency in the absence of perceived agency may not improve political participation.     

The dominant class and industrial development in Peru

From 1968, a reformist military regime in Peru implemented an industrialising development strategy which was fundamentally at odds with the interests of the traditional ‘oligarchy’ that had dominated the primary export phase of the country's development. In order to understand this new phase of development it is necessary to reject the idea of a monolithic ‘oligarchy’ before 1968, and to see the Peruvian dominant class as already internally differentiated. An important sector of that class was by 1968 committed to the development of industry and of the urban economy generally. Its interests were explicitly at variance with those of the exporting fractions of the Peruvian dominant class.     

The Correlates of Corruption in India: Analysis and Evidence from the States

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The Effect of Armed Conflict on Education: Evidence from Iraq

This study examines to what extent armed conflict affects education accumulation and enrolment rates, and whether this effect differs by gender. It uses the 2007 Iraq Household Socio-Economic Survey data in conjunction with data on civilian deaths recorded by the Iraq Body Count database. Conflict exposure is measured by the number of deaths as a percentage of the population and number of conflict incidents. Results are robust to different identification strategies, dependent variables and conflict measures. The findings suggest an increase in conflict is associated with a decrease in education for both genders, though more pronounced for boys.     

The 2011 presidential election in Peru: a thorny moral and political dilemma

The 2011 presidential elections in Peru was the third one held in the post-Fujimori era. A perusal of the campaign's political dynamics reveals pervasive anti-democratic behaviours, attitudes and rhetoric on the part of key political actors, showcasing the degree to which Peru remains an unconsolidated, precarious democracy. The second round presented a moral and political dilemma insofar as two unsavoury candidates of highly dubious democratic credentials vied for the presidency: Ollanta Humala, a former army lieutenant burdened by accusations of human rights violations who, additionally, led or supported two military uprisings; and Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a convicted and jailed dictator who unabashedly touted the legacy of her father's authoritarian regime and surrounded herself with tainted fujimoristas. The paradox of this undesirable electoral outcome, which can be read as a popular rebuke of the status quo, is that it took place in the Latin American country posting the fastest economic growth over the past decade.     

The Politics of Discontinuity and Its Medium Term Policy Outcomes: Evidence from Ghana

ABSTRACT

It is common knowledge in Ghana that during political transitions, programs set in previous Medium Term Development Plans (MTDP) by prior governments are abandoned without regard for their wider national implications. While the economic impacts of these political transitions have been researched, till date no known studies have taken a holistic look at the relation between political transition and the level of MTDP target achievement. This article attempts to fill this research gap using Ghana as a case and the policy learning and political business cycle literatures as organizing frames. Using annual MTDP data and semi-structured interviews with 25 officials who were involved in the implementation of MDTPs at the national and local government levels, this article finds that aberrations in target achievements across the entire period between 2001 and 2016 were the result of financial constraints and the pressures to adjust to political change.     

The Political Economy of Bad Data: Evidence from African Survey and Administrative Statistics

Abstract

Across multiple African countries, discrepancies between administrative data and independent household surveys suggest official statistics systematically exaggerate development progress. We provide evidence for two distinct explanations of these discrepancies. First, governments misreport to foreign donors, as in the case of a results-based aid programme rewarding reported vaccination rates. Second, national governments are themselves misled by frontline service providers, as in the case of primary education, where official enrolment numbers diverged from survey estimates after funding shifted from user fees to per pupil government grants. Both syndromes highlight the need for incentive compatibility between data systems and funding rules.     

Tansnationals and foreign trade: Evidence from Brazil

A recursive model of exports and imports of manufactures, in which imports depend in part on exports, is estimated using data for a cross‐section of 17,053 industrial firms. In this sample, 652 firms are foreign‐owned. Explanatory variables include firm size, skill intensity, advertising and other variables in addition to foreign ownership. Foreign ownership has a large, independent effect on both export performance and import propensities, but foreign ownership in itself explains little of the relatively low export/import ratios registered by affiliates of transnationals.