Exploring the long-term impact of development interventions within life-history narratives in rural Bangladesh

This paper explores the long-term effects of a set of development interventions within the life trajectories of people in rural Bangladesh, using findings from 293 life-history interviews and an accompanying set of focus group discussions conducted in 2007. The paper uses various methods to address the challenge of assessing the long-term impact of development interventions. It then goes on to discuss what was learned about the impact of microfinance, educational transfer, and agricultural technology development programs from the life-history narratives. The life-history interviews show that microfinance services are now widespread in rural Bangladesh, with 55 percent of research participants having used these services for some kind of income-generating activity at some time. Microfinance contributed to at least one of the three or four most important causes of well-being improvement within the life trajectories in 18 percent of research participants. However, 37 percent of research participants used microcredit to cope with crises or to maintain consumption, rather than to generate income. Educational transfers, such as food for education and cash for education, were also viewed positively by research participants and were seen as contributing positively in the life histories of 29 percent of participants. However, educational transfers were listed as a main cause of life improvement for only 7 percent of participants. The impact of educational transfers was limited by the relatively low monetary value of the benefits received as compared with other, more important contributors of improvement. Most research participants receiving educational transfers reported that the funds were used to help with education expenses, food, and children’s clothing, with some participants reporting that without these funds, their children may have had to withdraw from school. The life-history interviews detected little long-term benefit from the agricultural technology programs, and a number of reasons for this fact are discussed in the paper.development interventions, Microfinance, Poverty,

Everyday forms of collective action in Bangladesh: Learning from Fifteen Cases

"This paper examines fifteen cases of collective action in six villages in rural Bangladesh. Collective action was defined broadly and identified from significant episodes in previous life-history research in the same villages. The types of collective action identified were catalyzed by marriage; dowry and domestic violence; disputes over land; illness, injury and death in accidents; and theft and cheating. The role of development NGOs was less significant than would be expected considering their visibility in rural Bangladesh. The study suggests that ‘everyday forms' (Scott 1985) of collective action often occur spontaneously and informally, with significant impact on peoples' wellbeing, but with ambiguous outcomes for some poor people involved. This is a different picture that is usually understood in Bangladesh – due to the visibility of NGOs – particularly by outsiders. Local government elected chairs and members play a key role in collective action events, which often include local arbitration, or shalish, hearings. A deeper understanding of how collective disputes and struggles are commonly managed in everyday life should help us to hold a more realistic view of the empowerment potential of interventions aimed at fostering collective action in rural Bangladesh." authors' abstractCollective action, Disputes, Social norms, Gender, Poverty,

The flexible coefficient multinomial logit (FC-MNL) model of demand for differentiated products

We show FC-MNL is flexible in the sense of Diewert (1974), thus its parameters can be chosen to match a well-defined class of possible own- and cross-price elasticities of demand. In contrast to models such as Probit and Random Coefficient-MNL models, FC-MNL does not require estimation via simulation; it is fully analytic. Under well-defined and testable parameter restrictions, FC-MNL is shown to be an unexplored member of McFadden’s class of Multivariate Extreme Value discrete-choice models. Therefore, FC-MNL is fully consistent with an underlying structural model of heterogeneous, utility-maximizing consumers. We provide a Monte-Carlo study to establish its properties and we illustrate the use by estimating the demand for new automobiles in Italy

Book Reviews

Book Reviews of: Birchall, J. Rediscovering the Cooperative Advantage: Poverty Reduction through Self-help Geneva: International Labour Office, 2003; Steinnert, H. and Pilgram, A. (eds.) Welfare Policy From Below: Struggles Against Social Exclusion in Europe Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Distributional biases in the analysis of climate change

The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. These representative-agent models have an intrinsic distributional bias in favor of the rich. The bias is compounded by the se of revenue-neutrality in the allocation of emission permits. The result is mitigation recommendations that are biased downwards. JEL Categories: Q13, I3, E1representative agent, welfare, global warming, inequality.

Positional goods, climate change and the social returns to investment

The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. This approach can generate biases in the presence of positional goods and status effects. We show that by ignoring these direct consumption externalities, integrated assessment models overestimate the social return to conventional investment and underestimate the optimal amount of investment in mitigation. Empirical evidence on the influence of relative consumption on utility suggests that the bias could be quantitatively significant. Our results from a simple survey support this conclusion. JEL Categories: Q13, I3, E1representative agent, consumption externalities, positional goods, relative consumption, welfare, global warming, discount rates.