Migrating Away from a Seasonal Famine: A Randomized Intervention in Bangladesh

The rural northwestern districts of Bangladesh, home to 10 million people, experience a preharvest seasonal famine, locally known as Monga, with disturbing regularity. Surprisingly, outmigration from the Monga-prone districts is not all that common. This research tests whether migration could play any role in Monga mitigation. We implemented a randomized intervention that provided monetary incentives to individuals in Monga-prone regions to seasonally outmigrate during the pre-harvest season. We experimentally varied the conditionalities attached to the incentives, such as a requirement to form a group and migrate jointly (as opposed to migrating individually), sometimes assigning migration partners and the destination, and varying group size. This paper reports just the first stage results of this randomized intervention project, where we focus on household responsiveness to our incentive offers in terms of their decision to migrate. Our cash and credit incentives had a very large effect on migration propensity: over 40% of those receiving an incentive choose to migrate, whereas only 13% of control households do. This large effect is consistent with the presence of savings or borrowing constraints for these households, since providing information on wages and employment conditions at destinations only has a negligible 2 percentage point impact on the propensity to migrate relative to the control group.Monga, famine, Bangladesh, migration

A CGE-Analysis of Energy Policies Considering Labor Market Imperfections and Technology Specifications

The paper establishes a CGE/MPSGE model for evaluating energy policy measures with emphasis on their employment impacts. It specifies a dual labor market with respect to qualification, two different mechanisms for skill specific unemployment, and a technology detailed description of electricity generation. Non clearing of the dual labor market is modeled via minimum wage constraints and via wage curves. The model is exemplarily applied for the analysis of capital subsidies on the application of technologies using renewable energy sources. Quantitative results highlight that subsidies on these technologies do not automatically lead to a significant reduction in emissions. Moreover, if emission reductions are achieved these might actually partly result from negative growth effects induced by the promotion of cost inefficient technologies. Inefficiencies in the energy system increase unemployment for both skilled and unskilled labor.CGE, Energy Economic Analysis, Employment Impact, Choice of Technology

Migrating Away from a Seasonal Famine: A Randomized Intervention in Bangladesh

The rural northwestern districts of Bangladesh, home to 10 million people, experience a preharvest seasonal famine, locally known as Monga, with disturbing regularity. Surprisingly, outmigration from the Monga-prone districts is not all that common. This research tests whether migration could play any role in Monga mitigation. We implemented a randomized intervention that provided monetary incentives to individuals in Monga-prone regions to seasonally outmigrate during the pre-harvest season. We experimentally varied the conditionalities attached to the incentives, such as a requirement to form a group and migrate jointly (as opposed to migrating individually), sometimes assigning migration partners and the destination, and varying group size. This paper reports just the first stage results of this randomized intervention project, where we focus on household responsiveness to our incentive offers in terms of their decision to migrate. Our cash and credit incentives had a very large effect on migration propensity: over 40% of those receiving an incentive choose to migrate, whereas only 13% of control households do. This large effect is consistent with the presence of savings or borrowing constraints for these households, since providing information on wages and employment conditions at destinations only has a negligible 2 percentage point impact on the propensity to migrate relative to the control group.Monga, famine, Bangladesh, migration

Land Rights Insecurity and Temporary Migration in Rural China

Like most other developing countries, China experiences huge migration outflows from rural areas. Their most striking characteristic is a high geographical and temporal mobility. Rural migrants keep going back and forth between origin villages and destination areas. In this paper, we show that this temporary feature of migration can be linked to land rights insecurity. As village land ownership remains collective and as land use rights can be periodically reallocated, individual out-migration can result in deprivation of those rights. Moreover, the intensity of this insecurity varies according to the village-level management of land and the contractual status of land plots. We use these variations to identify the effect of land rights insecurity on migration behavior. Empirical results based on representative 2002 rural data demonstrate substantial impact.migration, land rights insecurity, China, semiparametric censored regression models

Economic Transformation: the New Spiritual Leadership Model in Blimbingsari Village Jembrana Bali

A spiritual leader can appear in any situation. It can not be just a genetic theory that allows a person to be a spiritual leader but is supported by social theory and ecological theory. In addition to the above theory, there is one more the most fundamental theory of the emergence of a spiritual leader of Divine theory.    The aim of this study is to identify the meaning of spiritual leadership in Blimbingsari Village, to identify the principle of spiritual leadership in Blimbingsari Village, and to analyze what does the spiritual Leader do to the economic transformation of Blimbingsari village.    The methodology used is qualitative with data collection techniques are participant observation or participatory nature of direct involvement, interview, literature review, case study, and documentation.  Village leaders Blimbingsari always increase leadership capacity through the intervention of the factors of spiritual values, work ethics, social capital, and entrepreneurial factors. These factors are growing in the middle of the village of Blimbingsari understood as a pattern of beliefs, values, and behaviors and leaders as agents of change do the role and relationship with the community intensive because it is influenced by historical trends, social attitudes, and socioeconomic factors

Capital Investment and Rural-Urban Migration in China

This paper explores the linkages between the population, investment, and wages in both China nationally and in each of China’s provinces. The expected result of these linkages is twofold. First, provinces with the greatest per capita investment, whether state-sponsored or private, should in theory experience the greatest change in per capita wage. This is due to the increased marginal product of labor resulting from capital investment, which ultimately will be reflected in per capita wages in a perfectly competitive market. From this hypothesis, it follows that the provinces experiencing the greatest change in wage per capita will experience the greatest change in population. It is logical to assume that rural workers will move to urban areas if the wage incentive is great enough. Though the population increase will, in theory, push urban wages down, this effect is secondary and should take a longer period of time

The Scorecard on Development: 25 Years of Diminished Progress

This paper examines data on economic growth and various social indicators and compares the past 25 years (1980-2005) with the prior two decades (1960-1980). The paper finds that the past 25 years in low- and middle-income countries have seen a sharp slowdown in the rate of economic growth, as well as a decline in the rate of progress on major social indicators including life expectancy and infant and child mortality. The authors conclude that economists and policy-makers should devote more effort to determining the causes of the economic and development failure of the last quarter-century.economic development, growth, social indicators, growth failure, developing countries, education, health

Employment and decent work in the era of flexicurity

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that the dynamism of employment is always contradictory to the enforcement of some forms of security for workers. Contemporary theorizing now recognizes the specificity of the wage-labour nexus. Consequently, minimum security is required for good economic performance by firms and national economies. A comparative analysis of OECD countries shows that the extended security promoted by welfare systems has not been detrimental to innovation, growth and job creation. Developing countries cannot immediately catch up with the emerging standards of flexicurity but the methodology of employment diagnosis might help them in designing security/flexibility configurations tailored according to their domestic economic specialization, social values and political choices.Workers security ; labour flexibility ; decent work ; developing countries ; labour standards ; employment diagnosis ; productive employment ; welfare ; flexicurity

Agricultural technology, productivity and employment: Policies for poverty reduction

This paper begins by arguing that agricultural economics has an important contribution to make to the economic transition of the new democratic South Africa. Policies are required to reduce unemployment, poverty and inequality, but does the work of agricultural economists provide the policy makers with the information necessary to make the correct choices? In this context, we update our recent work on technology, efficiency and productivity in South African agriculture, for both the commercial and smallholder sub-sectors. For the commercial sector, this means extending the total factor productivity index and estimates of the demand for labour. For the smallholder sector, there are new results on the impacts of GM cotton and white maize on output and employment. However, this piecemeal approach treats the two sectors as entirely separate, when they are actually interdependent. Thus, a Ricardian model of dualistic agriculture is used to explain the historical development of dualism in agriculture, especially how the native agriculturalists were impoverished by the colonists. Then this model is adapted to resemble the Harris-Todaro model of urban unemployment is order to represent the present dual agricultural sector. This allows the current policy options to be compared, although real data is needed to estimate the relationships and so the full analysis remains incomplete.Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Security and Poverty,