Family Migration: A Vehicle of Child Morbidity in the Informal Settlements of Nairobi City, Kenya?

Parental migration is often found to be negatively correlated with child health in Africa, yet the causal mechanisms are poorly understood. The paper uses a dataset that provides information from the respondent parent on child morbidity both in the rural and urban settings. Households first endogenously determine whether they will gain from participating in migration and, if they do, whether they will leave the children behind or not. The final choice is made to ensure the optimal survival chances for the child. This paper contributes to understanding the health consequences of raising the children in the context of increasing urban poverty in Nairobi, Kenya. The findings indicate that households who migrated together with their children in the slums of Nairobi experience higher child morbidity (43 per cent have at least one sick child in the last one month) as compared to households who leave children in their upcountry homes (31 per cent of morbidity rate). Even though children of migrants are safer upcountry, not all households can afford this strategy. Households are able to choose this strategy only if they have a strong social support network in their origin community and/or they are big size households. This is an important finding in targeting the Millennium Development Goals.childhood morbidity, split migration, incidental truncation, informal settlements, Nairobi, Kenya

Conflict, Ideology and Foreign Aid

In this paper, we present a rent-seeking model of conflict, which highlights the role of ideology in determining whether the government or the rebels take the initiative. We use the model to interpret the impact of a large-scale Community-Driven Development project on civil conflict in the Philippines. The country is characterized by the presence of two rebel groups, the New People's Army (NPA) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), with two distinct ideologies. We use a unique geo-referenced panel dataset on the occurrence of conflicts in 2003 and 2006 gathered from local newspapers that we match with nationally representative household survey and budget data on all municipalities in the country. Consistent with our model's predictions, using a variety of estimation strategies, we find robust evidence that the project leads to a decline in MILF-related events and to an increase in NPA-related events.Civil Conflict;foreign aid;Rent Seeking;Community-Driven Development;philippines

Estimating Vulnerability to Poverty using Panel data: Evidence from Indonesia

Etudes & documentsTraditional poverty measures fail to indicate the degree of risk of becoming or remaining poor that households are confronted to. They can therefore be misleading in the context of implementing poverty reduction policies. In this paper I propose a method to estimate an index of ex ante vulnerability to poverty, defined as the probability of being poor in the (near) future given current observable characteristics, using panel data. This method relies on the estimation of the expected mean and variance of future consumption conditional on current consumption and observable characteristics. It generates a vulnerability index, or predicted probability of future poverty, which performs well in predicting future poverty, including out of sample. About 80% of households with a 2000 vulnerability index of 100% are actually poor in 2007. This approach provides information on the population groups that have a high probability of becoming or remaining poor in the future, whether currently poor or not. It is therefore useful to complement traditional poverty measures such as the poverty headcount, in particular for the design and planning of poverty reduction policies

Conflict, Ideology and Foreign Aid

In this paper, we present a rent-seeking model of conflict, which highlights the role of ideology in determining whether the government or the rebels take the initiative. We use the model to interpret the impact of a large-scale Community-Driven Development project on civil conflict in the Philippines. The country is characterized by the presence of two rebel groups, the New People's Army (NPA) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), with two distinct ideologies. We use a unique geo-referenced panel dataset on the occurrence of conflicts in 2003 and 2006 gathered from local newspapers that we match with nationally representative household survey and budget data on all municipalities in the country. Consistent with our model's predictions, using a variety of estimation strategies, we find robust evidence that the project leads to a decline in MILF-related events and to an increase in NPA-related events.Civil Conflict, foreign aid, Rent Seeking, Community-Driven Development, philippines

Regionalism in West Africa : Do Polar Countries Reap the Benefits? : A Role for Migration

In the present globalization era an increasing attention is paid to the ambiguous relationship between international migration, brain drain, and economic growth, but few papers analyzed the growth impact of skilled migration. The paper filled the research gap by building the first dataset on brain drain from seven countries of the western African Union (WAEMU) and highlighted the size of the brain loss toward Côte d?Ivoire and France. Burkina Faso shows a more severe brain drain to Cote d?Ivoire compare to other similar sahelian countries whereas the reverse holds when considering the destination France. The subsequent empirical strategy consists in comparing the growth performance of an economy without migration to the counterpart economy. The regional growth convergence analysis shows higher convergence rate once the brain circulation is accounted for. However, the effect of brain gain holds only for countries with migration outside WAEMU toward an industrialized country (France) and failed when migration, as is the case for Burkina Faso, flows into Cote d?Ivoire the polar economy of the Union. Therefore, migration can be used as a powerful force working toward income convergence between capital-rich and capital-poor countries

Genetic variability and correlation analysis of rice (Oryza sativa L.) inbred lines based on agro-morphological traits

In order to evaluate genetic variability of agro-morphological traits and also determine the correlation between grain yield with its components in rice lines, 17 recombinants inbred lines, their parents and a check variety were grown in research station of Africa rice center in Benin republic during two consecutive years 2013 and 2014. The experiments were laid out in a randomized complete block design with four replications. Phenotypic coefficients of variance were higher than genotypic coefficients of variance in all the characters across the two years. High heritability in broad sense (H2) estimates were obtained for biomass (68.77%), date of 50% flowering (98.11%), plant height (81.94%), leaf area (82.90%), number of panicles (64.40%), leaf dry weight (72.91%), root weight (67.43%) and yield/plant (62.23%) suggesting that the traits were primarily under genetic control. A joint consideration of broad sense heritability (H2) and genetic advance as per cent mean expected (GAM) revealed that leaves dries weight and roots weight combined high heritability and high GAM. Furthermore, high (H2) and high GAM recorded in these characters could be explained by additive gene action. However, high estimates (H2) combined with moderate GAM recorded for biomass, day to 50% flowering, leaf area, number of panicle and yield/plant could be due to non-additive gene effect. Grain yield/plant recorded positive and significant correlation with stem weight (r=0.5262) and biomass (r=0.9291). This result indicates that selection based on these two characters will be highly effective for yield improvement in rice. (Résumé d'auteur