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

Civil Conflicts and Regional Economic Integration Outcomes in Africa

Civil conflicts are a major challenge to the economic development of a country and its neighbors. The present article analyzes the consequences of conflicts on regional economic integration outcomes among African nations. Our findings document that civil conflicts affect the economic fate of regional economic communities through their negative substantial impact on business cycle synchronicity. Yet, contrary to the findings of previous studies on the effects of conflict on bilateral trade flows, we show that experiencing conflict increases regional trade intensities. This only holds in the short run and is explained by a decrease in the conflict country’s total trade and output, as well as by an increase in its intra-regional trade flows. By assessing the effect of conflict on regional economic integration processes, this paper highlights that intrastate political events are also a major regional constraint. We therefore find an additional reason to recommend that prevention and resolution of civil conflicts might be put on the top of the political agenda of African Regional Economic Communities.Civil Conflict, Regional Economic Integration, Africa

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

Venezuela, Surinam, Jamaica y Uruguay: relevancia de los partidos políticos para la democracia, ayer y hoy

El postulado de que los sistemas bipartidistas son más estables es negado por las crisis políticas habidas en Uruguay y Jamaica en las décadas de 1960 y 1970. Los sistemas multipartidistas de Venezuela y Uruguay, en cierto momento histórico, acomodaron laThe postulate that two party systems are more stable is negated by political crises in Uruguay and Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s. Multi-party systems in Venezuela and Suriname have at a certain point in history accommodated pact-making and seemingly unl

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