Do economic crises lead to health and nutrition behavior responses?: analysis using longitudinal data from Russia

Using longitudinal data on more than 2,000 Russian families spanning the period between 2007 and 2010, this paper estimates the impact of the 2009 global financial crisis on food expenditures, health care expenditures, and doctor visits in Russia. The primary estimation strategy adopted is the semi-parametric difference-in-difference with propensity score matching technique. The analysis finds that household health and nutritional behavior indicators do not vary statistically between households that were crisis-affected and households that were not affected by the crisis. However the analysis finds that crisis-affected poor families curtailed their out-of-pocket health expenditures during and after the crisis more than poor families that were not affected by the crisis did. In addition, crisis-affected vulnerable groups changed their health behavior. In particular, households with low educational attainment of household heads and households with more elderly people changed their health and nutrition behavior response when affected by the crisis. The results are invariant to the propensity score matching techniques and parametric fixed effects estimation models

Income shocks reduce human capital investments : evidence from five east European countries

This paper empirically investigates whether households affected by income shocks cope by reducing human capital investments. The analysis uses Crisis Response Surveys conducted in Armenia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Turkey during 2009 and 2010. A propensity score matching technique is adopted to compare health and education investment decisions among households that were affected by income shocks to the matched comparison group. The authors find that households affected by income shocks reduced some human capital investments. Interestingly, households in these five countries were more likely to adopt health-related coping strategies as opposed to education-related coping strategies. The results from Armenia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Turkey show that households affected by income shocks reduced their visits to doctors and reduced their spending on medicine and medical care significantly more than the matched comparison group. Households affected by income shocks reduced their education investments, but did not adopt harmful education-related coping strategies, such as withdrawing children from schools or moving children from costly private to cheaper public schools. These findings reveal that long-term and possibly intergenerational household welfare could be affected by short-run income shocks and hence underscore the need for governments to employ mitigation measures.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Labor Policies,Inequality,Debt Markets

Simulating the Impact of the 2009 Financial Crisis on Welfare in Latvia

This note details simulations of the distributional impacts of the 2009 financial crisis on households in Latvia. It uses household survey data collected prior to the crisis and simulates the impact of the growth slowdown. The simulations show that Latvia experienced a sharp rise in poverty, widening of the poverty gap, and a rise in income inequality due to the economic contraction in 2009. The 18 percent contraction in gross domestic product (affecting mainly trade hotels and restaurants, construction, and manufacturing) likely led the poverty head count to increase from 14.4 percent in 2008 to 20.2 percent in 2009. The poverty gap, which measures the national poverty deficit, was simulated to increase from 5.9 percent in 2008 to 8.3 percent in 2009. The analysis finds that the results are robust to most assumptions except post-layoff incomes, which substantially mitigated household welfare. The authors also simulate the impact of Latvia's Emergency Social Safety Net components and find that the Safety Net likely mitigated crisis impacts for many beneficiaries. The simulations measure only direct short-run impacts; hence, they do not take into account general equilibrium effects. Post-crisis income data from a different data source suggest that poverty rates increased by 8.0 percentage points between 2008 and 2009. As a result, the authors suggest that their ex-ante simulation performs reasonably well and is a useful tool to identify vulnerable groups during the early stages of a crisis.Facultad de Ciencias Económica

Cross-sectional analyses of climate change impacts

The authors explore the use of cross-sectional analysis to measure the impacts of climate change on agriculture. The impact literature, using experiments on crops in laboratory settings combined with simulation models, suggests that agriculture will be strongly affected by climate change. The extent of these effects varies by country and region. Therefore, local experiments are needed for policy purposes, which becomes expensive and difficult to implement for most developing countries. The cross-sectional technique, as an alternative approach, examines farm performance across a broad range of climates. By seeing how farm performance changes with climate, one can estimate long-run impacts. The advantage of this approach is that it fully captures adaptation as each farmer adapts to the climate they have lived in. The technique measures the full net cost of climate change, including the costs as well as the benefits of adaptation. However, the technique is not concern-free. The four chapters in this paper examine important potential concerns of the cross-sectional method and how they could be addressed, especially in developing countries. Data availability is a major concern in developing countries. The first chapter looks at whether estimating impacts using individual farm data can substitute using agricultural census data at the district level that is more difficult to obtain in developing countries. The study, conducted in Sri Lanka, finds that the individual farm data from surveys are ideal for cross-sectional analysis. Another anticipated problem with applying the cross-sectionalapproach to developing countries is the absence of weather stations, or discontinued weather data sets. Further, weather stations tend to be concentrated in urban settings. Measures of climate across the landscape, especially where farms are located, are difficult to acquire. The second chapter compares the use of satellite data with ground weather stations. Analyzing these two sources of information, the study reveals that satellite data can explain more of the observed variation in farm performance than ground station data. Because satellite data are readily available for the entire planet, the availability of climate data will not be a constraint. A continuing debate is whether farm performance depends on just climate normals-the average weather over a long period of time-or on climate variance (variations away from the climate normal). Chapter 3 reveals that climate normals and climate variance are highly correlated. By adding climate variance, the studies can begin to measure the importance of weather extremes as well as normals. A host of studies have revealed that climate affects agricultural performance. Since agriculture is a primary source of income in rural areas, it follows that climate might explain variations in rural income. This is tested in the analysis in Chapter 4 and shown to be the case. The analysis reveals that local people in rural areas could be heavily affected by climate change even in circumstances when the aggregate agricultural sector in the country does fine.Climate Change,Environmental Economics&Policies,Wetlands,Global Environment Facility,Montreal Protocol,Environmental Economics&Policies,Climate Change,Wetlands,Global Environment Facility,Montreal Protocol

Ethnic and Gender Wage Disparities in Sri Lanka

The authors examine wage inequalities in Sri Lanka's formal sector using data from the Sri Lanka Integrated Survey 1999-2000. The study aims to: a) investigate whether the labor market is characterized by wage disparities among ethnic and gender groups; b) identify the determinants of wages and the factors that affect the wage differential; c) analyze the determinants of wages across the conditional wage distribution; and d) disaggregate the ethnic or gender wage disparities where observed into a component affected by the endowment of productive characteristics, as well as a component affected by the returns to those productive characteristics in the labor market. The authors find that ethnicity is not a significant determinant of wages. The result is robust to different specifications. In addition, ethnicity is not significant in any of the emotional quantiles estimated. However, there is gender disparity in wage rates in Sri Lanka. The magnitude of this disparity varies depending on the worker's ethnicity. This gender wage disparity varies by about 10 percent for Tamils and 48 percent among other ethnicities. In addition, the authors find that much of the gender disparity is not explained by productive characteristics, implying that discrimination against women may play a role. The quantile regression estimates indicate that the premium paid to male workers in the labor force is more pronounced in the upper conditional wage rate distribution

Attaining the Health and Education Millennium Development Goals in Nepal

This paper looks at Nepal's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) with respect to health and education. The paper is organized with part one dealing with education and is divided into three sections: section A details the current state of Nepal's MDG indicators and analyzes progress towards the goals; section B describes the policies that have contributed to Nepal's success, and policies that constrain its future achievements; and the final section C outlines the challenges facing Nepal in achieving the education MDGs. Part two of the paper deals with goals in health. This part of the paper also is divided into three sections with section A detailing health outcomes, progress and prospects; section B discusses the factors explaining progress in health and outcomes; and section C gives challenges for the future

Determinants of Educational Expenditures and Outcomes: Analyses Using School Campus -Level Data

92 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.It appears that school quality, measured by school expenditures, is a significant determinant of pupil pass rates in reading, math and all three exams. Hence, "money matters" at a school campus-level in predicting educational achievement. Furthermore, the effect of school expenditures on educational achievement varies inversely with family income. Thus, the marginal productivity of an additional dollar of spending is higher in schools attended predominantly by poor pupils. In addition, many of the pupil, family and neighborhood characteristics are statistically significant determinants of educational achievement. Specifically, family income, education level and race proportions in the neighborhood have an effect on the educational achievement of pupils.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Determinants of Educational Expenditures and Outcomes: Analyses Using School Campus -Level Data

92 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.It appears that school quality, measured by school expenditures, is a significant determinant of pupil pass rates in reading, math and all three exams. Hence, "money matters" at a school campus-level in predicting educational achievement. Furthermore, the effect of school expenditures on educational achievement varies inversely with family income. Thus, the marginal productivity of an additional dollar of spending is higher in schools attended predominantly by poor pupils. In addition, many of the pupil, family and neighborhood characteristics are statistically significant determinants of educational achievement. Specifically, family income, education level and race proportions in the neighborhood have an effect on the educational achievement of pupils.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD