Schooling Returns for Wage Earners in Burkina Faso: Evidence from the 1994 and 1998 National Surveys

This paper uses national survey data to estimate up-to-date private rates of return to education in Burkina Faso. Mincer earning regressions are fitted to wage data for women and men, and for public and private sector workers. The main results indicate that rates of return rise by level of education, and the public sector does not compensate female primary education. The findings suggest that current education polices which focus on increasing primary schooling supply be complemented with support for children, especially girls from resource constrained households to reach the secondary and tertiary levels. The estimated returns to education are strongly influenced by sample selection. For both men and women, failing to control for both selection in the wage sector and sector choice leads to biased estimates based on my identification of the selection process.Burkina, Education, Labor

Consumption Smoothing? Livestock, Insurance and Drought in Rural Burkina Faso

This paper explores the extent of consumption smoothing between 1981 and 1985 in rural Burkina Faso. In particular, we examine the extent to which livestock, grain storage and interhousehold transfers are used to smooth consumption against income risk. The survey coincided with a period of severe drought, so that the results provide direct evidence on the effectiveness of these various insurance mechanisms when they are the most needed. We find evidence of little consumption smoothing. In particular, there is almost no risk sharing, and households rely almost exclusively on self-insurance in the form of adjustments to grain stocks to smooth out consumption. The outcome, however, is far from complete smoothing. Hence the main risk-coping strategies, which are hypothesized in the literature (risk sharing and buffer stock), were not effective during the survey period.Livestock, consumption smoothing, permanent income hypothesis, precautionary saving, risk sharing

INVESTING IN SOILS: FIELD BUNDS AND MICROCATCHMENTS IN BURKINA FASO

This research uses field-level data from Burkina Faso to ask what determines farmers' investment in two well-known soil and water conservation techniques: field bunds (barriers to soil and water runoff), and microcatchments (small holes in which seeds and fertilizers are placed). Survey data for 1993 and 1994 are used to estimate Tobit functions, compute elasticities of adoption and intensity of use, perform robustness tests and estimate alternative models. Controlling for land and labor abundance and other factors we find that those who have more ownership rights over farmland, and who do more controlled feeding of livestock, tend to invest more in both technologies. The result suggests that responding to land scarcity with clearer property rights over cropland and pasture could help promote investment in soil conservation, and raise the productivity of factors applied to land.Land Economics/Use,

PROPERTY RIGHTS, PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY AND DEFORESTATION: COCOA IN WEST AFRICA

In this paper, we use a vintage-capital model with risk of eviction to assess cocoa farmers' response to changes in their tenure security and to the introduction of a new, faster-maturing cocoa variety. The model is calibrated with data from Cameroon in calendar year 2000, and then used to simulate the effects of institutional and technical change on farmer welfare and deforestation rates. Our findings can be summarized in three points. First, improved tenure security over cocoa fields increases farmers' consumption and welfare, but at the expense of more deforestation. Second, the introduction of new cocoa varieties with faster maturity and higher input response also unambiguously raises farmers' consumption and welfare. Doing so increases deforestation under insecure land tenure, but slows down deforestation under secure land tenure. Third, when introducing the two innovations together (more security and also new varieties), there is both an increase in welfare and a decline in deforestation. In sum, the availability of new cocoa cultivars calls for stronger tenure security, to accelerate investment and reduce deforestation.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso

Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children's cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households' decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child's siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry exerts an impact on the parent's decision of whether and how much to invest in their child’s education. We find children with one standard deviation higher own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers current enrollment by 16 percent and having two higher ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30 percent. Results are robust to addressing the potential reverse causality of schooling influencing child ability measures and using alternative cognitive tests to measure ability.child ability, sibling rivalry, education, household decisions, Africa

Alternative Cash Transfer Delivery Mechanisms: Impacts on Routine Preventative Health Clinic Visits in Burkina Faso

We conducted a unique randomized experiment to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on household demand for routine preventative health services in rural Burkina Faso. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional or unconditional and were given to either mothers or fathers. Families under the conditional cash transfer schemes were required to obtain quarterly child growth monitoring at local health clinics for all children under 60 months old. There were no such requirements under the unconditional programs. Compared with control group households, we find that conditional cash transfers significantly increase the number of preventative health care visits during the previous year, while unconditional cash transfers do not have such an impact. For the conditional cash transfers, transfers given to mothers or fathers showed similar magnitude beneficial impacts on increasing routine visits.

Educational and health impacts of two school feeding schemes : evidence from a randomized trial in rural Burkina Faso

This paper uses a prospective randomized trial to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on health and education outcomes for children from low-income households in northern rural Burkina Faso. The two school feeding programs under consideration are, on the one hand, school meals where students are provided with lunch each school day, and, on the other hand, take-home rations that provide girls with10 kg of cereal flour each month, conditional on 90 percent attendance rate. After running for one academic year, both programs increased girls’ enrollment by 5 to 6 percentage points. While there was no observable significant impact on raw scores in mathematics, the time-adjusted scores in mathematics improved slightly for girls. The interventions caused absenteeism to increase in households that were low in child labor supply while absenteeism decreased for households that had a relatively large child labor supply, consistent with the labor constraints. Finally, for younger siblings of beneficiaries, aged between 12 and 60 months, take-home rations have increased weight-for-age by .38 standard deviations and weight-for-height by .33 standard deviations. In contrast, school meals did not have any significant impact on the nutrition of younger children.Youth and Governance,Primary Education,Education For All,Street Children,Tertiary Education