The Poverty Elasticity of Growth

Poverty, Poverty reduction, Economic growth, Inequality

How Parental Education Affects Child Human Capital: Evidence from Mozambique.

This paper anlyses how parental education affects child human capital outcomes, using household survey data from Mozambique. Four indicators of human capital are examined: height-for-age of children below 5 years of age, children''s rate of survival, children''s education, and total fertility of adult women. Using a sequential regression approach, it is investigated how mothers'' and fathers'' education impacts on child human capital outcomes through higher incomes, literacy, and changes in fertility knowledge and preferences. Education of the parents, and especially of the mother, is found to impact in a strong and significant manner on human capital outcomes. The effect of education seems to work through cognitive skills (such as literacy) to a large extent, but income, health knowledge, and fertility preferences also play a role. The results are robust to controlling for community fixed effects (which purge the estimates of all differences in infrastructure and prices), and there seems to be little difference in the determinants of human capital outcomes between rural and urban areas. For education, gender of the child matters: Mothers'' schooling and literacy has a stronger effect on girls'' education, and fathers'' schooling and literacy has a larger impact on the education of boys. It is concluded that programs to expand literacy, especially of women, are likely to have a higher payoff in terms of improved human capital and reduced fertility.human capital; fertility; education; health; Africa; Mozambique

Agricultural Supply Response and Poverty in Mozambique

Agriculture, Supply response, Food marketing , Africa , Mozambique

Mapping vulnerability to climate change

This paper develops a methodology for regional disaggregated estimation and mapping of the areas that are ex-ante the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and variability and applies it to Tajikistan, a mountainous country highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The authors construct the vulnerability index as a function of exposure to climate variability and natural disasters, sensitivity to the impacts of that exposure, and capacity to adapt to ongoing and future climatic changes. This index can inform decisions about adaptation responses that might benefit from an assessment of how and why vulnerability to climate change varies regionally and it may therefore prove a useful tool for policy analysts interested in how to ensure pro-poor adaptation in developing countries. Index results for Tajikistan suggest that vulnerability varies according to socio-economic and institutional development in ways that do not follow directly from exposure or elevation: geography is not destiny. The results indicate that urban areas are by far the least vulnerable, while the eastern Region of Republican Subordination mountain zone is the most vulnerable. Prime agricultural valleys are also relatively more vulnerable, implying that adaptation planners do not necessarily face a trade-off between defending vulnerable areas and defending economically important areas. These results lend support to at least some elements of current adaptation practice.Population Policies,Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases,Science of Climate Change,Climate Change Economics,Adaptation to Climate Change

Public Spending and Poverty in Mozambique

Government expenditure, Poverty and inequality, Mozambique

The poverty elasticity of growth

How much does economic growth contribute to poverty reduction? I discuss analytical and empirical approches to assess the poverty elasticity of growth, and emphasize that the relationship between growth and poverty change is non-constant. For a given poverty measure, it depends on initial inequality and on the location of the poverty line relative to mean income. In most cases, growth is more important for poverty reduction than changes in inequality, but this does not tender inequality unimportant. Reduction in inequality may be triple effective: (1) it will reduce poverty for a given level of income, (2) it will accelerate the poverty reducing impact of economic growth, and (3) according to crosscountry growth regressions, it may contribute to a larger rate of growth. – poverty ; poverty reduction ; economic growth ; inequalit

Public spending and poverty in Mozambique

For poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, poverty reduction usually requires a combination of well-distributed economic growth and increased investment in human capital, especially among the poor. Two key areas for such investment are education and health, both sectors in which the state is the major service provider. A third area that is often cited is physical capital, and public infra-structure in particular. Faced with tight fiscal constraints, governments must ensure that spending on public services and infrastructure is efficient and benefits the poor. Using data from Mozambique, this study asks the question, “Who benefits from public spending on education, health, and infrastructure?” In addition to the poverty reduction imperative that most poor countries face, Mozambique also faces the challenge of rebuilding after decades of war that devastated the country.

Public spending and poverty in Mozambique

"Poverty reduction strategies often highlight public spending to improve health and education, focusing on investments in human capital among poorer members of society. In addition, debt relief programs such as the enhanced Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative often require increased spending on health and education in return for debt cancellation. Mozambique's poverty reduction strategy is closely integrated with the government expenditure program, yet up to now little is known about the extent to which public spending is targeted toward the poor in Mozambique. This paper assesses whether public expenditures on education and health are successful at reaching the poorer segments of the Mozambican population. Standard nonbehavioral benefit-incidence methodology is applied, combining individual client information from survey data with provincial-level data on the cost of service provision. Most of the public services we are able to measure are moderately progressive, although some of the instruments we could not measure are probably less equally distributed. In Mozambique, it appears that regional and gender imbalances in health and education are more significant than income-based differences. Nevertheless, increased public expenditures on health and education such as that related to the HIPC initiative are likely to have significant poverty-reducing effects." Author's Abstract

Community-based Adaptation: Lessons from the Development Marketplace 2009 on Adaptation to Climate Change

The Development Marketplace 2009 focused on adaptation to climate change. This paper identifies lessons from the Marketplace and assesses their implications for adaptation support. Our findings are based on: statistical tabulation of all proposals; in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 346 semi-finalists; and interviews with finalists and assessors. Proposals were fuelled by deep concerns that ongoing climate change and its impacts undermine development and exacerbate poverty, migration and food insecurity. Proposals addressed both local poverty and climate change challenges, and offered a wide range of approaches to render local development more resilient to current climate variability. Therefore, support to community-based adaptation should: exploit its strong local grounding and synergies with development; help connect local initiatives to higher levels; and use complementary approaches to address policy issues.Community-based Adaptation, Development Marketplace, Adaptation, Climate Change

Anatomy of coping: evidence from people living through the crises of 2008-11

This paper surveys qualitative crisis monitoring data from sites in 17 developing and transition countries to describe crisis impacts and analyze the responses and sources of support used by people to cope. These crises included shocks to export sectors as a result of the global financial crisis, as well as food and fuel price volatility, in the period from 2008 to early 2011. Respondents reported the crisis had resulted in significant hardships in the form of foregone meals, education, and health care, food insecurity, asset losses, stress, and worsening crime and community cohesion. Although the export-oriented formal sector was most exposed to the global economic downturn, the crises impacts were more damaging for informal sector workers, and some of the adverse impacts will be long-lasting and possibly irreversible. There were important gender and age differences in the distribution of impacts and coping responses, some of which diverged from what has been seen in previous crisis coping responses. The more common sources of assistance were family, friends, and community-based and religious organizations; formal social protection and finance were not widely cited as sources of support in most study countries. However, as the crisis deepened, the traditional informal safety nets of the poor became depleted because of the large and long-lasting shocks that ensued, pointing to the need for better formal social protection systems for coping with future shocks.