Menstruation and the cycle of poverty: a cluster quasi-randomised control trial of sanitary pad and puberty education provision in Uganda

BACKGROUND: Poor menstrual knowledge and access to sanitary products have been proposed as barriers to menstrual health and school attendance. In response, interventions targeting these needs have seen increasing implementation in public and private sectors. However, there has been limited assessment of their effectiveness. // OBJECTIVES: Assess the impact of providing reusable sanitary pads and puberty education on girls’ school attendance and psychosocial wellbeing outcomes. // METHODS: A cluster quasi-randomised controlled trial was conducted across 8 schools, including 1124 girls, in rural Uganda. Schools were allocated to one of four conditions: the provision of puberty education alone; reusable sanitary pads alone; puberty education and reusable sanitary pads; and a control (no intervention). The primary outcome was school attendance. Secondary outcomes reflected psychosocial wellbeing. // RESULTS: At follow-up, school attendance had worsened for girls across all conditions. Per-protocol analysis revealed that this decline was significantly greater for those in the control condition d = 0.52 (95%CI 0.26–0.77), with those in control schools having a 17.1% (95%CI: 8.7–25.5) greater drop in attendance than those in any intervention school. There were no differences between the intervention conditions. High rates of school drop-out and transfer meant the trial suffered from substantial participant drop-out. Intention-to-treat analyses using two different imputation strategies were consistent with the main results, with mean differences of 5.2% attendance in best-case and 24.5% in worst-case imputations. Results were robust to adjustments for clustering. There was no impact of the interventions on girls’ self-reported shame or insecurity during menstruation. // CONCLUSION: Results of the trial support the hypothesised positive impact of providing sanitary pads or puberty education for girls’ school attendance in a developing country context. Findings must be interpreted with caution in light of poor participant retention, intervention fidelity, and the attendance measures used

Trade, Gravity, and Sudden Stops: On How Commercial Trade Can Increase the Stability of Capital Flows

Financial stability is an important policy objective, since crises are associated with large economic, social and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing 'sudden stops' in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to the discussion by providing new theoretical and empirical evidence on the causal connection between lack of exposure to commercial trade and proclivity to sudden stops. On the theoretical front, the paper shows how exposure to trade raises the creditworthiness of countries and reduces the probability of sudden stops. In relatively closed economies, sudden stops (when they occur) are more harmful and thus the option to default on the inherited debt is more attractive. Therefore, conditional on the amount that lenders are willing to loan, decreased exposure to trade increases the likelihood of default. A sudden stop takes place when the borrowers reject the amount that lenders want to loan: they receive no new funding and they concurrently default on the outstanding debt to 'ease the pain'. This proposition is tested using 'gravity estimates', which are based on countries' geographic characteristics, as appropriate instruments for trade. The results indicate that, all else equal, a 10 percentage point decrease in the trade to GDP ratio increases the probability of a sudden stop between 30 percent and 40 percent. The policy implications are unambiguous: increasing the tradable component of a country's GDP will, ceteris paribus, reduce the vulnerability of that country to sudden stops in capital flows

On the Relationship between Mobility, Population Growth, and Capital Spending in the United States

In this paper, we assess the empirical relationship between population growth, mobility, and state-level capital spending in the United States. To evaluate the magnitude of the coefficients, we introduce an explicit, quantitative political-economy model of government spending determination, where mobility and population growth generate departures from Ricardian equivalence. Our estimates find strong responses in the level of capital provision per capita to these demographic movements; in fact, the resulting coefficients are stronger than the model delivers. Regression coefficients on population growth and mobility also yield opposite implications for the direction to which spending is distorted by the politicaleconomy friction, posing a further challenge

Distributional impacts of cash allowances for children: A microsimulation analysis for Russia and Europe

This article analyses programmes of cash allowances for children and compares their effectiveness in combating child poverty in Russia and four European Union (EU) countries representing alternative family policy models – Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Using microsimulation models, this article estimates the potential gains if the Russian system were re-designed along the policy parameters of these countries and vice versa. The results confirm that the poverty impact of the programme design is smaller than that of the level of spending. Other conditions being equal, the best distributional outcomes for children are achieved by applying the mix of universal and means-tested child benefits, such as those employed by the United Kingdom and Belgium. At the same time, the Russian design of child allowances does not appear to be less effective in terms of its impact on child poverty when transferred to European countries in place of their current arrangements

Predation and the Maintenance of Color Polymorphism in a Habitat Specialist Squamate

Multiple studies have addressed the mechanisms maintaining polymorphism within a population. However, several examples exist where species inhabiting diverse habitats exhibit local population-specific polymorphism. Numerous explanations have been proposed for the maintenance of geographic variation in color patterns. For example, spatial variation in patterns of selection or limited gene flow can cause entire populations to become fixed for a single morph, resulting in separate populations of the same species exhibiting separate and distinct color morphs. The mottled rock rattlesnake (Crotalus lepidus lepidus) is a montane species that exhibits among-population color polymorphism that correlates with substrate color. Habitat substrate in the eastern part of its range is composed primarily of light colored limestone and snakes have light dorsal coloration, whereas in the western region the substrate is primarily dark and snakes exhibit dark dorsal coloration. We hypothesized that predation on high contrast color and blotched patterns maintain these distinct color morphs. To test this we performed a predation experiment in the wild by deploying model snakes at 12 sites evenly distributed within each of the two regions where the different morphs are found. We employed a 2×2 factorial design that included two color and two blotched treatments. Our results showed that models contrasting with substrate coloration suffered significantly more avian attacks relative to models mimicking substrates. Predation attempts on blotched models were similar in each substrate type. These results support the hypothesis that color pattern is maintained by selective predation

Social Spending and Aggregate Welfare in Developing and Transition Economies

Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper examines the impact of government spending on the social sectors (health, education, and social protection) on two major indicators of aggregate welfare (the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index and child mortality), using a panel dataset comprising 55 developing and transition countries from 1990 to 2009. We find that government social spending has a significantly positive causal effect on the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, while government expenditure on health has a significant negative impact on child mortality rate. These results are fairly robust to the method of estimation, the use of alternative instruments to control for the endogeneity of social spending, the set of control variables included in the regressions, and the use of alternative samples

Preschool and Maternal Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

In developing countries, employment rates of mothers with young children are relatively lower. This paper analyzes how maternal labor market outcomes in Argentina are affected by the preschool attendance of their children. Using pooled household surveys, we show that four yearolds with birthdays on June 30 have sharply higher probabilities of preschool attendance than children born on July 1, given enrollment-age rules. Regression-discontinuity estimates using this variation suggest that preschool attendance of the youngest child in the household increases the probability of full-time employment and weekly hours of maternal employment. We find no effect of preschool attendance on maternal labor outcomes for children that are not the youngest in the household