Using repeated cross-sections to explore movements in and out of poverty

Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper, the authors build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data can allow inferences to be made about movements in and out of poverty. They illustrate that the method permits the estimation of bounds on mobility, and provide non-parametric and parametric approaches to obtaining these bounds. They test how well the method works on data sets for Vietnam and Indonesia where we are able to compare our method to true panel estimates. The results are sufficiently encouraging to offer the prospect of some limited, basic, insights into mobility and poverty duration in settings where historically it was judged that the data necessary for such analysis were unavailable.Rural Poverty Reduction,Regional Economic Development,Statistical&Mathematical Sciences,Achieving Shared Growth

What Point-of-Use Water Treatment Products Do Consumers Use? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial among the Urban Poor in Bangladesh

BACKGROUND: There is evidence that household point-of-use (POU) water treatment products can reduce the enormous burden of water-borne illness. Nevertheless, adoption among the global poor is very low, and little evidence exists on why. METHODS: We gave 600 households in poor communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh randomly-ordered two-month free trials of four water treatment products: dilute liquid chlorine (sodium hypochlorite solution, marketed locally as Water Guard), sodium dichloroisocyanurate tablets (branded as Aquatabs), a combined flocculant-disinfectant powdered mixture (the PUR Purifier of Water), and a silver-coated ceramic siphon filter. Consumers also received education on the dangers of untreated drinking water. We measured which products consumers used with self-reports, observation (for the filter), and chlorine tests (for the other products). We also measured drinking water's contamination with E. coli (compared to 200 control households). FINDINGS: Households reported highest usage of the filter, although no product had even 30% usage. E. coli concentrations in stored drinking water were generally lowest when households had Water Guard. Households that self-reported product usage had large reductions in E. coli concentrations with any product as compared to controls. CONCLUSION: Traditional arguments for the low adoption of POU products focus on affordability, consumers' lack of information about germs and the dangers of unsafe water, and specific products not meshing with a household's preferences. In this study we provided free trials, repeated informational messages explaining the dangers of untreated water, and a variety of product designs. The low usage of all products despite such efforts makes clear that important barriers exist beyond cost, information, and variation among these four product designs. Without a better understanding of the choices and aspirations of the target end-users, household-based water treatment is unlikely to reduce morbidity and mortality substantially in urban Bangladesh and similar populations

Choosing and Using Safe Water Technologies: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya

This dissertation examines the decision-making of poor rural Kenyan households with respect to the adoption of point-of-use (POU) safe water technologies designed to expand access to safe drinking water in the developing world. Low-cost POU products such as chlorine and filters substantially reduce diarrhea, which kills two million children in poor countries each year. Nevertheless, POU products remain little used in many parts of the developing world, even when they are widely available at subsidized prices. This dissertation presents results from a six-month field experiment conducted in rural western Kenya that provided all participating households exposure to a variety of free POU products. The design of this study allows me to compare competing safe water products as well as to explore the primary factors that determine consumer preferences for water treatment. In chapter 1 I consider relative consumer preferences for, and the use of, three competing POU products to understand the role of product design in adoption. My study cycled 400 households through three successive, randomly ordered two-month trials of three competing POU products. I find that households' stated preferences for products often deviate from their revealed usage behaviors. I find suggestive evidence that a product's market value plays a role in stated, but not revealed, preference. In particular, the cheapest of the three products, a liquid chlorine product branded as WaterGuard, was consistently used at the highest rates by households. Nonetheless, when households were asked to choose a six-month supply of one of the three products as a parting gift at the end of our study when all households had experienced all products, WaterGuard was chosen at the lowest rates. This divergence of stated and revealed preferences could have important implications for the scalability of all three POU products: If households will use what they won't choose (in a market setting) and vice versa, reducing disease and achieving market scalability may be two distinct problems to solve. Of course, these findings ignore the role of price, an issue we consider in chapter 3.In chapter 2, I consider the common decision-making barriers to the adoption of any safe water product or behavior. I hypothesize that incomplete information and behavioral biases may constrain a household's decision to use a POU technology. To test these hypotheses, households were randomly assigned to receive the results of water quality tests, as well as marketing messages designed to appeal to well-known decision-making heuristics. Sharing water quality information increased water treatment by 8-13 percentage points, representing a 12-23% increase over base values. Social marketing messages that harnessed findings from behavioral economics increased water treatment by an additional 9-11 percentage points in total. In particular, framing safe water products as both increasing health and avoiding disease (not just increasing health) increased usage on the order of 4-6 percentage points. This finding is consistent with a story that loss aversion will spur greater action. A public commitment to treat water regularly had similar results, and even larger effects at households that showed "present-biased" responses to hypothetical questions about future payoffs. Chapter 3 is split into two main parts. In the first part, I explicitly model and quantify the role of experience in changing households' valuations for POU technologies. I find that experience with a safe water product can increase households' stated willingness to pay for a safe water product, suggesting that these private health products are experience goods and offering potential insight into ways to increase demand for these products. The second part of chapter 3 considers various anomalies from the collected Kenyan data that were unexpected at the outset. I find that households are more likely to adopt a safe water technology when they receive an unannounced visit from a survey enumerator during a product trial, suggesting strong Hawthorne effects as well as a potential channel for social pressure to increase adoption. I also find that relative product preferences are strongly influenced by the order in which a household experienced a product, and these ordering effects do not fully dissipate with market experience. This finding does not support the neoclassical assumption of stable and innate preferences behind the rational model. In total, this dissertation aims to better understand how households form preferences over safe water products as well as choose to adopt safe water behaviors. Its findings can offer promising avenues for incremental improvements in the market for safe water (and other) technologies. More broadly, it suggests that economic models of decision-making that fail to account for the accompanying psychology behind a decision can often fall short

Credit Information Systems in Less-Developed Countries: A Test with Microfinance in Guatemala

Increases in formal sector lending among the poor have created a need for credit information systems that provide potential lenders with borrower information. In this paper we present fixed-effects estimations that attempt to measure the effect of a newly implemented credit information system in Guatemala. Our results indicate that improved screening effects from the system caused the level of portfolio arrears to decline approximately two percentage points after it was implemented in branch offices. We observe an even more substantial and significant effect of the information system in reducing late payments that occur during the loan cycle

Credit Information Systems in Less Developed Countries: A Test with Microfinance in Guatemala

Increases in formal sector lending among the poor have created a need for credit information systems that provide potential lenders with borrower information. In this article we present fixed-effects estimations that attempt to measure the effect of a newly implemented credit information system in Guatemala. Our results indicate that improved screening effects from the system caused the level of portfolio arrears to decline approximately 2 percentage points after it was implemented in branch offices. We observe an even more substantial and significant effect of the information system in reducing late payments that occur during the loan cycle.

Small area estimation-based prediction methods to track poverty: Validation and applications

Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Price deflators are also often missing or disputed. In response, poverty prediction methods that track consumption correlates as opposed to consumption itself have been developed. These methods typically assume that the estimated relation between consumption and its predictors is stable over time-assumptions that cannot usually be tested directly. This study analyzes the performance of poverty prediction models based on small area estimation (SAE) techniques. Predicted poverty estimates are compared with directly observed levels in two country settings where data comparability over time is not a problem. Prediction models that employ either non-staple food or non-food expenditures or a full set of assets as predictors are found to yield poverty estimates that match observed poverty well. This offers some support to the use of such methods to approximate the evolution of poverty. Two further country examples illustrate how an application of the method employing models based on household assets can help to adjudicate between alternative price deflators

Reporting of context and implementation in studies of global health interventions: a pilot study.

BackgroundThere is an increasing push for 'evidence-based' decision making in global health policy circles. However, at present there are no agreed upon standards or guidelines for how to evaluate evidence in global health. Recent evaluations of existing evidence frameworks that could serve such a purpose have identified details of program context and project implementation as missing components needed to inform policy. We performed a pilot study to assess the current state of reporting of context and implementation in studies of global health interventions.MethodsWe identified three existing criteria sets for implementation reporting and selected from them 10 criteria potentially relevant to the needs of policy makers in global health contexts. We applied these 10 criteria to 15 articles included in the evidence base for three global health interventions chosen to represent a diverse set of advocated global health programs or interventions: household water chlorination, prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and lay community health workers to reduce child mortality. We used a good-fair-poor/none scale for the ratings.ResultsThe proportion of criteria for which reporting was poor/none ranged from 11% to 54% with an average of 30%. Eight articles had 'good' or 'fair' documentation for greater than 75% of criteria, while five articles had 'poor or none' documentation for 50% of criteria or more. Examples of good reporting were identified.ConclusionsReporting of context and implementation information in studies of global health interventions is mostly fair or poor, and highly variable. The idiosyncratic variability in reporting indicates that global health investigators need more guidance about what aspects of context and implementation to measure and how to report them. This lack of context and implementation information is a major gap in the evidence needed by global health policy makers to reach decisions