How structure of production determines the demand for human capital

On the issue of women's status, the objectives of this paper are twofold. First, it attempts to make precise some of the claims and allegations regarding the existence of bias against females in the allocation of resources within the household. The idea is to formulate these questions explicitly, so that it is possible to identify whether and to what degree there is evidence of this bias. Second, it identifies causes of this bias with the objective of isolating key factors that can be used for policy. In contrast to earlier studies that attemptto account for male-female differences in human capital, the authors do not assume any discrimination against females either at home (in the parent's utility function) or in the market (in the returns to human capital). It is assumed, however, that women have a comparative advantage in working in some sectors of the economy. Thus, increases in the shares of these sectors will increase the demand for female human capital. This explicit attention to factors that can be used as policy instruments -- and the relative neglect of factors reflecting gender bias in tastes -- is the point of departure from earlier literature. This paper develops the theory, tests the hypotheses, and concludes with a discussion of the policy implications.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Housing&Human Habitats,Environmental Economics&Policies

THE COST STRUCTURE OF MICROFINANCE INSTITUTIONS IN EASTERN EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA

Microfinance institutions are important, particularly in developing countries, because they expand the frontier of financial intermediation by providing loans to those traditionally excluded from formal financial markets. This paper presents the first systematic statistical examination of the performance of MFIs operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. A cost function is estimated for MFIs in the region from 1999-2004. First, the presence of subsidies is found to be associated with higher MFI costs. When output is measured as the number of loans made, we find that MFIs become more efficient over time and that MFIs involved in the provision of group loans and loans to women have lower costs. However, when output is measured as volume of loans rather than their number, this last finding is reversed. This may be due to the fact that such loans are smaller in size; thus for a given volume more loans must be made.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40195/3/wp809.pd

HIV/AIDS, declining family resources and the community safety net

Families play central roles in the HIV/AIDS pandemic, caring for both orphaned children and the ill. This extra caregiving depletes two family resources essential for supporting children: time and money. We use recent data from published studies in sub-Saharan Africa to illustrate deficits and document community responses. In Botswana, parents caring for the chronically ill had less time for their preschool children (74 versus 96 hours per month) and were almost twice as likely to leave children home alone (53% versus 27%); these children experienced greater health and academic problems. Caregiving often prevented adults from working full time or earning their previous level of income; 47% of orphan caregivers and 64% of HIV/AIDS caregivers reported financial difficulties due to caregiving. Communities can play an important role in helping families provide adequate childcare and financial support. Unfortunately, while communities commonly offer informal assistance, the value of such support is not adequate to match the magnitude of need: 75% of children's families in Malawi received assistance from their social network, but averaging only US$81 annually. We suggest communities can strengthen the capacity of families by implementing affordable quality childcare for 0–6 year olds, after-school programming for older children and youth, supportive care for ill children and parents, microlending to enhance earnings, training to increase access to quality jobs, decent working conditions, social insurance for the informal sector, and income and food transfers when families are unable to make ends meet

Social Entrepreneurship and Social Business: Retrospective and Prospective Research

Ye

Poverty and Wellbeing Impacts of Microfinance : What Do We Know?

Over the last 35 years, microfinance has been generally regarded as an effective policy tool in the fight against poverty. Yet, the question of whether access to credit leads to poverty reduction and improved wellbeing remains open. To address this question, we conduct a systematic review of the quantitative literature of microfinance’s impacts in the developing world, and develop a theory of change that links inputs to impacts on several welfare outcomes. Overall, we find that the limited comparability of outcomes and the heterogeneity of microfinance-lending technologies, together with a considerable variation in socio-economic conditions and contexts in which impact studies have been conducted, render the interpretation and generalization of findings intricate. Our results indicate that, at best, microfinance induces short-term dynamism in the financial life of the poor; however, we do not find compelling evidence that this dynamism leads to increases in income, consumption, human capital and assets, and, ultimately, a reduction in poverty

General Three-Point Functions in 4D CFT

We classify and compute, by means of the six-dimensional embedding formalism in twistor space, all possible three-point functions in four dimensional conformal field theories involving bosonic or fermionic operators in irreducible representations of the Lorentz group. We show how to impose in this formalism constraints due to conservation of bosonic or fermionic currents. The number of independent tensor structures appearing in any three-point function is obtained by a simple counting. Using the Operator Product Expansion (OPE), we can then determine the number of structures appearing in 4-point functions with arbitrary operators. This procedure is independent of the way we take the OPE between pairs of operators, namely it is consistent with crossing symmetry, as it should be. An analytic formula for the number of tensor structures for three-point correlators with two symmetric and an arbitrary bosonic (non-conserved) operators is found, which in turn allows to analytically determine the number of structures in 4-point functions of symmetric traceless tensors

Micro-finance, women’s empowerment and fertility decline in Bangladesh: How important was women’s agency?

As Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has argued “[Bangladesh’s development achievements have] important lessons for other countries across the globe, [in particular a focus on] reducing gender inequality”. A major avenue through which this emphasis has been manifest lies, according to this narrative, in enhancements to women’s agency for instrumental and intrinsic reasons particularly through innovations in family planning and microfinance. The “Bangladesh paradox” of improved wellbeing despite low economic growth over the last four decades is claimed as a paradigmatic case of the spread of both modern family planning programmes and microfinance leading to women’s empowerment and fertility reduction. In this paper we show that the links between microfinance, empowerment and fertility reduction, are fraught with problems, and far from robust; hence the claimed causal links between microfinance and family planning via women’s empowerment needs to be further reconsidered

Social Entrepreneurship and Social Business: Retrospective and Prospective Research

Ye

Rural-urban disparities in child nutrition in Bangladesh and Nepal

Background The persistence of rural-urban disparities in child nutrition outcomes in developing countries alongside rapid urbanisation and increasing incidence of child malnutrition in urban areas raises an important health policy question - whether fundamentally different nutrition policies and interventions are required in rural and urban areas. Addressing this question requires an enhanced understanding of the main drivers of rural-urban disparities in child nutrition outcomes especially for the vulnerable segments of the population. This study applies recently developed statistical methods to quantify the contribution of different socio-economic determinants to rural-urban differences in child nutrition outcomes in two South Asian countries – Bangladesh and Nepal. Methods Using DHS data sets for Bangladesh and Nepal, we apply quantile regression-based counterfactual decomposition methods to quantify the contribution of (1) the differences in levels of socio-economic determinants (covariate effects) and (2) the differences in the strength of association between socio-economic determinants and child nutrition outcomes (co-efficient effects) to the observed rural-urban disparities in child HAZ scores. The methodology employed in the study allows the covariate and coefficient effects to vary across entire distribution of child nutrition outcomes. This is particularly useful in providing specific insights into factors influencing rural-urban disparities at the lower tails of child HAZ score distributions. It also helps assess the importance of individual determinants and how they vary across the distribution of HAZ scores. Results There are no fundamental differences in the characteristics that determine child nutrition outcomes in urban and rural areas. Differences in the levels of a limited number of socio-economic characteristics – maternal education, spouse’s education and the wealth index (incorporating household asset ownership and access to drinking water and sanitation) contribute a major share of rural-urban disparities in the lowest quantiles of child nutrition outcomes. Differences in the strength of association between socio-economic characteristics and child nutrition outcomes account for less than a quarter of rural-urban disparities at the lower end of the HAZ score distribution. Conclusions Public health interventions aimed at overcoming rural-urban disparities in child nutrition outcomes need to focus principally on bridging gaps in socio-economic endowments of rural and urban households and improving the quality of rural infrastructure. Improving child nutrition outcomes in developing countries does not call for fundamentally different approaches to public health interventions in rural and urban areas