Non-Traditional Export Crops in Guatemala: Short-Term Tool or Long-Term Strategy for Poverty Alleviation?

This study is the first to document the long-term welfare effects of household non-traditional agricultural export (NTX) adoption. We use a unique panel dataset, which spans the period of 1985-2005, and employ difference-in-differences estimation to investigate the long-term impact of NTX adoption on changes in household consumption status and asset position in Santiago Sacatepéquez municipality of Guatemala. Given the heterogeneity in adoption patterns, we differentiate the impact estimates based on a classification of households that takes into account the timing and duration of NTX adoption. Our results show that while, on average, welfare levels have improved for all households irrespective of adoption status and duration, the extent of improvement varied across groups, with long-term adopters exhibiting the smallest increase in the lapse of two decades, in spite of some early gains. Conversely, early adopters who withdrew from NTX production after reaping the benefits of the boom period of the 1980s are found to have fared better and shown greater improvements in durable asset position and housing conditions than any other category.Smallholders, Non-Traditional Export Crops, Long-Term Welfare Effects, Consumer/Household Economics, International Relations/Trade,

Non-traditional crops, traditional constraints : long-term welfare impacts of export crop adoption among guatemalan smallholders

This study documents the long-term welfare effects of household non-traditional agricultural export (NTX) adoption. The analysis uses a unique panel dataset, which spans the period 1985-2005, and employs difference-in-differences estimation to investigate the long-term impact of non-traditional agricultural export adoption on changes in household consumption status and asset position in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. Given the heterogeneity in adoption patterns, the analysis differentiates the impact estimates based on a classification of households that takes into account the timing and duration of non-traditional agricultural export adoption. The results show that while, on average, welfare levels have improved for all households irrespective of adoption status and duration, the extent of improvement has varied across groups. Long-term adopters exhibit the smallest increase in the lapse of two decades, in spite of some early gains. Conversely, early adopters who withdrew from non-traditional agricultural export production after reaping the benefits of the boom period of the 1980s are found to have fared better and shown greater improvements in durable asset position and housing conditions than any other category.Economic Theory&Research,Rural Development Knowledge&Information Systems,Regional Economic Development,Crops&Crop Management Systems,Rural Poverty Reduction

Non-traditional crops, traditional constraints : the adoption and diffusion of export crops among guatemalan smallholders

This paper uses a duration analysis based on adoption data spanning more than 25 years from six communities in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. The analysis explores how household characteristics and external trends play into both the adoption and diffusion processes of non-traditional exports among smallholders. Adoption was initially widespread and rapid, which led nontraditional exports to be hailed as a pro-poor success, reaching all but the smallest landholders. However, over time more than two-thirds of adopters eventually dropped out of production of nontraditional exports. Based on the analysis, production of nontraditional exports appears to have delivered less prosperity to adopters than initially promised. Although smallholders may be enticed into entering into nontraditional exports markets when conditions are favorable, they may lack the capacity to overcome the difficulties that inevitably arise in complex types of cultivations and in highly variable global agricultural markets. Governmental and non-governmental organizations can attempt to mitigate these difficulties, but market forces may overwhelm their efforts, with some adopters still unable to compete in global markets.Access to Finance,Rural Development Knowledge&Information Systems,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Rural Poverty Reduction

Globalization and Smallholders: The Adoption, Diffusion, and Welfare Impact of Non-traditional Export Crops in Guatemala

This paper uses a duration analysis based on adoption data spanning over 25 years from six communities in the Central Highlands of Guatemala to explore how household characteristics and external trends play into both the adoption and diffusion processes of non-traditional exports among smallholders. Adoption was initially widespread and rapid, which led NTX to be hailed as a pro-poor success, reaching all but the smallest landholders. However, over time more than two-thirds of the adopters eventually dropped out from NTX production. Based on the analysis, NTX production appeared to have delivered less prosperity to adopters than initially promised. While smallholders may be enticed into entering into NTX markets when conditions are favourable, they may lack the capacity to overcome difficulties that inevitably arise in complex types of cultivations and in highly variable global agricultural markets. Governmental and non-governmental organizations can attempt to mitigate these difficulties, but market forces may overwhelm these efforts, with some adopters still unable to compete in global markets.globalization, land, smallholders, non-traditional exports

Non-Traditional Exports, Traditional Constraints: The Adoption and Diffusion of Cash Crops among Smallholders in Guatemala

More than two decades after non-traditional export crops (NTXs) were introduced to the central highlands of Guatemala to link farmers to global markets and foster rural development, this study uses duration analysis to explore how time-varying household characteristics and external trends play into both the adoption and diffusion processes of NTX among smallholders. Adoption was widespread and rapid, which led the project to be hailed as a pro-poor success, reaching all but the smallest landholders. Potential benefits of NTXs have proven to be high, but constraints to sustained adoption also numerous, particularly in the second decade of the period considered. Over time, more than two-thirds of adopters eventually dropped out, reverting back to more traditional crops, or leaving agriculture altogether. Based on a second round of a 20-year panel survey carried out by the authors, the analysis suggests that smallholders are quite responsive to price incentives when making their repeated decision to continue adopting overtime. Also, in line with previous findings, land size does not seem important in the decision to adopt. However, land quality emerges as a significant factor in prolonging NTX production over time. Overall, the findings suggest that, in the long-run, NTX production does not appear to have been as pro-poor as initially hoped, and that institutions and policy interventions were able to only partially offset these difficulties in favor of less endowed farmers.Crop Production/Industries, International Relations/Trade,

The effects of home-based HIV counseling and testing on HIV/AIDS stigma among individuals and community leaders in western Kenya: Evidence from a cluster-randomized trial 1,2

HIV counseling and testing services play an important role in HIV treatment and prevention efforts in developing countries. Community-wide testing campaigns to detect HIV earlier may additionally impact community knowledge and beliefs about HIV. We conducted a cluster-randomized evaluation of a home-based HIV testing campaign in western Kenya and evaluated the effects of the campaign on community leaders’ and members’ stigma toward people living with HIV/AIDS. We find that this type of large-scale HIV testing can be implemented successfully in the presence of stigma, perhaps due to its “whole community” approach. The home-based HIV testing intervention resulted in community leaders reporting lower levels of stigma. However, stigma among community members reacted in mixed ways, and there is little evidence that the program affected beliefs about HIV prevalence and prevention

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Overview of progress in European medium sized tokamaks towards an integrated plasma-edge/wall solution

Integrating the plasma core performance with an edge and scrape-off layer (SOL) that leads to tolerable heat and particle loads on the wall is a major challenge. The new European medium size tokamak task force (EU-MST) coordinates research on ASDEX Upgrade (AUG), MAST and TCV. This multi-machine approach within EU-MST, covering a wide parameter range, is instrumental to progress in the field, as ITER and DEMO core/pedestal and SOL parameters are not achievable simultaneously in present day devices. A two prong approach is adopted. On the one hand, scenarios with tolerable transient heat and particle loads, including active edge localised mode (ELM) control are developed. On the other hand, divertor solutions including advanced magnetic configurations are studied. Considerable progress has been made on both approaches, in particular in the fields of: ELM control with resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP), small ELM regimes, detachment onset and control, as well as filamentary scrape-off-layer transport. For example full ELM suppression has now been achieved on AUG at low collisionality with n  =  2 RMP maintaining good confinement ${{H}_{\text{H}\left(98,\text{y}2\right)}}\approx 0.95$ . Advances have been made with respect to detachment onset and control. Studies in advanced divertor configurations (Snowflake, Super-X and X-point target divertor) shed new light on SOL physics. Cross field filamentary transport has been characterised in a wide parameter regime on AUG, MAST and TCV progressing the theoretical and experimental understanding crucial for predicting first wall loads in ITER and DEMO. Conditions in the SOL also play a crucial role for ELM stability and access to small ELM regimes

Real-time plasma state monitoring and supervisory control on TCV

In ITER and DEMO, various control objectives related to plasma control must be simultaneously achieved by the plasma control system (PCS), in both normal operation as well as off-normal conditions. The PCS must act on off-normal events and deviations from the target scenario, since certain sequences (chains) of events can precede disruptions. It is important that these decisions are made while maintaining a coherent prioritization between the real-time control tasks to ensure high-performance operation. In this paper, a generic architecture for task-based integrated plasma control is proposed. The architecture is characterized by the separation of state estimation, event detection, decisions and task execution among different algorithms, with standardized signal interfaces. Central to the architecture are a plasma state monitor and supervisory controller. In the plasma state monitor, discrete events in the continuous-valued plasma state are modeled using finite state machines. This provides a high-level representation of the plasma state. The supervisory controller coordinates the execution of multiple plasma control tasks by assigning task priorities, based on the finite states of the plasma and the pulse schedule. These algorithms were implemented on the TCV digital control system and integrated with actuator resource management and existing state estimation algorithms and controllers. The plasma state monitor on TCV can track a multitude of plasma events, related to plasma current, rotating and locked neoclassical tearing modes, and position displacements. In TCV experiments on simultaneous control of plasma pressure, safety factor profile and NTMs using electron cyclotron heating (ECH) and current drive (ECCD), the supervisory controller assigns priorities to the relevant control tasks. The tasks are then executed by feedback controllers and actuator allocation management. This work forms a significant step forward in the ongoing integration of control capabilities in experiments on TCV, in support of tokamak reactor operation

Health, Human Capital, and Behavior Change: Essays in Development Microeconomics

This dissertation combines three empirical studies of household behaviors as they relate to investment in health and human capital in developing countries. The first explores how changes in children's nutrition in Uganda correspond to composition of a household's income. The second studies measurement activities in a cookstove intervention in Darfur, Sudan, with insights into what may be missed in traditional evaluation approaches as well as how technology adoption may benefit from an unintended “nudge.” The third evaluates the impacts of a conditional cash transfer program in El Salvador, with a focus on how program compliance and benefits change time allocations among household members. Chapter 1 explores the relationship between a household's income source (e.g. wage vs. farm) and children's nutrition in Uganda, in a joint work with Talip Kilic and Calogero Carletto. The analysis uses the three annual waves of the Uganda National Panel Survey and features a series of panel regressions for child height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) under age 5. We control for time-invariant child-level heterogeneity and other time-variant observable characteristics using fixed effects. The analysis finds no impact of short-term changes in total gross income on height scores overall. Sector-differentiated analyses indicate that compared to wage earnings, only the share of income originating from non-farm self-employment exerts positive effects on HAZ, while agriculture is more negative. Within agriculture, the income shares from (i) household's consumption of own crop production and (ii) low-protein crop production appear to underlie a negative effect seen from the share of income originating from crop production. We see that results are driven by the older and poorer cohorts, whose diets may be more influenced by shifts in income and production. Overall, any effects are small, given that coefficients represent a change from 100 percent wage income to 100 percent of the other source in a context where many households experience limited changes from year to year. We also cannot say that these relationships are causal, given that observed changes in income likely reflect changes in endogenous livelihood decisions from year to year. Still, the results suggest the possibility of stickiness of crop production to own consumption. While this may be nutrition-supporting in some contexts, it is possible that income growth in the production of low-protein crops in Uganda, which is known for a low-protein diet, may crowd out consumption of other goods and services that have the potential to serve as better nutritional investments. These results suggest a need for more information about how children’s diets or childcare patterns accompany income changes. Chapter 2 studies fuel-efficient cookstove adoption in Darfur, in a joint work with Daniel Wilson, Jeremy Coyle, Javier Rosa, Omnia Abbas, Mohammed Idris Adam, and Ashok Gadgil. In this study, we used sensors and surveys to measure objective versus self-reported adoption of freely-distributed cookstoves. Our data offer insights for how effective measurement and promotion of adoption, especially in a humanitarian crisis. With sensors, we measured a 71% initial adoption rate compared to a 95% rate reported during surveys. No line of survey questioning, whether direct or indirect, predicted sensor-measured usage. For participants who rarely or never used their cookstoves after initial dissemination (``non-users''), we find significant increases in adoption after a simple followup survey (p = 0.001). The followup converted 83% of prior ``non-users'' to ``users'' with average daily adoption of 1.7 cooking hours over 2.2 meals. This increased adoption, which we posit resulted from cookstove familiarization and social conformity, was sustained for a 2-week observation period post intervention. Given that most dissemination programs do not employ objective measurement of adoption to inform design, marketing, and dissemination practices, our findings suggest that self-report information may lead programs to over-estimate impacts. A lack of reliable data is likely to prevents insights and may contribute to consistently low adoption rates. Our findings also suggest a potential role for low-cost followup actions that may facilitate learning for a subset of the target population that could benefit from the new technology.In Chapter 3, I use panel data from El Salvador to examine short-term responses in time use to the Comunidades Solidarias Rurales conditional cash transfer program during 2007/2008, applying difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity methods. Th program was introduced in stages based on observable municipality traits that precluded household-level influence over eligibility. This design allows for a selection-on-observables estimation approach. Because baseline analysis shows significant differences in a few characteristics between earlier and later phases, I use fixed effects specifications to control for time-invariant differences between groups. With only one baseline period, however, I cannot provide evidence against differences in time-variant trends. For each specification, I present results using two bandwidths from the treatment cutoff. To address the small number of municipalities in the sample, I apply wild cluster bootstrapping and present the resulting p-values along those obtained from clustered standard errors as typically applied for larger samples, and show that standard methods would lead to over-rejection of the null hypothesis in multiple instances. I use clustering at the municipality level in both cases. Overall, many of my results are small and somewhat variable across alterative specifications, potentially due to measurement error, a small number of clusters, or simply a small response in the short run to a program offering a relatively small sum of $15-20 a month. Despite these caveats, my findings suggest that for children 6-12, the program appears to have increased school attendance for girls by a small amount relative to boys. There were no gains in enrollment in most specifications, though this may not be surprising in a context where primary school enrollment is already around 90 percent. At the household level, the program may result in a slight reduction of household labor (defined to exclude housework or time allocated to program compliance) for wealthier households relative to poorer households, but a more important change seems to be the shift of productive labor from adult females toward men. Given the total number of statistical tests, however, multiple inference penalties reduce confidence in these few findings