Determinants of Collective Action under Devolution Initiatives: The Case of Citizen Community Boards in Pakistan

In 2001, a scheme called Citizen Community Board (CCB), a kind of communitybased organisation (CBO), was introduced in Pakistan, under which local people propose development projects to the local government through forming a CCB, and upon approval the local government funds 80 percent of the project cost. Since 2001, however, both the number of CCBs and that of approved projects have been below the expected level. This raises a concern that the Pakistani society with limited historical experience in CBO-based development is too handicapped for the CCB scheme to be successful. This paper addresses this concern through quantifying the determinants of successful formation of a CCB and those of successful development activities conditional on the formation. The regression results using a cross-section dataset in a district in Pakistan Punjab in 2004-05 suggest that the rules within a CCB and the type of leadership are key to the success of CCB initiatives.

Labor Contracts, Incentives, and Food Security in Rural Myanmar

This paper develops an agency model of contract choice in the hiring of labor and then uses the model to estimate the determinants of contract choice in rural Myanmar. As a salient feature relevant for the agricultural sector in a low income country such as Myanmar, the agency model incorporates considerations of food security and incentive effects. It is shown that when, possibly due to poverty, food considerations are important for employees, employers will prefer a labor contract with wages paid in kind (food) to one with wages paid in cash. At the same time, when output is responsive to workers' effort and labor monitoring is costly, employers will prefer a contract with piecerate wages to one with hourly wages. The case of sharecropping can be understood as a combination of the two: a labor contract with piecerate wages paid in kind. The predictions of the theoretical model are tested using a crosssection dataset collected in rural Myanmar through a sample household survey which was conducted in 2001 and covers diverse agroecological environments. The estimation results are consistent with the theoretical predictions: wages are more likely to be paid in kind when the share of staple food in workers' budget is higher and the farmland on which they produce food themselves is smaller; piecerate wages are more likely to be adopted when work effort is more difficult to monitor and the farming operation requires quick completion.contract, incentive, selection, food security, Myanmar

Targeting the Vulnerable and the Choice of Vulnerability Measures: Review and Application to Pakistan

In this paper, the concept of vulnerability of the poor’s welfare and its practical measures are scrutinised in order to derive implications for targeting poverty reduction policies toward vulnerable households. As illustration, various measures of vulnerability proposed in the literature are applied to a panel data-set collected from rural Pakistan. The empirical results show that different vulnerability rankings can be obtained depending on the choice of the measure. By utilising these measures, we can identify who and which region is more vulnerable to a particular type of risk. This kind of information is useful in targeting poverty reduction policies. Since the nature of vulnerability is diverse, it is advisable to use the whole vector of various vulnerability measures.Vulnerability, Poverty, Risk, Consumption Smoothing, Pakistan

Wages in Kind and Economic Development: Historical and Contemporary Evidence from Asia

This paper investigates the function of various modes of wage payment, focusing on the role of in-kind wages in enhancing household food security when markets are underdeveloped. Historical records from Asian countries, including pre-war Japan and colonial India, demonstrate the importance of in-kind wage payment in the initial phase of economic development. However, there is a paucity of theoretical explanations of in-kind wages in terms of their function and rationale in existing literature. This paper therefore develops a theoretical model that explains labor supply under different labor contracts, by incorporating considerations of food security as the main explanation for in-kind wages. The model predicts that when food security considerations are important for workers, owing to poverty and thin food markets, they tend to work more under contracts where wages are paid in kind (food) than under contracts where wages are paid in cash. This prediction is supported by empirical evidence from rural Myanmar. Estimation results of the reduced-form determinants of labor supply show that workers supply more labor for work paid in kind when the share of staple food in the workers’ household budget is higher and the farmlands on which they produce food themselves are smaller.agrarian contract, in-kind wages, incentive, food security, Myanmar

Compilation of Agricultural Production Data in Areas Currently in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh from 1901/02 to 2001/02

This paper presents estimates for agricultural production data in areas currently in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh from 1901/02 to 2001/02. A salient feature of these estimates is that they correspond to current international borders. The British Empire of India, which was broken up in 1947 (in the so-called "Partition" of the Indian subcontinent), covered areas of what are now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Although a rich accumulation of statistical documents is available from the colonial period, there has been no rigorous attempt to compile statistics corresponding to the current borders during a period that includes years prior to 1947. This is because the Partition broke up the Empire of India not only at the provincial level (for which data are readily available) but also at the district or lower levels of administration. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap, focusing on production in crop farming in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Since neither the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh nor the concept of such nations existed during the early decades of the twentieth century, this exercise is hypothetical to some extent. Nevertheless, because farming activities are carried out on the soil of a region irrespective of its political designation, the estimates presented in this paper could shed new light on agricultural development in the three countries over the long term.

Compilation of Agricultural Production Data in Areas Currently in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh from 1901/02 to 2011/02

This paper presents estimates for agricultural production data in areas currently in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh from 1901/02 to 2001/02. A salient feature of these estimates is that they correspond to current international borders. The British Empire of India, which was broken up in 1947 (in the so-called “Partition” of the Indian subcontinent), covered areas of what are now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Although a rich accumulation of statistical documents is available from the colonial period, there has been no rigorous attempt to compile statistics corresponding to the current borders during a period that includes years prior to 1947. This is because the Partition broke up the Empire of India not only at the provincial level (for which data are readily available) but also at the district or lower levels of administration. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap, focusing on production in crop farming in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Since neither the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh nor the concept of such nations existed during the early decades of the twentieth century, this exercise is hypothetical to some extent. Nevertheless, because farming activities are carried out on the soil of a region irrespective of its political designation, the estimates presented in this paper could shed new light on agricultural development in the three countries over the long term.

Measurement of Chronic and Transient Poverty: Theory and Application to Pakistan

This paper investigates how to characterize each person's poverty status when his/her welfare level fluctuates and how to aggregate the status into chronic and transient poverty measures. The contribution of the paper is to clarify the sensitivity of relative magnitudes of chronic versus transient poverty to the choice of a poverty measure. We show this by theoretically re-examining Ravallion's (1988) decomposition of the expected value of a poverty measure into chronic and transient components. The examination covers major poverty measures including those developed by Foster et al. (1985), which are used extensively in the existing studies. Our analysis shows that the chronic-transient decomposition using the squared poverty gap index might be too sensitive to the poverty line and that the index is justified only if we accept that the welfare cost of consumption fluctuation is independent of the depth of chronic poverty. If we instead believe that the decomposition should not be too sensitive to the poverty line and that the welfare cost of risk is more severe when an individual's chronic poverty is deeper, other poverty measures such as suggested by Clark et al. (1981) are useful. We also investigate how empirically different are the relative magnitudes of chronic versus transient poverty, depending on the choice of a poverty measure. Based on a two-period household panel dataset collected in Pakistan, we show that the difference is substantial even when the poorest experienced only a small fluctuation in their consumption.chronic poverty, transient poverty, risk, poverty measurement

Crop Choice, Farm Income, and Political Relations in Myanmar

Myanmar's agricultural economy is in transition from a planned to a market system. However, the economy does not seem to capture the full gains of productivity growth expected from such a transition. Using a micro dataset collected in 2001 and covering more than 500 households in eight villages with diverse agro-ecological environments, this paper shows that policy interventions in land use and agricultural marketing underlie the lack of income growth. Regression analyses focusing on within-village variations in cropping patterns show that the acreage share under nonlucrative paddy crops is higher for farmers who are under tighter control of the local administration.reform, food policy, transitional economies, Asia, Myanmar

Vulnerability of Household Consumption to Village-level Aggregate Shocks in a Developing Country

Village-level aggregate shocks such as droughts and floods cannot be perfectly insured by risk sharing within a village. Then, what type of households are more vulnerable in terms of a decline in consumption when a village is hit by such natural disasters? This question is investigated in this study by using two-period panel data for the years 2001 and 2004 from rural Pakistan. We propose a methodology to infer the theoretical mechanisms underlying the heterogeneity of households in terms of their vulnerability, and focus on the difference between the across-household-type difference in marginal response to aggregate shocks and that in marginal response to idiosyncratic shocks. The empirical results obtained indicate that the sensitivity of consumption changes to shocks differs across household types, depending on the type of natural disasters. Moreover, land and credit access are effective in mitigating the ill-effects of various types of shocks. Household heads who are educated or elderly and households with a greater number of working members bear a larger burden of the village-level shocks; however, they are not vulnerable to idiosyncratic health shocks. It is revealed that these patterns may be explained by the coexistence of unequal access to credit markets and risk sharing among heterogeneous households in terms of risk tolerance.natural disaster, consumption smoothing, risk sharing, self-insurance, Pakistan