Incentives, supervision, and sharecropper productivity

Although sharecropping has long fascinated economists, the determinants of this contractual form are still poorly understood and the debate over the extent of moral hazard is far from settled. The authors address both issues by emphasizing the role of landlord supervision. When tenant effort is observable, but at a cost to the landlord, otherwise identical share-tenants can receive different levels of supervision and have different productivity. Unique data on monitoring frequency collected from sharetenants in rural Pakistan confirm that, controlling for selection,"supervised"tenants are significantly more productive than"unsupervised"ones. Landlords'decisions regarding the intensity of supervision and the type of incentive contract to offer depend importantly on the cost of supervising tenants.Contract Law,Economic Theory&Research,Investment and Investment Climate,Municipal Housing and Land,Urban Housing

Incomplete contracts and investment : a study of land tenancy in Pakistan

When contracts are incomplete, relationship-specific investments may be underprovided due to the threat of opportunistic expropriation or holdup. The authors find evidence of such underinvestment on tenanted land in rural Pakistan. Using data from households cultivating multiple plots under different tenure arrangements, they show that land-specific investment is lower on leased plots. This result is robust to the possible effects of asymmetric information in the leasing market. Greater tenure security also increases land-specific investment on leased plots. Moreover, variation in tenure security appears to be driven largely by heterogeneity across landlords, suggesting that reputation may be important in mitigating the holdup problem.Investment and Investment Climate,Municipal Housing and Land,Contract Law,Economic Theory&Research,Real Estate Development

Watta satta : bride exchange and women's welfare in rural Pakistan

In a setting where husbands wield considerable coercive power, forms of marriage should adapt to protect the interests of women and their families. The authors study the pervasive marriage custom of watta satta in rural Pakistan, a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of retaliation. They show that watta satta may be a mechanism to coordinate the actions of two sets of in-laws, each of whom wish to restrain their sons-in-law but who only have the ability to restrain their sons. The authors'empirical results support this view. The likelihood of marital inefficiency, as measured by estrangement, domestic abuse, and wife's mental health, is significantly lower in watta satta arrangements as compared with conventional marriages, but only after properly accounting for selection.Population&Development,Anthropology,Education and Society,Gender and Law,Gender and Law

Crossing boundaries : gender, caste and schooling in rural Pakistan

Can communal heterogeneity explain persistent educational inequities in developing countries? The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social makeup of constituent hamlets to show that demand for schooling is sensitive to the allocation of schools across ethnically fragmented communities. The analysis focuses on two types of social barriers: stigma based on caste affiliation and female seclusion that is more rigidly enforced outside a girl's own hamlet. Results indicate a substantial decrease in primary school enrollment rates for girls who have to cross hamlet boundaries to attend, irrespective of school distance, an effect not present for boys. However, low-caste children, both boys and girls, are deterred from enrolling when the most convenient school is in a hamlet dominated by high-caste households. In particular, low-caste girls, the most educationally disadvantaged group, benefit from improved school access only when the school is also caste-concordant. A policy experiment indicates that providing schools in low-caste dominant hamlets would increase overall enrollment by almost twice as much as a policy of placing a school in every unserved hamlet, and would do so at one-sixth of the cost.Primary Education,Education For All,Disability,Adolescent Health,Tertiary Education

Income Growth, School Enrolment and the Gender Gap in Schooling: Evidence from Rural Pakistan

Household panel data document a remarkable closing of the gender gap in school enrolment in rural Pakistan between 2001 and 2004. During this 3-year period, there was an 8 point increase in the percentage of girls entering school, while the corresponding increase for boys was less than 2 percentage points. More than half of the rise for girls can be explained by the substantial increase in household incomes, whereas comparatively little is accounted for by increased school availability. Unpacking these enrolment trends and their determinants requires solving the classic period-age-cohort identification problem. The paper shows how to do so using auxiliary information on the distribution of school entry ages. JEL Classification: O15, O40, I 25, I21 Keywords: School Enrolment, Gender, Income Growth, Gender Ga

Impact of Climate Change on Public Health in India: Action to Tackle Climate Crisis, a Systematic Review

Climate change as ‘a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods (UNFCCC). The main aim is to Studying about the climate change will help us to know about how the climate change create impact on public health and how to tackle climate crisis. Online data-based PubMed Central (PMC), Science Direct, GoogleScholar, Shodhganga, ResearchGate, etc. were systemically searched for articles has been published within the last 10 years (after 2012).The study screened 1632 articles, excluding 813 that were not relevant or did not meet inclusion criteria. The remaining 201 articles were assessed for eligibility and quality, excluding 189. We are then included 12 studies in the qualitative synthesis based on relevance, appropriateness, eligibility, and quality, ensuring they met the criteria of the study. Climate change impacts human health and disease, leading to increased respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, injuries, and early deaths. It also affects food- and water-borne illnesses, infectious diseases, and mental health. The air quality worsens due to climate change, and children are impacted by natural disasters. Under nutrition, diarrheal diseases, low birth weight, and early mortality are the main health effects. Flood victims experience physical and psychological effects, and 72% of respondents believe climate change affects the general public's health. The literature review reveals that climate change is associated with various adverse health outcomes, including increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, air pollution, waterborne diseases, food insecurity, and vector-borne diseases

Tracheotomy in COVID-19 patients:Optimizing patient selection and identifying prognostic indicators

Background: Tracheotomy, through its ability to wean patients off ventilation, can shorten ICU length of stay and in doing so increase ICU bed capacity, crucial for saving lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, there is a paucity of patient selection criteria and prognosticators to facilitate decision making and enhance precious ICU capacity. Methods: Prospective study of COVID-19 patients undergoing tracheotomy (n = 12) over a 4-week period (March-April 2020). Association between preoperative and postoperative ventilation requirements and outcomes (ICU stay, time to decannulation, and death) were examined. Results: Patients who sustained FiO2 ≤ 50% and PEEP ≤ 8 cm H2O in the 24 hours pretracheotomy exhibited a favorable outcome. Those whose requirements remained below these thresholds post-tracheotomy could be safely stepped down after 48 hours. Conclusion: Sustained FiO2 ≤ 50% and PEEP ≤ 8 cm H2O in the 48 hours post-tracheotomy are strong predictive factors for a good outcome, raising the potential for these patients to be stepped down early, thus increasing ICU capacity

Can Bottom-Up Institutional Reform Improve Service Delivery?

This article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it provides new evidence of the impact of community monitoring interventions using a unique dataset from the Citizen Visible Audit (CVA) program in Colombia. In particular, this article studies the effect of social audits on citizens' assessment of service delivery performance. The second contribution is the introduction a theoretical framework to understand the pathway of change, the necessary building blocks that are needed for social audits to be effective. Using this framework, the third contribution of this article is answering the following questions: i) under what conditions do citizens decide to monitor government activity and ii) under what conditions do governments facilitate citizen engagement and become more accountable

Measuring the Impacts of Community-based Grasslands Management in Mongolia's Gobi

We assessed a donor-funded grassland management project designed to create both conservation and livelihood benefits in the rangelands of Mongolia's Gobi desert. The project ran from 1995 to 2006, and we used remote sensing Normalized Differential Vegetation Index data from 1982 to 2009 to compare project grazing sites to matched control sites before and after the project's implementation. We found that the productivity of project grazing sites was on average within 1% of control sites for the 20 years before the project but generated 11% more biomass on average than the control areas from 2000 to 2009. To better understand the benefits of the improved grasslands to local people, we conducted 280 household interviews, 8 focus group discussions, and 31 key informant interviews across 6 districts. We found a 12% greater median annual income as well as a range of other socioeconomic benefits for project households compared to control households in the same areas. Overall, the project generated measurable benefits to both nature and people. The key factors underlying project achievements that may be replicable by other conservation projects include the community-driven approach of the project, knowledge exchanges within and between communities inside and outside the country, a project-supported local community organizer in each district, and strong community leadership