Performance bonuses for public services: Winner-take-all prizes versus proportional payments to reduce child malnutrition in India

We provide results of a randomized trial comparing incentives for improved delivery of public services in India, targeting child nutrition through the work of salaried caregivers in Chandigarh, India. A winner-take-all prize paid to the best performer yielded less improvement than dividing the same award among workers in proportion to their share of measured gains. In our population of about 2,000 children served by 85 workers, using proportional rewards led to weight-for-age malnutrition rates that were 4.3 percentage points lower at 3 months (when rewards were paid) and 5.9 points lower at 6 months (after the contest had ended), with mean weight-for-age z scores that were .071 higher at 3 months, and .095 higher at 6 months. Proportional bonuses led to larger and more sustained gains because of better performance by lower-ranked workers, whose efforts were not rewarded by a winner-take-all prize. Results are consistent with previous laboratory trials and athletic events, demonstrating the value of proportional rewards to improve service delivery for child nutrition and other development outcomes. Acknowledgement : This project was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1107973), with additional support from Amherst College and the Bharat Prakarsh Foundation. We are especially grateful to the mothers, children and Anganwadis who participated in our trial, to the Chandigarh Social Welfare Department and Child Development Bureau for their support, to our survey staff especially Alka Yadav, Paulin Priscilla and Sam Alpert, and for very helpful comments from Jere Behrman, Sonia Bhalotra, Karthik Muralidharan and Alessandro Tarozzi and other participants at the Conference on Child Development at the UPenn Center for Advanced Studies on India (CASI), 15-16 September 2017

Orange Fanta vs orange fruit: A novel measure of nutrition knowledge and women’s diet quality in Malawi

This paper uses a novel survey instrument to identify distinct components of nutrition knowledge, and test for links between knowledge and dietary choices in Southern Malawi. Our first aim is to distinguish respondents’ familiarity with recommended behaviors, such as when to start breastfeeding or introduce solid foods, from respondents’ factual knowledge about mechanisms, such as whether biscuits or papaya and orange fruit or orange Fanta contribute more to future health. We find knowledge of nutrition behaviors to be strongly associated with more schooling, older age and being female, while knowledge of mechanisms is associated only with training and employment as a health professional. We then test whether this expanded definition of nutrition knowledge is associated with dietary intake when controlling for other factors, and find only suggestive evidence for significant links interacting with age of respondents. These findings point to the need for knowledge surveys and public health behavior-change campaigns to address the kinds of information that might have the most influence on actual behavior, potentially including the mechanisms involved in food composition, food safety and disease transmission

Willingness to Pay for Hermetic Grain Storage Bags in Malawi

This study estimates willingness to pay (WTP) for hermetic grain storage bags in a sample of 116 very low-income farmers, about half of whom had attended bag-use demonstrations designed to demonstrate how these bags prevent damage from mold and insects. WTP was measured using Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) auctions, accompanied by a survey regarding respondents education, household wealth and knowledge about aflatoxins that are released when mold is allowed to grow on the grain. We found a mean WTP of 311 Kwacha ($0.42) for one bag, well below the market price around 750 Kwacha, and no significant association between a respondent s WTP and their attendance at bag-use demonstrations, aflatoxin knowledge or education and wealth. At current market prices, we found no evidence that these bags would be commercially marketable in these communities, even after bag-use demonstrations. A systematic review of the literature suggests that commercial sales of hermetic bags may be possible for buyers in areas of less extreme poverty, where households are more able to make such investments in pursuit of longer-term payoffs in food safety and storage. Acknowledgement : This report was funded by the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) via Cooperative Agreements AID-FFP-A-14-00006 and AID-OAA-A-15-00019 to Catholic Relief Services (CRS) for the UBALE project. We are grateful to all respondents, UBALE partners and CRS-Malawi staff for their help, and especially thank Angela Tavares and Juma Masumba for their guidance and support. Ethical approval was obtained from the Tufts University IRB as study #1703012, and from the Malawi National Commission for Science and Technology as Protocol P.06/17/181. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of CRS, USAID or the United States Government

Agriculture, Transportation and the Timing of Urbanization: Global Analysis at the Grid Cell Level

This paper addresses the timing of a location's historical transition from rural to urban activity. We test whether urbanization occurs sooner in places with higher agricultural potential and comparatively lower transport costs, using worldwide data that divide the earth's surface at half-degree intervals into 62,290 cells. From an independent estimate of each cell's rural and urban population history over the last 2,000 years, we identify the date at which each cell achieves various thresholds of urbanization. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across countries through fixed effects and using a variety of spatial econometric techniques, we find a robust association between earlier urbanization and agro-climatic suitability for cultivation, having seasonal frosts, better access to the ocean or navigable rivers, and lower elevation. These geographic correlations become smaller in magnitude as urbanization proceeds, and there is some variation in the effects across continents. Aggregating cells into countries, we show that an earlier urbanization date is associated with higher per capita income today. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Cost and affordability of healthy diets across and within countries

Background paper for The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020 – Price and affordability are key barriers to accessing sufficient, safe, nutritious food to meet dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. In this study, the least-cost items available in local markets are identified to estimate the cost of three diet types: energy sufficient, nutrient adequate, and healthy (meeting food-based dietary guidelines). For price and availability the World Bank’s International Comparison Program (ICP) dataset is used, which provides food prices in local currency units (LCU) for 680 foods and non-alcoholic beverages in 170 countries in 2017. In addition, country case studies are developed with national food price datasets in United Republic of Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia, Ghana and Myanmar. The findings reveal that healthy diets by any definition are far more expensive than the entire international poverty line of USD 1.90, let alone the upper bound portion of the poverty line that can credibly be reserved for food of USD 1.20. The cost of healthy diets exceeds food expenditures in most countries in the Global South. The findings suggest that nutrition education and behaviour change alone will not substantially improve dietary consumption where nutrient adequate and healthy diets, even in their cheapest form, are unaffordable for the majority of the poor. To make healthy diets cheaper, agricultural policies, research, and development need to shift toward a diversity of nutritious foods. This publication was developed as a background study for "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020" (available at https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9692en)

Africa's growth trap A political-economy model of taxation, R and D and investment

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Climate and scale in economic growth

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:9350.8339(WPS/2000-13) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo