Historical Missionary Activity, Schooling, and the Reversal of Fortunes: Evidence from Nigeria

This paper shows that historical missionary activity has had a persistent effect on schooling outcomes, and contributed to a reversal of fortunes wherein historically richer ethnic groups are poorer today. Combining contemporary individual-level data with a newly constructed dataset on mission stations in Nigeria, we find that individuals whose ancestors were exposed to greater missionary activity have higher levels of schooling. This effect is robust to omitted heterogeneity, ethnicity fixed effects, and reverse causation. We find inter-generational factors and the persistence of early advantages in educational infrastructure to be key channels through which the effect has persisted. Consistent with theory, the effect of missions on current schooling is larger for population subgroups that have historically suffered disadvantages in access to education

Understanding Adoption of Soil and Water Conservation Techniques: The role of new owners

This paper analyzes the adoption behavior of small holder farmers using comparable plot-level duration data for Kenya and The Philippines. We find that adoption behavior is strongly linked to the process of land ownership transfer. This relationship is found both for data from Kenya and The Philippines and is robust to the inclusion of unobserved village, household, plot and time effects. While previous studies on adoption using duration or panel data have focused on the role of various changing village- and household-level factors, no previous adoption study has emphasized the crucial role of land ownership changes

Regional Labor Market Integration, Shadow Wages and Poverty in Vietnam

Poor workers suffer from low returns to their most abundant resource, labor. In this paper we show that labor market integration strongly affects these returns for poor workers in Vietnam. Using seven representative household surveys, it is shown that while regional labor markets have become increasingly integrated over the period 1993–2010 considering market wages of workers in wage employment, there remains a strong lack of integration considering shadow wages of workers in farm self-employment. Shadow wages have been increasing as a proportion of market wages during 1993–2010, but they remain only 22–28% of rural market wages by 2010. Using a decomposition technique, it is shown that the lack of integration between the farm self-employment segment with various segments of wage employment (regional, urban versus rural, non-farm household versus other enterprises), explains primarily the gap in returns to labor between poor and non-poor workers. These findings show that labor market integration studies should not only focus on observed market wages but also on shadow wages in order to understand the relationship between labor market integration and the returns to labor

The Impact of Trade Liberalization on the Return to Education in Vietnam: Wage versus Employment Effect

Several studies have identified the impact of trade liberalization in developing countries on the return to education within a Mincerian framework through a difference-in-difference estimator or with industry-level measures of trade openness. These studies have typically estimated the return to education in terms of changes in wages rather than employment, effectively ignoring the fact that trade liberalization affects not only wages but also employment opportunities. In this paper we use four large-scale representative household surveys from Vietnam for the period 1998-2006 to estimate the impact of trade liberalization on the return to education taking into account both changes in wages and employment. The results show that the impact was large in Vietnam but is severely underestimated if changes in employment opportunities are ignored.trade liberalization, return to education, employment, Vietnam

The Changing Role of Non-Farm Household Enterprises in Vietnam

Summary In this paper we study the importance of the non-farm household enterprise (NFHE) sector in Vietnam. We do find that NFHEs increase income and reduce between-household inequality. However, the role of the NFHE sector has been diminishing, especially in urban areas, and the NFHEs have been affected by trade liberalization in the period 1993-2002. In terms of policy, this suggests that there is increasing scope for targeting NFHE sector policies at those NFHEs that are in the best position to benefit from the new opportunities in the liberalizing environment.household enterprises income inequality trade liberalization Asia Vietnam

Explaining a miracle Intensification and the transition towards sustainable small-scale agriculture in dryland Machakos and Kitui Districts, Kenya

Includes bibliographical references. Title from coverAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:9350. 8339(WPS/2001-19) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo