The combined incidence of taxes and public expenditures in the Philippines

Incidence studies of fiscal policy in developing countries typically examine either the distribution of tax burdens or the incidence of public expenditures. But the central issue for policymakers is the combined or net incidence of fiscal activities. One reason that combined incidence studies are so rare is that they require detailed data on both taxation and public spending. The authors show that the net incidence of fiscal policy in a country with average data - the Philippines - can be estimated using a variety of data sources and tools, using simplifying assumptions. For 20 years, the Philippine economy has experienced a series of balance of payments crises triggered by fiscal crises. It has had an unsatisfactory record of poverty alleviation. The authors examine net fiscal incidence to find out how poverty will be affected by the rise in taxes and the cut in spending. They found that: 1) the incidence pattern of taxes is basically neutral. Contrary to expectations, indirect taxes are only slightly regressive; and 2) it is the pattern of expenditures that drives the combined incidence, which is progressive.Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Systems Development&Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Health Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform

Vermi-compost production to enterprise: case studies from Bangladesh

In recent years organic agriculture practices have been gaining support from both consumers and producers in Bangladesh. Considering the economic benefits and environmental advantages, one such practice vermi-compost, or worm based composting, is growing in popularity with small-scale households. In the program study area it is fostering entrepreneurship, and with proper guidance and monitoring, is demonstrating that it can be a profitable enterprise

Organic farming in populated area: Bangladesh – an example of case study

Agriculture plays a very important role in populated countries like Bangladesh. Bangladesh ranks eighth in World population rank and fifth in Asia. The conventional agriculture of Bangladesh after green revolution heavily depended on chemical fertilizers and pesticides causing several problems to human health and the environment. As a result, food safety has now become a big issue. Moreover, the cost of agriculture has increased manifold with declining yield levels and growing dependence on market for purchase of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Hence the most urgent step is application of bio-products in order to ensure better and safe environment without any reduction in yield of crops. Food security is also challenging considering the climate change, land degradation and natural disasters in the highly populated countries in Asia like Bangladesh. Small farmers in Bangladesh are struggling to compete with today’s liberalized and globalised market and do not get fair price of their product. Organic agriculture is considered to be a suitable agricultural production area to ensure harmonization between human welfare and sustainable development. It may be noted that organic issues are yet to be highlighted as an important agenda in the research institutions and by the policy makers. Organic products have good potential for export, the local market can also be important since many consumers are interested with food quality and food safety and eager to purchase with premium price with proper certification and labeling. To develop the organic agricultural sector in Bangladesh, government should develop appropriate policies, product standardization and support programs. This paper will discuss the importance of organic agriculture in populated countries with few examples, overall opportunities and limitations of Bangladesh

The role of organic entrepreneurship and innovation for poverty alleviation and development

Agricultural production from small farms is currently meeting the food needs of one-third of the world population. Agriculture in Asia is characterized by small holders of farmland with an average size of less than 2 hectares (80% of total farms). These small-scale farmers are challenged by increasing cost of production and decreasing profitability. They cannot afford high input agriculture, such as available chemical solutions for their crops and therefore, by default, most of them are operating as organic farmers but yet they are not fully organic. There is ample opportunity to help these marginal farms become fully organic and in turn profitable enterprises by introducing organic farming practices. To do this there is a need for policies and strategies which are pro-poor and pro-organic. Millions of small farm enterprises could be included in larger scale organic farming which would give producers profit from agriculture and transform them from subsistence to more viable farming enterprises. Poverty remains an enormous problem worldwide with over 800 million people in Asia alone living in abject poverty with nearly 20 million children either malnourished or undernourished. Reducing poverty, in all forms, is the greatest challenge for the developing countries and for the international community. Of the world’s 6 billion people, 1.2 billion live on less than one dollar a day and 2.8 billion live on less than two dollars day. The population of Bangladesh which is below the poverty line is 31.51% according to HIES-2010 (BBS, 2011) with a majority of rural households being functionally landless. To address these challenges, what is needed includes: concerted public-private partnership supported by innovative policies and strategies; the development of supportive markets; standards for organic production; and value chain development. Such changes would contribute to poverty alleviation far more effectively than conventional agricultural intervention projects, such as subsidies, mechanization or high input agricultural practices

Making education in China equitable and efficient

As China consolidates its rapid economic gains and continues its drive toward a market-oriented environment, the country's international competitiveness will depend greatly on the quality of its human resources. China has made impressive gains in human resource development in the past two decades, and continuing to do so will help reduce poverty in two ways: indirectly, by increasing the productivity and efficiency of its labor force, and directly, by fostering the earning capacity of the poor. Eventually, improving human resources will spur economic growth and enhance welfare. Progress in human resource development has steadily slowed in recent years, however, because of two broad problems. First, the distribution of education services continues to discriminate against the poor, largely because they have not benefited from recent gains in economic growth and are being choked off from access to services. Second, some mechanisms and arrangements for delivering services have created targeting inefficiencies. The author argues that the government's priorities should be to improve the equity, efficiency, and quality of social services, as well as their financing.Public Health Promotion,Primary Education,Curriculum&Instruction,Teaching and Learning,Decentralization,Teaching and Learning,Gender and Education,Primary Education,Curriculum&Instruction,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

Tackling health transition in China

Over the past three decades, China has made commendable strides in improving the health status of its population. Between 1965 and 1995, its infant mortality rate declined from 90 per 1,000 live births to 36. During the same period, life expectancy at birth rose from 55 to 69 years and the maternal mortality rate fell from 26 to 15 per 100,000 deliveries. This performance compares favorably with that in similar Asian economies. China's infant mortality rate, for example, was less that half the rate predicted for its income level, Similarly, life expectancy at birth was higher than that in many comparable Asian countries. These favorable results conceal more recent trends, however. Since the early 1990s, mortality rates have increased in many provinces, particularly among infants and children under age five. And health status and health-related process indicators have improved more slowly than in the mid -1980s. What accounts for relatively stagnant, even deteriorating health indicators, and what strategies should be designed to address them as China enters the 21st century? Overall, the author argues, the recent erosion in health gains stems from three factors: a) changes in government financing of the health sector have increased inequity, inefficiency, and costs for medical treatment; b) the main contributors to the burden of disease have shifted from maternal conditions and infectious disease toward noncommunicable diseases and injuries, the prevention of which has not been a tradition part of China's public health programs; and c) the shift to a more market-oriented economy has changed environmental and behavioral risk factors, thus diversifying the types of disease across regions. The author suggests strategies for mitigating China's current and emerging health problems.Health Systems Development&Reform,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Disease Control&Prevention,Early Child and Children's Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Adolescent Health,Gender and Health

Organic sack garden ensuring nutrition and improve the food security on small scale households

An experiment was conducted in Gazipur district of Bangladesh in 2009 to study the effect of sack/bag gardening method for the first time in Bangladesh and to observe the suitability and opportunities of the method in context of Bangladesh that one of the most vulnarable country in the world with recent climate change. The peoples who are disadvangatage and living in unfavaourable ecosystems can able to grow and cook their own vegetables and have more diversiy in their diet by growing high nutritional products. The overall objective is to improve peoples ability to be food secure and more specifically are to increase the household food consumption and production also to increase their income through these activities. From the study it was observed that the vegetable production by sack gardenining method was a effective technology and received a attention from the household communities. It was also obsearved that the households consumption pattarn has changed in some extent with practicing the technology

Advisory services on organic farming using ICT’s in Bangladesh

Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world with more than 160 million people with a very small territory of 147,570 square kilometers (BBS, 2011). To ensure food production for the huge population, the term ‘green revolution’ was appeared in 1960s with the concept of ‘grow more food’. For this, introduction of High Yielding Varieties (HYV), as well as chemical fertilizers, pesticides and ground water extraction were undertaken. As a result, food self sufficiency have achieved within a very short time. At the same time, soil fertility as well as soil health maintenance totally been ignored. The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is increasing over the years in Bangladesh (Table 1). BARC (2001) showed that soil organic matter is decreasing in some agro-ecological zones of Bangladesh (Fig.1). Subsequently, the average organic matter content of top soils have gone down, from about 2% to 1% over the last 40 years (BARC, 2001). In these aspects, the term Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has come in the sight to the advisory services of farmers safeguarding the environment in a cost effective way. ICT means information and communication technology which is an umbrella that includes any communication device or application, encompassing: radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, satellite systems and so on. Over the past few years, there has been a remarkable progress in the use of ICT’s in Bangladesh agriculture, especially in the area of farmers’ access to agro-services delivery. Various projects have been developed that integrate ICTs into the dissemination of agricultural information to farmers. This paper discusses few innovative technologies using ICTs to deliver information to farmers, focusing its analysis largely on mobile telephony, which has become more widespread recently as a means of disseminating agricultural information to farmers and offers various means of providing agricultural entrepreneurships

Weighted bootstrap consistency for matching estimators: The role of bias-correction

We show that the purpose of consistent bias-correction for matching estimators of treatment effects is two-fold. Firstly, it is known to improve point estimation to get rid of asymptotically non-negligible bias terms. Secondly, point estimates, it will also distort inference leading e.g. to invalid confidence intervals. In simulations, we show that the choice of the bias-correction estimator that practitioners still have to make, can severely affect the weighted bootstrap’s performance when estimating the asymptotic variance in finite samples. In particular, simple rules such as estimating the bias based on linear regressions in the treatment arms can lead to very poor weighted bootstrap based variance estimates

Nearest neighbor matching: Does the M-out-of-N bootstrap work when the naive bootstrap fails?

In a seminal paper Abadie and Imbens (2008) showed that the limiting variance of the classi- cal nearest neighbor matching estimator cannot be consistently estimated by a naive Efron-type bootstrap. Specifically, they show that the conditional variance of the Efron-type boostrap es- timator does not converge to the correct limit in expectation. In essence this is due to drawing with replacement such that original observations appear more than once in the bootstrap sample with positive probability even when the sample size becomes large. In the same paper, it is con- jectured that the limiting variance should be consistently estimable by an M-out-of-N bootstrap. Here, we prove that the conditional variance of an M-out-of-N-type bootstrap estimator does in- deed converge to the correct limit in expectation in the setting considered in Abadie and Imbens (2008). The key to the proof lies in the fact that asymptotically the M-out-of-N-type bootstrap sample does not contain any observations more than once with probability one. The finite sample performance of the M-out-of-N-type bootstrap is investigated in a simulation study of the DGP considered by Abadie and Imbens (2008)