The Dynamics of Nutrition and Child Health Stocks

Height-for-age (HA) and weight-for-age (WA) of children are standard measures to study the determinants of stunting and short-term underweight. Rather than studying these indicators separately, this paper looks at their interaction and therefore at the dynamics of height and weight. Considering HA a child's health stock and WA nutritional investment, we develop an overlapping generations model. The main features of the model are self-productivity of health stocks and the dynamic complementarity between past health stocks and contemporaneous nutrition. We test the model's predictions on a Senegalese panel of 305 children between 0 and 5 years over three periods. To control for endogeneity and serial correlation we employ different GMM methods. We find evidence of self- productive health stocks and that child health produced at one stage raises the productivity of nutritional inputs at subsequent stages. Our results indicate that child health is quickly depleted and needs constant updating. Simulations based on our estimates show that a positive nutritional shock during the first six months of life is essentially depleted at the age of 2. Consequently, sustainable development and nutrition programs have to be long-term and yield higher returns if they reach babies in the early months of infancy

Oil, Gas and Minerals: The Impact of Resource-Dependence and Governance on Sustainable Development

It has often been argued that oil, gas and minerals may have a negative impact on development as measured by income per capita. This does not say much about sustainability, which is critical for developing countries whose economic growth derives primarily from the exploitation of exhaustible resources

Aid, peasants and social exclusion

Using unique village census data collected in 2003 and 2008 in Senegal, we assess the impact of a major World Bank-funded Community Driven Development (CDD) program on membership and assortative matching in community-based organizations (CBOs). We implement both standard discrete choice and dyadic regression techniques. We find that channeling development aid through CBOs makes these organizations more inclusive in the sense that a number of traditionbound assortative matching patterns are partly broken. Ceteris paribus, this leads to more heterogeneous CBOs. On the other hand, the likelihood of CBO membership is reduced in treated villages, with significant differences between men and women. Our results suggest that grassroots level development projects which target CBOs must be carefully designed and executed if they are not to result, paradoxically, in a greater degree of social exclusion, with differentiation by gender playing a crucial role

Gender, ethnicity and teaching evaluations : Evidence from mixed teaching teams

This paper studies the effect of teacher gender and ethnicity on student evaluations of teaching quality at university. We analyze a unique data-set featuring mixed teaching teams and a diverse, multicultural, multi-ethnic group of students and teachers. Co-teaching allows us to study the impact of teacher gender and ethnicity on students’ evaluations of teaching exploiting within course variation in an empirical model with course-year fixed effects. We document a negative effect of being a female teacher on student evaluations of teaching, which amounts to roughly one fourth of the sample standard deviation of teaching scores. Overall women are 11 percentage points less likely to attain the teaching evaluation cut-off for promotion to associate professor. The effect is robust to a host of co-variates such as course leadership, teacher experience and research quality. There is no evidence of a corresponding ethnicity effect. Our results point to an important gender bias and indicate that the use of teaching evaluations in hiring and promotion decisions may put female lectures at a disadvantage

Improving police integrity in Uganda: Impact assessment of the police accountability and reform project

Uganda and in particular the Ugandan police are perceived as highly corrupt. To address the integrity of police officers, an intervention called the Police Accountability and Reform Project (PARP) was implemented in selected police districts between 2010 and early 2013. This paper studies the impact of PARP for a sample of 600 police officers who were interviewed about police integrity by means of 12 hypothetical vignette cases depicting context-specific, undesirable behavior of varying degrees of severity. The assessments of the cases by the police officers are analyzed using propensity score matching, inverse probability weighting, and seemingly unrelated regression techniques. We show that the self-selection of police officers into the program is unlikely to drive the results. The results suggest that officers participating in PARP activities (1) judge the presented cases of misconduct more severely, (2) are more inclined to report misconduct, and (3) also expect their colleagues to judge misbehavior at the police level more critically although the latter two coefficient estimates are smaller in size. This suggests that PARP activities have affected the perception of police officers but only encouraged them moderately to actually take action against bad practices

When I receive the SMS, it is a sign of love: Symbolic Connotations of SMS messages for People living with HIV in Burkina Faso

Mobile health (mHealth) has gained considerable interest recently due to its potential to improve health outcomes in developing countries with high outreach yet low costs. Several studies have explored the use of short message service (SMS) reminders to improve antiretroviral (ARV) retention and adherence, with mixed results. The majority of these studies has a quantitative nature and employs randomized designs, which do not provide further qualitative insights about other possible impacts of the messages. Based on the qualitative assessment of an SMS intervention in Burkina Faso, which complemented a (quantitative) Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT), we show that beyond the functional role of improving ARV retention and adherence, SMS messages can also play important symbolic roles in offering psychosocial support to people living with HIV (PLHIV) and improving their perception of life. Concomitantly, we show that sufficient (ICT) literacy skills cannot be taken for granted in resource-poor settings. Yet, regardless of (ICT) literacy skills, the symbolism of care was perceived. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of complementing quantitative evidence of mHealth interventions with qualitative assessments

Macroeconomic impacts of Universal Health Coverage : Synthetic control evidence from Thailand

We study the impact of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) on various macroeconomic outcomes in Thailand using synthetic control methods. Thailand is compared to a weighted average of control countries in terms of aggregate health and economic performance over the period 1995 to 2012. Our results suggest that financial protection in Thailand has improved relative to its synthetic counterfactual. While out-of-pocket payments as a percentage of overall health expenditures decreased by 16.9 percentage points, annual government per capita health spending increased by $78. However, we detect no impact on total health spending per capita nor the share of the government budget allocated to health. We find positive health impacts as captured by reductions in infant and child mortality. The introduction of UHC has had no discernible impact on GDP per capita. Our results complement micro evidence based on within country variation. The counterfactual design implemented here may be used to inform other countries on the causal repercussions and benefits of UHC at the macroeconomic level

Universal health coverage at the macro level: Synthetic control evidence from Thailand

As more and more countries are moving towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC), it is important to understand the macro level or aggregate impacts of such a policy. We use synthetic control methods to study the impact of UHC, introduced in Thailand in 2001, on various macroeconomic and health outcomes. Thailand is compared to a weighted average of control countries in terms of aggregate health financing indicators, aggregate health outcomes and economic performance, over the period 1995 to 2012. Our results suggest that UHC helps alleviate the financial consequences of illnesses. The estimated treatment effect of UHC on out-of-pocket payments as a percentage of overall health expenditures is negative 13 percentage points and its effect on annual government per capita health spending is US$79. We detect a smaller effect of US$ 60.8 on total health spending per capita which appears with a lag. We document positive health effects as captured by reductions in infant and child mortality. We do not find any effect on GDP and the share of the government budget devoted to health. Overall, our results complement micro evidence based on within country variation. The counterfactual design implemented here may be used to inform other countries on the macro level repercussions of UHC

Determinants of intended return migration among refugees : A comparison of Syrian refugees in Germany and Turkey

This study assesses whether Syrian refugees intend to return to Syria, taking account of the economic, cultural and institutional differences between their country of origin and the host country. We develop a simple theoretical model on return migration and optimal duration of stay in the host country to identify the potential trade-offs faced by refugees. We then assess the theoretical predictions empirically with a sample of 577 Syrian refugees living in Germany and Turkey. Three return scenarios are considered: (i) ever returning, (ii) returning when it is as safe in Syria as before the war, and (iii) returning within two years. Refugees in the immediately neighbouring country of Turkey are more likely to regard their stay as temporary (76%) compared to those who fled to geographically more distant Germany (55%,