Three Essays on Household Behaviours and Welfare in Development Context

Three Essays on Household Behaviours and Welfare in Development Context PDF Author: Tu Chi Nguyen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description


Three Essays on the Economics of Household Behaviour in Developing Countries

Three Essays on the Economics of Household Behaviour in Developing Countries PDF Author: Ramesh Subramaniam
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780315982178
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description


Essays on Household Behavior in Developing Economies

Essays on Household Behavior in Developing Economies PDF Author: Yu-hsuan Su
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays in development economics. I explore various household behaviors in developing economies, using India and Tanzania as examples. The first two chapters focus on urban slums to capture the inequality within cities and to evaluate the impact of an intervention during urbanization. The third chapter investigates the influence of an inheritance law reform on child labor. The first chapter, which is a joint work with Claus Portner, examines the differences in child health across rural, urban non-slum and slum areas. The developing world is rapidly becoming more and more urban, but our understanding of the differences between urban and rural areas is still limited, especially in the important area of child health and its determinants. Simple averages show clearly that child health in India is worst in rural areas and best in urban areas---with slums in between---but it is unclear exactly what accounts for these differences. We examine the determinants of these differences and to what extent the same mechanisms affect child health in different areas using the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) data from India. Once we control for environmental conditions and wealth status, the urban advantage in child health disappears and slum children fare substantially worse than their rural counterparts. We also examine the impact of maternal education on child health across rural, urban, and slum areas and find that the positive effect of mother's education on child health is significantly stronger in rural areas than in cities and almost entirely absent in slums. Potential explanations for these results, such as school quality and migration, are explored, but these are unlikely to fully explain the differences in health. The second chapter, which is a joint work with Aidan Coville, evaluates the impact of a slum upgrading project in Tanzania. Developing countries spend significant amounts of their budgets annually on slum upgrading activities, with the broad objectives of alleviating poverty, improving health and well-being and strengthening the social fabric within these communities in a holistic and integrated manner. Rigorous evidence on the impact of these programs is sparse. Isolating the causal impact of these interventions presents a challenge, since the outcomes of interest are often correlated with the site selection for upgrading, and randomized controlled trials are not usually feasible for practical implementation reasons. While rigorous research is beginning to emerge on the effects of slum upgrading on diarrhea, acute respiratory illness (ARI) and the crowding out of private investments, very little is known about the broader impacts of the upgrading process that serve to motivate these interventions in the first place. This paper evaluates the Community Infrastructure Upgrading Program (CIUP) financed by the World Bank with the aim of improving the lives of slum dwellers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania through targeted investments in community infrastructure such as roads, drainage systems and streetlights. We find that the CIUP interventions increased household sizes and decreased out-migration, halved diarrhea rates for children under 5, and increased female school enrollment rates, but did not have significant impacts on employment, business operations, income and expenditure, private investment or social cohesion. We review possible confounding factors that influence the reliability of these estimates and present the results in light of these methodological constraints. The third chapter examines the relationship between female autonomy and child labor in India. Many children in developing countries are engaged in various forms of child labor. It is important to understand the determinants of child labor and to evaluate its welfare implications. Intra-household bargaining has been considered an important factor in household decision-making for investment in children. This paper uses the Hindu Succession Act Amendment (HSAA) in India as a source of exogenous variation in woman's bargaining power and information from the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) to study the effect on child labor. I find that the increase in mothers' bargaining power is associated with a lower probability of child labor, and this negative impact is especially strong for teenage daughters. A daughter of 12 to 14 years old is less likely to be working by 30 percentage points and is less likely to do family work by 20.6 percentage points if her mother is exposed to the HSAA. The HSAA also shows differential impact on families with different sizes and wealth status.

Household Behaviour, Prices, and Welfare

Household Behaviour, Prices, and Welfare PDF Author: Ranjan Ray
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811319308
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Book Description
This collection of essays covers a diverse set of topics related to household behavior and welfare. Prices play a key role in several of the essays, particularly the distributional implications of price movements, and the effects of changes in relative prices on inequality and poverty. This book shows the shift in the literature on prices from being an exclusively macro topic featuring the study of inflation and cross-country comparisons to one that is firmly rooted in micro theory-based analysis of household behavior. It also includes recent developments in the poverty measurement literature, documenting the shift from the exclusively money metric and unidimensional poverty measures to multidimensional poverty encompassing a wider view of deprivation. Largely, but not exclusively, focusing on India, the book also features global comparisons of welfare. Intra country spatial comparisons along with cross country comparisons of household behavior and welfare feature in several of the essays in this book. The book also compares the effects of selected public delivery schemes in India on the health of its children. It is a useful resource for researchers and serves as reading material for advanced graduate courses on development in India and elsewhere.

Understanding Consumption

Understanding Consumption PDF Author: Angus Deaton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198288244
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
An overview of the saving and consumption patterns of households

Parenting Matters

Parenting Matters PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309388570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 525

Book Description
Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

From Neurons to Neighborhoods

From Neurons to Neighborhoods PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309069882
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 610

Book Description
How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen

Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen PDF Author: Kaushik Basu
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191553557
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 617

Book Description
Amartya Sen has made deep and lasting contributions to the academic disciplines of economics, philosophy, and the social sciences more broadly. He has engaged in policy dialogue and public debate, advancing the cause of a human development focused policy agenda, and a tolerant and democratic polity. This argumentative Indian has made the case for the poorest of the poor, and for plurality in cultural perspective. It is not surprising that he has won the highest awards, ranging from the Nobel Prize in Economics to the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. This public recognition has gone hand in hand with the affection and admiration that Amartya's friends and students hold for him. This volume of essays, written in honor of his 75th birthday by his students and peers, covers the range of contributions that Sen has made to knowledge. They are written by some of the world's leading economists, philosophers and social scientists, and address topics such as ethics, welfare economics, poverty, gender, human development, society and politics. This first volume covers the topics of Ethics, Normative Economics and Welfare; Agency, Aggregation and Social Choice; Poverty, Capabilities and Measurement; and Identity, Collective Action and Public Economics. It is a fitting tribute to Sen's own contributions to the discourse on Ethics, Welfare and Measurement. Contributors include: Sabina Alkire, Paul Anand, Sudhir Anand, Kwame Anthony Appiah, A. B. Atkinson, Walter Bossert, Francois Bourguignon, John Broome, Satya R. Chakravarty, Rajat Deb, Bhaskar Dutta, James E. Foster, Wulf Gaertner, Indranil K. Ghosh, Peter Hammond, Christopher Handy, Christopher Harris, Satish K. Jain, Isaac Levi, Oliver Linton, S. R. Osmani, Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Edmund S. Phelps, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Martin Ravallion, Kevin Roberts, Ingrid Robeyns, Maurice Salles, Cristina Santos, T. M. Scanlon, Arjun Sengupta, Tae Kun Seo, Anthony Shorrocks , Ron Smith, Joseph E. Stiglitz, S. Subramanian, Kotaro Suzumura, Alain Trannoy, Guanghua Wan, John A. Weymark, and Yongsheng Xu.

A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty

A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309483980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 619

Book Description
The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.

Control of Human Behavior, Mental Processes, and Consciousness

Control of Human Behavior, Mental Processes, and Consciousness PDF Author: Walter J. Perrig
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135679649
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Book Description
In this book, an international group of leading scientists present perspectives on the control of human behavior, awareness, consciousness, and the meaning and function of perceived control or self-efficacy in people's lives. The book breaks down the barriers between subdisciplines, and thus constitutes an occasion to reflect on various facets of control in human life. Each expert reviews his or her field through the lens of perceived control and shows how these insights can be applied in practice.