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92. The Meaning of Failed Replications: A Review and Proposal
- Publication Date:
- 04-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- <p>The welcome rise of replication tests in economics has not been accompanied by a single, clear definition of replication. A discrepant replication, in current usage of the term, can signal anything from an unremarkable disagreement over methods to scientific incompetence or misconduct. This paper proposes an unambiguous definition of replication, one that reflects currently common but unstandardized use. It contrasts this definition with decades of unsuccessful attempts to standardize terminology, and argues that many prominent results described as replication tests should not be described as such. Adopting this definition can improve incentives for researchers, encouraging more and better replication tests./p
93. Multiple Inequalities and Policies to Mitigate Inequality Traps in Pakistan
- Publication Date:
- 03-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- <p>The growth-inequality nexus has long been debated by researchers, social commentators and politicians. Despite being controversial, there is growing evidence of multi-dimensional inequality in developing countries, including Pakistan. Oxfam has carried out research on multiple inequalities in Pakistan in collaboration with the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), the findings of which are presented in this report. The research focused on multi-dimensional inequality in Pakistan to highlight the nature and dimensions of inequality; identify the inequality traps that exacerbate multi-dimensional inequality; examine strategies for mitigating multi-dimensional inequality; and to discuss the policy implications of these findings. This is an effort to generate a sound knowledge base around multiple inequalities in Pakistan and to initiate a national discourse on the impact of inequalities on poverty reduction efforts.</p>
94. Manufacturing or Services? An Indian Illustration of a Development Dilemma
- Author:
- Amrit Amirapu and Arvind Subramanian
- Publication Date:
- 06-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Manufacturing has historically offered the fastest path out of poverty, but there is mounting evidence that this path may be all but closed to developing countries today. Some have suggested that services might provide a new path forward, while others have expressed skepticism about this claim and consequent pessimism over the future growth trajectories of developing countries. We contribute to debate this by using a multi-sector growth framework to establish five important criteria that any sector must exhibit in order to lead an economy to rapid, sustained, and inclusive development. These are: 1) a high level of productivity, 2) “dynamic” productivity growth (i.e., high growth rates coupled with domestic and international convergence), 3) expansion of the sector in terms of its use of inputs, 4) comparative advantage, or alignment between resource requirements of the sector and resource endowments of the country, and 5) exportability. We then compare the performance of manufacturing against specific service subsectors under each of these criteria using India as a case in point. We find that many of the virtues exhibited by the manufacturing sector (such as high productivity and international and domestic convergence in productivity) are shared by some service subsectors (such as Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate). However, in the Indian case, these subsectors also share manufacturing’s flaws: they are all too skill intensive and hence unaligned with India’s comparative advantage. This poses further difficult policy questions for India and other developing countries in similar positions, which we attempt to consider in our conclusion.
95. How the New International Goal for Child Mortality Is Unfair to Africa (Again)
- Author:
- Simon Lange and Stephan Klasen
- Publication Date:
- 06-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Despite unprecedented progress towards lower under-five mortality in high-mortality countries in recent years, a large fraction of these countries will not attain the numerical target under Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4, a reduction of the mortality rate by two-thirds compared to levels in 1990. Nevertheless, many stakeholders have argued that the post-2015 agenda should contain a level-end goal for under-five mortality and recent accelerations in the rate of reduction in under-five mortality have been cited as a cause for optimism. We argue in this paper that one key fact about relative changes in mortality rates is a lack of persistence. We find robust evidence for substantial mean reversion in the data. Hence, recent accelerations observed for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are an overly optimistic estimate of future reductions. At the same time, progress as required by the old MDG4 coincides very much with our projections for Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions. Thus, while MDG4 has been rightly criticized as overly ambitious and unfair to Africa for the 1990-2015 period, such a goal seems more appropriate for the 2005-2030 period. We also offer a discussion of likely drivers of future reductions in child deaths.
96. The Health Consequences of Aerial Spraying of Illicit Crops: The Case of Colombia
- Author:
- Adriana Camacho and Daniel Mejia
- Publication Date:
- 06-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- This paper exploits the variation in aerial spraying across time and space in Colombia and employs a panel of individual health records in order to study the causal effects of aerial spraying of herbicides (Glyphosate) on short term health-related outcomes. The results show that exposure to the herbicide used in aerial spraying campaigns increases the number of medical consultations related to dermatological and respiratory related illnesses and the number of miscarriages. This finding is robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, which compares the prevalence of these medical conditions for the same person under different levels of exposure to the herbicide used in the aerial spraying program over a period of 5 years. Also, the results are robust to controlling for the extent of coca cultivation of illicit crops in the municipality of residence.
97. Call Me Educated: Evidence from a Mobile Monitoring Experiment in Niger
- Author:
- Christopher Ksoll and Jenny C. Aker
- Publication Date:
- 05-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- In rural areas of developing countries, education programs are often implemented through community teachers. While teachers are a crucial part of the education production function, observing their effort remains a challenge for the public sector. This paper tests whether a simple monitoring system, implemented via the mobile phone, can improve student learning as part of an adult education program. Using a randomized control trial in 160 villages in Niger, we randomly assigned villages to a mobile phone monitoring component, whereby teachers, students and the village chief were called on a weekly basis. There was no incentive component to the program. The monitoring intervention dramatically affected student performance: During the first year of the program, reading and math test scores were .15-.30 s.d. higher in monitoring villages than in nonmonitoring villages, with relatively stronger effects in the region where monitoring was weakest and for teachers for whom the outside option was lowest. We provide more speculative evidence on the mechanisms behind these effects, namely, teacher and student effort and motivation.
98. Can a Poverty-Reducing and Progressive Tax and Transfer System Hurt the Poor?
- Author:
- Sean Higgins and Nora Lustig
- Publication Date:
- 05-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Whether the poor are helped or hurt by taxes and transfers is generally determined by comparing income distributions before and after fiscal policy using stochastic dominance tests and measures of progressivity and horizontal inequity. We formally show that these tools can fail to capture an important aspect: that a substantial proportion of the poor are made poorer (or non-poor made poor) by the tax and transfer system.
99. The Financial Secrecy Index: Shedding New Light on the Geography of Secrecy
- Author:
- Markus Meinzer, Petr Janský, and Alex Cobham
- Publication Date:
- 05-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Both academic research and public policy debate around tax havens and offshore finance typically suffer from a lack of definitional consistency. Unsurprisingly then, there is little agreement about which jurisdictions ought to be considered as tax havens—or which policy measures would result in their not being so considered. In this article we explore and make operational an alternative concept, that of a secrecy jurisdiction and present the findings of the resulting Financial Secrecy Index (FSI). The FSI ranks countries and jurisdictions according to their contribution to opacity in global financial flows, revealing a quite different geography of financial secrecy from the image of small island tax havens that may still dominate popular perceptions and some of the literature on offshore finance. Some major (secrecy-supplying) economies now come into focus. Instead of a binary division between tax havens and others, the results show a secrecy spectrum, on which all jurisdictions can be situated, and that adjustment for the scale of business is necessary in order to compare impact propensity. This approach has the potential to support more precise and granular research findings and policy recommendations.
100. New Estimates of Global Poverty and Inequality: How Much Difference Do Price Data Really Make?
- Author:
- Peter Edward and Andy Sumner
- Publication Date:
- 05-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- This paper makes new estimates of global poverty and inequality in 2012 using both ‘old’, 2005 and ‘new’, 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) price data in order to assess systematically what difference PPP data makes to the estimates. The methodology for the 2011 PPP data is thought to be superior. However, contentions remain. We discuss the PPPs and justify the use of 2011 PPP data to estimate global poverty and inequality, at least for comparison purposes.
- Topic:
- Poverty