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41. Heckle and Chide: Results of a Randomized Road Safety Intervention in Kenya

Author:
James Habyarimana and William Jack
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
In economies with weak enforcement of traffic regulations, drivers who adopt excessively risky behavior impose externalities on other vehicles, and on their own passengers. In light of the difficulties of correcting inter-vehicle externalities associated with weak third-party enforcement, this paper evaluates an intervention that aims instead to correct the intra-vehicle externality between a driver and his passengers, who face a collective action problem when deciding whether to exert social pressure on the driver if their safety is compromised. We report the results of a field experiment aimed at solving this collective action problem, which empowers passengers to take action. Evocative messages encouraging passengers to speak up were placed inside a random sample of over 1,000 long-distance Kenyan minibuses, or matatus, serving both as a focal point for, and to reduce the cost of, passenger action. Independent insurance claims data were collected for the treatment group and a control group before and after the intervention. Our results indicate that insurance claims fell by a half to two-thirds, from an annual rate of about 10 percent without the intervention, and that claims involving injury or death fell by at least 50 percent. Results of a driver survey eight months into the intervention suggest passenger heckling was a contributing factor to the improvement in safety.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Political Economy, and Third World
Political Geography:
Kenya and Africa

42. U.N. Peace Operations and State-building: A Case Study of Haiti

Author:
Charles T. Call
Publication Date:
03-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center on International Cooperation
Abstract:
Recently the issue of state-building has become more pronounced in the study and policy of building and consolidating peace. Despite important research exploring how state institutions relate to international and national efforts to secure peace, these issues remain underconceptualized and understudied in the operations of international organizations.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Political Violence, Democratization, Peace Studies, Third World, and United Nations
Political Geography:
Caribbean and Haiti

43. A Billion Hungry People: Governments and aid agencies must rise to the challenge

Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
The food price increases of 2007 and 2008 focused attention on a global food crisis that was already affecting more than 850 million people. Even before the 2008 food riots, some 16,000 children were dying every day from hunger-related causes – one every five seconds. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that by the end of 2008, rising prices had added 109 million to the ranks of the hungry. Today, about one in six of the world's population goes short of food, almost a billion people.
Topic:
International Relations, Humanitarian Aid, Third World, Foreign Aid, Food, and Famine

44. Blind Optimism: Challenging the myths about private health care in poor countries

Publication Date:
02-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
The stakes could not be higher. Every minute a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth for want of simple medical care; every hour 300 people die of AIDS-related illnesses; and every day 5,000 children are killed by pneumonia. The world is badly off-course to achieve the internationally agreed health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). To get back on-course and achieve universal and equitable health care for all requires a massive expansion of health services. To fail in this endeavour will be to abandon hundreds of millions of people to an early death and a life blighted by sickness. The critical question is how can such a massive scale up be achieved?
Topic:
Health, Humanitarian Aid, Third World, and Foreign Aid

45. Making Pooled Funding Work for People in Crisis

Author:
Tanja Schuemer-Cross
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
International humanitarian aid provides relief to tens of millions of people each year: in 2007 to more than 43 million people through UN humanitarian appeals alone. However, it is also often too little, too late, and unpredictable, or inappropriate to the needs of communities, including specific groups such as women and girls. The UN-led reforms since 2005 to improve humanitarian aid have begun - but only begun - to make a difference to this variable performance.
Topic:
Development, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, Third World, and Foreign Aid

46. European Food Safety Regulation and the Developing Countries: Regulatory problems and possibilities

Author:
Morten Broberg
Publication Date:
06-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
This paper examines the European Community's food safety regime in order to identify those legal measures that cause the most problems for developing countries' exporters of food products and to point to possible solutions. It is shown that barriers ma y arise due to an array of requirements, some of which may appear to be rather minor legal amendments, such as changing a sampling plan. There is no easy solution to this problem, but three specific measures are proposed: Firstly, improved harmonisation of food safety measures in the industrialised countries. Secondly, when proposing new food safety measures the European Commission should identify the proposal's likely consequences on developing countries – and should explain how alternative measures will affect both food safety and the developing countries. And lastly, the European Community should strengthen its provision of development assistance to enable the developing countries to comply with the food safety standards.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, International Trade and Finance, Third World, and Food
Political Geography:
Europe

47. What Is Poverty Reduction?

Author:
Owen Barder
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
There is a healthy debate about how to achieve poverty reduction in developing countries, but not enough discussion of what we mean by “poverty reduction.” “Poverty reduction” is often used as a short-hand for promoting economic growth that will permanently lift as many people as possible over a poverty line. But there are many different objectives that are consistent with “poverty reduction,” and we have to make choices between them. There are trade-offs between tackling current and future poverty, between helping as many poor people as possible and focusing on those in chronic poverty, and between measures that tackle the causes of poverty and those which deal with the symptoms. Because donors focus on just one dimension of poverty reduction (growth) they marginalise other legitimate objectives such as reducing chronic poverty or providing social services in countries that cannot otherwise afford them.
Topic:
Development, Environment, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, Third World, and Foreign Aid

48. Assessing the Alternatives: Financing climate change mitigation and adaptation in developing countries

Author:
Stephen Spratt
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
The global climate is changing, fast. And this is the direct result of human activity. It is broadly accepted that we need to restrict global temperature increases to as far below 2°C as possible if we are to avoid triggering runaway, irreversible and catastrophic climate change. This is very probably the greatest challenge and danger that mankind has ever faced, and evidence is mounting that time is rapidly running out if we wish to “preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” (Hansen, et al, 2008).
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, and Third World

49. Using Indicators to Encourage Development? Lessons from the Millennium Development Goals

Author:
Richard Manning
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
The Millennium Declaration included a highly significant innovation – universal, support by the world's governments for a short list of development results to be, achieved by a set date. As the target year of 2015 approaches, the paper compares the, MDG framework that emerged from the Declaration with other ways of measuring, and incentivising progress, sets out some initial hypotheses about its impact and addresses issues about its structure and coverage. This leads to proposals about how to, get the best value from the MDGs over the years to 2015 and five hypotheses about, how the world might approach the issue of what framework, if any, to put in place, to measure and incentivise development progress after 2015.
Topic:
Development, Health, Human Welfare, Humanitarian Aid, International Cooperation, International Political Economy, Third World, and United Nations

50. Do Regulatory Reforms Stimulate Investment and Growth? Evidence from the Doing Business Data

Author:
Benjamin P. Eifert
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
The role of regulatory barriers in inhibiting entrepreneurship, investment and employment creation is an old topic in economics. This study utilizes a five-year panel of data on regulations and procedures from the World Bank's Doing Business project, along with Arellano-Bond dynamic panel estimators, looking for evidence that regulatory reforms lead to higher aggregate investment rates (roughly, factor demand) or GDP growth conditional on investment rates (roughly, factor productivity). It looks both at individual regulatory indicators and more aggregate measures of the incidence of reforms, finding some evidence of positive impacts of regulatory reforms in countries which are relatively poor (conditional on governance) and relatively well-governed (conditional on income). Relatively poor and relatively well-governed countries grow about 0.4 and 0.2 percentage points faster in the year immediately following one or more reforms, respectively. In both subsets of countries, investment rates accelerate by about 0.6 percentage points in the subsequent year.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Markets, Poverty, and Third World