Rural Demography, Public Services and Land Rights in Africa: A
Village-Level Analysis in Burkina Faso (with William Masters and
Margaret McMillan).
Abstract: This paper uses historical census data from Burkina Faso to
characterize local demographic pressures associated with internal
migration into river valleys after Onchocerciasis eradication, combined
with a new survey of village elders to document change over time and
differences across villages in local public goods provision, market
institutions and land use rights. We hypothesize that higher local
population densities are associated with more public goods and a
transition from open-access to regulated land use. Controlling for
province or village fixed effects, we find that villages’ variance in
population
associated with proximity to rivers is closely correlated with higher
levels of infrastructure, markets and individual land rights, as
opposed to familial or communal rights. Responding to population growth
with both improved public services and private property rights is
consistent with both scale effects in public good provision, and
changes in the scarcity of land. Also available as NBER working paper
17718
Child
Labor, Schooling, and Child Ability (Richard Akresh, Emilie Bagby
and Damien de Walque)
Abstract: Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how
children’s cognitive abilities influence resource constrained
households’ decisions to invest in their education. To address the
potential endogeneity of current measures
of child ability, we use rainfall shocks in the child’s village that
were experienced in utero or during early childhood to instrument for
cognitive ability. Negative rainfall shocks experienced in utero lead
to 0.24 standard deviations lower ability z-scores and that corresponds
with a 38 percent drop in enrollment and a 49 percent increase in the
number of hours of child labor compared to their siblings. Negative
education impacts are largest for shocks experienced in utero,
diminished for shocks before age two, and have no impact for shocks
after age two. Results are consistent with alternative education and
child labor outcomes, and are robust to placebo tests focusing on
rainfall shocks prior to the child being in utero.
Child
Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso
(with Richard Akresh, Emilie Bagby and Damien de Walque) Abstract:Using
data they collected in rural Burkina Faso, the authors examine how
children’s
cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households’
decisions to invest
in their education. This paper uses a direct measure of child ability
for all
primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment.
The
analysis explicitly incorporates direct measures of the ability of each
child’s
siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling
rivalry exerts
an impact on the parents’ decision of whether and how much to invest in
their
child’s education. The findings indicate that children with one
standard
deviation higher own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently
enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers current
enrollment by 16
percent and having two higher ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30
percent.
The results are robust to addressing the potential reverse causality of
schooling influencing child ability measures and using alternative
cognitive
tests to measure ability. Also available as a World
Bank
Policy
Research
Working
Paper
School Feeding Programs, Intrahousehold
Allocation and the
Nutrition of Siblings: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Rural
Burkina Faso (with Daminen
de
Walque and Harold Alderman) Abstract:We
evaluate the impact of two school feeding schemes on health outcomes of
pre-school age children in Burkina Faso: school meals which provide
students with lunch each school day, and dry rations which provide
girls with 10 kg of cereal flour each month, conditional on 90 percent
attendance rate. We investigated the pass through to younger siblings
of the beneficiaries and found that both dry rations and school meals
have increased weight-for-age of boys by .57, and by .40 standard
deviations, respectively compared to a control group. Neither program
had significant impact on girls. We provide evidence indicating that
most of the gains are realized through intra-household food
reallocation.
Abstract: People living with
HIV/AIDS in Africa are among the most vulnerable because of the
debilitating effect of the illness, which prevents them from having an
income-generating activity. As highly active anti-retroviral treatments
are developed, and access to this therapy scaled-up, they are able to
improve their health to a point of living a normal life. The treatment,
however, requires to be taken in certain conditions, such as after a
nutritious meal, and can be costly in terms of travel to the health
facility, even if the drug regimen is subsidized. In this context, the
impact of a food crisis on welfare, and in particular, on food
consumption, can have a very negative impact of adherence to treatment
and health outcomes. To test this hypothesis, we use data from a
longitudinal survey carried out in Mozambique in 2007 and 2008, which
was designed to include households with HIV positive individuals as
well as comparison households with no identified HIV positive members.
Food grain prices have risen by 150% between January 2006 and June
2008, with about 40% of that rise that occurred in just the first half
of 2008. We find that, as a likely effect of the food crisis, there has
been a real deterioration of welfare in terms of income, food
consumption and nutritional status in Mozambique between 2007 and 2008,
among both HIV and comparison households. However, HIV households have
not suffered more from the crisis than others. We conjecture that
initiation of treatment and better services in the health facilities
have counter-balanced the effect of the crisis by improving the health
of patients and their labor force participation.
Abstract: We use health facility
level survey which was
administered to health staff and outpatients to assess healthcare
quality, and
evaluate the extent to which health care quality is related to costs,
and
whether costs and quality differ for HIV/AIDS related patients. We
measure
health care quality by patients’ self-reported satisfaction and a
vignette
score assessing the quality of healthcare practices.We find that consulting for HIV-related
services, while not more costly to patients significantly increases the
quality
of care received. Consulting for HIV/AIDS also increases substantially
the time
spent waiting to be served. The wealth of patients does not affect care
quality, but helps in reducing waiting time, in particular for HIV
patients.
Our findings are robust to controlling for health facility level fixed
effects.
Abstract: This
paper uses a prospective
randomized trial to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on
health
and education outcomes for children from low-income households in
northern rural Burkina Faso. The two
school feeding programs under consideration are, on the one hand,
school meals
where students are provided with lunch each school day, and, on the
other hand,
take home rations which provide girls with 10 kg of cereal flour each
month,
conditional on 90 percent attendance rate. After the program ran for
one academic
year, both programs increased girls’ enrollment by 5 to 6 percentage
points.While there was no observable
significant impact on raw scores on mathematics, the time-adjusted
scores on
mathematics improved slightly for girls.The interventions caused absenteeism to increase in households
who are
low in child labor supply while absenteeism decreased for households
which have
a relatively large child labor supply, consistent with the labor
constraints.Finally, for younger
siblings of beneficiaries, aged between 12 and 60 months, take-home rations have increased
weight-for-age by .38 standard deviations and weight-for-height by .33
standard
deviations. In contrast, school meals
did not have any significant impact on the nutrition of younger
children.
Also available as a World
Bank
Policy
Research
Working
Paper
The
Intra-Household Economics of
Polygyny:
Fertility and Child Health in Rural Mali (with Stefan Klonner) Abstract: Abstract: Building on anthropological
evidence, we
develop a model of intra-household decision making on fertility and
child survival within the framework of the collective household model.
We carry out a test of the implications of this framework with data
from Demographic and Health Surveys in rural Mali, where polygyny rates
among married women are close to 50 per cent. The econometric tests
reject the implications of efficient intrahousehold allocations for
junior wives in bigynous households and fail to reject for senior wives
in bigynous households as well as for wives in monogamous households.
These findings are consistent with existent narrative evidence
according to which co-wife rivalry is responsible for
resource-consuming struggle and junior wives are the adults with the
weakest bargaining position in the household.
Economic
Role
of
Children
and
the
Demand
for
Wives:
Evidence
from Burkina Faso (with Nistha
Sinha) Abstract: This paper uses data
from
rural Burkina Faso
to probe the links between the
economic contribution
of children in low income economies and men’s fertility preference, and
to show
how men’s demand for children determines the number of wives a man
marries. The
empirical results indicate that men demand more children in areas where
child
productivity is high, which in turn induce men to take more than one
wife.
Conditional on our identification strategy, our findings have three
caveats.
First, they broaden the analysis of determinants of polygyny, providing
some
explanation to the variation in number of wives within a relatively
homogenous
agricultural system where variation in female productivity may be
limited.
Second, the results show the important role of men in areas where
polygyny is
practiced. Third, the results imply that policies that provide old age
security, discourage child labor or encourage schooling may reduce the
occurrence of polygyny.