Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Zonder onderwerpscode

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

March 2000 - Policies to foster accumulation of the assets needed for agricultural production (including draft animals and implements) and to provide complementary public goods (education, credit, and good agricultural extension services) could greatly help reduce poverty and improve productivity in Zambia. Deininger and Olinto use a large panel data set from Zambia to examine factors that could explain the relatively lackluster performance of the country's agricultural sector after liberalization. Zambia's liberalization significantly opened the economy but failed to alter the structure of production or help realize efficiency gains. They reach two main conclusions. First, not owning productive assets (in Zambia, draft animals and implements) limits improvements in agricultural productivity and household welfare. Owning oxen increases income directly, allows farmers to till their fields efficiently when rain is delayed, increases the area cultivated, and improves access to credit and fertilizer markets. Second, the authors reject the hypothesis that the application of fertilizer is unprofitable because of high input prices. Rather, fertilizer use appears to have declined because of constraints on supplies, which government intervention exacerbated instead of alleviating. (Extending the use of fertilizer to the many producers not currently using it would be profitable, but increasing the amount applied by the few producers who now have access to it would not be.) Policies to foster accumulation of the assets needed for agricultural production (including draft animals and implements) and to provide complementary public goods (education, credit, and good agricultural extension services) could greatly help reduce poverty and improve productivity. This paper - a product of Rural Development, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to analyze determinants of rural growth and market participation. The authors may be contacted at kdeininger@worldbank.org or polinto@worldbank.org.

Cred Demand --- Economic Theory and Research --- Exports --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Financial Literacy --- Fiscal Policies --- GDP --- Goods --- Inputs --- Labor Policies --- Macro-Economic Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Markets --- Markets and Market Access --- Overvalued Exchange Rates --- Ownership --- Prices --- Production --- Production Function --- Productive Assets --- Productivity --- Risk Aversion --- Social Protections and Labor --- Subsidies --- Total Factor Productivity --- Welfare

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This paper re-examines the roles of changes in income and inequality in poverty reduction. The study provides estimates of the relative effects of inequality reduction versus growth promotion in reducing poverty for countries with different levels of initial poverty. The analysis uses country panel-data for 1980-2010. The results indicate that, as countries become less poor, inequality-reducing policies are likely to become relatively more effective for poverty reduction than growth-promoting policies. The results indicate that the growth elasticity of poverty reduction either increases or remains constant with the level of initial poverty. Nevertheless, the results also strongly indicate that, as poverty declines, the inequality elasticity of poverty reduction increases faster. Therefore, if the marginal cost of reducing inequality relative to the marginal cost of increasing growth does not increase with lower poverty levels, to accelerate poverty reduction, greater emphasis should be given to equity rather than growth as countries attain higher levels of development.

Arellano Bond Estimator --- Elasticity of Poverty --- Income Growth --- Inequality --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Services & Transfers to Poor

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This study examines the impact of publicly provided daycare for children aged 0-3 on outcomes of children and their caregivers over the course of seven years after enrollment into daycare. At the end of 2007, the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil used a lottery to assign children to limited public daycare openings. Winning the lottery translated to a 34 percent increase in time in daycare during a child's first four years of life. This allowed caregivers more time to work, resulting in higher incomes for beneficiary households in the first year of daycare attendance and 4 years later (but not after 7 years, by which time all children were eligible for universal schooling). The rise in labor force participation is driven primarily by grandparents and by adolescent siblings residing in the same household as (and possibly caring for) the child, and not by parents, most of whom were already working. Beneficiary children saw sustained gains in height-for-age and weight-for-age, due to better nutritional intake at school and at home. Gains in beneficiary children's cognitive development were observed 4 years after enrolment but not later.