World Development最新文献

{"title":"Asymmetric sovereign risk: Implications for climate change preparation","authors":"Jose E. Gomez-Gonzalez ,&nbsp;Jorge M. Uribe ,&nbsp;Oscar M. Valencia","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106908","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106908","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Climate change adaptation efforts heavily depend on a country’s fiscal capacity and the costs associated with implementing adaptation policies. The high levels of debt currently accumulated by developing countries, which disproportionately bear the brunt of climate change, raise significant concerns. We investigate whether these asymmetric economic conditions are reflected in how sovereign spreads react to climate change risks across different countries. Our study introduces a panel quantile model with fixed effects from statistical medicine and leverages recent advances in machine learning to address selection bias often encountered when constructing a balanced panel of spreads across countries for varying maturities. Our findings indicate that sovereign risk and, consequently, funding costs for governments exhibit significantly asymmetric reactions to their determinants across the conditional distribution of credit spreads. Countries with elevated risk levels are disproportionately impacted by climate change vulnerability compared to their lower-risk counterparts, particularly in the short term. Notably, investing in climate change preparedness proves effective in mitigating vulnerability, especially regarding sovereign risk for countries with low spreads and long-term debt. However, for those with high spreads and short-term debt, additional measures are essential, as climate change readiness alone is often insufficient to offset vulnerability effects. Our results contribute to the understanding of the ecological transition and the fiscal risks faced by developing countries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106908"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143167619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The employment profile of cities around the world: Consumption vs. production cities and economic development","authors":"Remi Jedwab ,&nbsp;Elena Ianchovichina ,&nbsp;Federico Haslop","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106883","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106883","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Census data for 7000 cities – three fourth of the world’s urban population – reveal that cities of the same population size in countries with similar development levels differ substantially in terms of their employment composition, especially in the developing world. Using these data, we classify cities into <em>production cities</em> with high employment shares of <em>urban tradables</em> (e.g., manufacturing or business services), <em>consumption cities</em> with high employment shares of <em>urban non-tradables</em> (e.g., retail and personal services), or <em>neutral cities</em> with a balanced mix of urban tradables and non-tradables. After establishing stylized facts regarding the sectoral distribution of employment in our global sample of cities, we discuss the various paths by which developing nations may urbanize through production cities – via industrialization or tradable services – or consumption cities – via resource exports, agricultural exports, or deindustrialization. Country and city-level data corroborate our hypotheses. Results on the construction of very tall buildings also provide suggestive evidence on the relationship between resource exports and consumption cities. Importantly, consumption cities seem to present lower growth opportunities than production cities, diminishing the role of cities as “engines of growth.” Understanding how sectoral structure mediates the urbanization-growth relationship and how consumption cities become production cites is thus highly relevant for policy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106883"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the distributional effects of principal-agent problems: Evidence from China’s shell farmer cooperatives","authors":"Wenyuan Hua","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106915","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106915","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the distributional consequences of a poignant example of the principal-agent problem in China: local officials and the public (i.e. the agents) establish “shell cooperatives” that only exist in name at the urging of the central government (i.e. the principal). Using a novel data on the county-level shell cooperatives from the State Administration for Industry and Commerce of China, we investigate the effects of the shell cooperative problem on local poverty alleviation. Our results suggest that rural households in counties that were exposed to a more severe shell cooperative problem were associated with a reduced income per capita, an increased income gap, and a lower probability of staying out of poverty. We also find supportive evidence for the plausible mechanisms behind the distributional effects of the shell cooperative problem: decreased subsidy availability, restricted financial access, reduced public goods provision and undermined social trust. Overall, our study offers a novel perspective to shed light on the distributional consequences of the principal-agent problem.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106915"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The labour market effects of cash transfers to the unemployed: Evidence from South Africa","authors":"Haroon Bhorat,&nbsp;Timothy Köhler","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106889","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106889","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper considers the labour market effects of an unconditional cash transfer targeted at the unemployed in a context of extreme unemployment. Using a staggered, heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences design applied to panel labour force survey data, we estimate the contemporaneous and dynamic effects of a new transfer introduced in South Africa, the Social Relief of Distress grant, the first labour market-linked transfer in the country’s history. We find that, on average, receipt has positive effects on the probabilities of job search, trying to start a business, and employment. The latter effects are driven by effects on wage and informal sector employment. We show that employment effects are positive for the unemployed who are either actively searching for work or trying to start a business, as well as for those who are not, but they are substantially larger for the former. This indicates that the transfer both encourages and improves the efficiency of labour market activity by addressing labour market constraints, but highlights the importance of active labour market engagement for improving employment prospects through the transfer. However, these employment effects are non-linear, in that they are evident in the short-term but quickly become and remain null in the longer-term. These results suggest that cash transfers can help reduce labour market constraints but such gains need not translate into better longer-term employment prospects in high-unemployment contexts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106889"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The cousin marriage tradition and performance of businesses during the economic crises in Nigeria","authors":"Saul Estrin ,&nbsp;Tomasz Mickiewicz ,&nbsp;Tolu Olarewaju","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106910","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106910","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Strong kinship structures correspond to important informal institutions that provide some social insurance to businesses in developing economies. More specifically, we posit that, during an economic crisis, businesses located in areas characterised by an in-group supporting marriage tradition (cousin marriage) will experience weaker negative effects on their profitability. We speculate that the cousin marriage tradition is associated with dense structures of kinship-based contacts between individuals, which creates the basis for effective social sanctions that support the cooperation needed during crises. Such structures may enhance the resilience of the local social systems; and local businesses may draw on local, socially available resources, which will attenuate the impact of crises on their financial performance. We utilise the data from the 2018–2019 Nigeria Living Standard Survey and find support for our hypotheses.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106910"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Global Distributions of Capital and Labor Incomes","authors":"Marco Ranaldi","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106849","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106849","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article studies the global distributions of capital and labor incomes among individuals in 2000 and 2016. By constructing a novel database covering approximately 80% of the global output and 60% of the world population, two major findings stand out. First, the world underwent an important process of capitalization. The share of world individuals with positive capital income rose from 20% to 32%. Second, the global middle class benefited the most, in relative terms, from such a capitalization process, with China being the main driver of this global trend. The findings of this paper are robust to changes in the income definition, top-income and functional income distribution adjustments. The global composition of capital and labor incomes is more equal today than it was twenty years ago.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106849"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Inclusion and social contracts in Tunisia: Navigating the complexities of political and socio-economic transformation","authors":"Erin McCandless","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106848","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106848","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Societal demands for more politically and socio-economically inclusive social contracts are growing globally. In Tunisia, despite a celebrated highly inclusive political transition process, the country was back on what many cite as an authoritarian path one decade on, with strong societal support. As analysts have observed, the expected and hoped-for inclusive socio-economic outcomes did not sufficiently or expediently follow, and societal buy-in into the transition process unraveled. While such democratic reversals are not uncommon, and transitions are notoriously neither linear nor smooth, the Tunisia case offers important, nuanced insights into questions of how inclusion functions as a driver of change in social contracts, what types of inclusion matter to people at different stages of a transition process, and the challenges and potential entry points for achieving more sustained and transformative outcomes. Drawing from interdisciplinary literatures to tackle this complex, multi-dimensional topic, an analytical framing is developed to assess inclusion in processes (primarily political and civil) and outcomes (political, civil, and especially socio-economic) driving change in Tunisia’s social contract, and the nature and sustainability of change. Findings reveal how and why inclusive outcomes (and related, desired large-scale shifts in social contracts) necessitate structural, transformative measures and addressing of core grievances – in this case, grievances that drove Tunisia’s revolution.</div><div>These findings offer nuanced evidence and theoretical insights, demonstrating how societal expectations of inclusion encompass both process-oriented participation and outcome-oriented deliverables, with the latter influencing social contract stability and legitimacy. At a time when traditional assumptions about social contracts are being challenged globally, understanding how societies evaluate and potentially reshape these fundamental state-society bargains has profound implications for scholars of development, democratization, social change and peace, particularly regarding the relationship between political transformation and socio-economic inclusion.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106848"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Crafting work and workspaces: A qualitative study of the meaning of work for women in the weaving sector in Kashmir","authors":"Humaira Chowdhury ,&nbsp;Kamini Gupta","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106877","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106877","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prior research has discussed a number of barriers that hinder Indian women’s participation in the workforce, especially outside their homes. We build on this research to explore how women use their agency to creatively negotiate with these barriers to access workplaces outside their home, as well as the non-wage benefits and meaning they associate with it. We use a qualitative methodology, privileging the voices of women workers themselves, to understand how women artisans from low-income households in Kashmir navigated structural barriers such as demands of respectability, unpaid care work and restricted mobility, to make work choices. We found that women used a specific set of resources rooted in space and time to access paid work at weaving centers outside their home. In addition, they exercised agency in remaking the workplace such that it had the right ‘mahaul’ (environment) which conformed with ideals of feminine modesty and respectability; and crafted ‘in-between’ workplaces that blended aspects of both the ‘home’ and the ‘outside’, consistent with their need for flexibility and mobility restrictions. Our study revealed that these ‘in-between’ workplaces, in turn, provided a ‘sanctuary’ like space for women weavers, which not only helped them to overcome financial precarity, but also, emotional precarity. These findings contribute to the literature on women and paid work in India by challenging the binary of ‘home-based’ and ‘outside’ to make room for novel articulations about ‘in-between’ spaces of work; and by emphasising the benefits of locational embeddedness and an ‘occupational community’ in the context of immobility in Kashmir.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106877"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exploring the determinants of household water treatment in Kabul: A COM-B model perspective in a low-income context","authors":"Mohammad Daud Hamidi ,&nbsp;Marco J. Haenssgen ,&nbsp;H.Chris Greenwell","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106902","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106902","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Access to clean drinking water remains a major challenge in low- and middle-income countries, causing premature death from waterborne diseases, especially in water-insecure settings such as Afghanistan. While technologies and solutions for household-level water treatment exist, models to guide behaviour change for their adoption tend to stress psychological dimensions of behaviour with relatively little grounding in local expressions and contextual drivers of households’ water treatment behaviour in low- and middle-income countries.</div><div>Speaking to this challenge, our study explores factors influencing household water treatment in <em>peri</em>-urban Kabul, using the COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation – Behaviour) as a guiding framework for analysis. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a purposive (maximally diverse) sample of 68 participants across two Kabul neighbourhoods to inform the framework. The data was collected from May to July 2021.</div><div>Our qualitative findings cover themes including water realities, common water storage and treatment practices, the process of navigating and negotiating water treatment, and discontinuities therein. Among others, this shows that residents’ everyday experiences with water are shaped by sensory quality indicators like smell and turbidity, but also illness experiences due to limited formal water information. The complex assemblage of factors shaping households’ navigation and negotiation of water treatment options included gender roles, household economics, technology availability, efficacy perceptions, and competing priorities. In addition, our qualitative data documents how the emergency-focused approach to water security by NGOs contributed occasionally to scepticism, trust erosion, and discontinuities in household water treatment methods.</div><div>Our study challenges the literature’s emphasis on psychological dimensions of water behaviour as similarly salient contextual factors include social dynamics, infrastructure, electricity disruptions, and the physical environment. We recommend that behaviourally-informed interventions should be tailored to the realities of underserved communities, for example by increasing community involvement, targeting affordable technologies resilient to disruptions, and addressing contextual barriers like infrastructure limitations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106902"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Relaxation of fertility policy and firm’s short-term hiring of female employees: Evidence from China","authors":"Qian Huang,&nbsp;Ziang Fan","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106904","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106904","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Most existing studies have focused on the impacts of childbearing decisions and policies on female labor market outcomes, overlooking their effects on firms’ hiring. Over the past decade, China has gradually relaxed its fertility policies. This paper examines the effects of fertility policy relaxation (FPR) on hiring decisions in Chinese firms. We develop a theoretical model integrating fertility intentions and firms’ employment forms. Subsequently, we investigate the impact of the FPR on the employment term structure of firms using a Difference-in-Differences method. We find that the FPR results in a short-term employment trend for female employees eligible for a second child. This effect is particularly pronounced among low-skilled women, those without sons, and those employed in large, labor-intensive firms. In terms of the potential mechanisms, the FPR increases both the quasi-fixed cost and total cost associated with hiring these employees, reduces their labor productivity, and makes firms less inclined to offer fixed wages. Our study highlights a policy conflict between encouraging fertility and improving women’s employment stability. Giving the declining labor force trends, it is crucial to incentivize firms to rehire and retrain women who have taken time off for childbirth, which requires further policy design.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48463,"journal":{"name":"World Development","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106904"},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143168768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}