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AbstractThe last two decades of the 20th century recorded a slowdown in the pace of progress of life expectancy at birth in most developing and transitional regions. The paper explores the causes of such trend on the basis of existing mortality theories. The results obtained through an eclectic econometric model confirm the negative impact of the 1980–2000 trends in the main determinants of health, such as rising inequality and volatility, declining health expenditure, lower vaccination coverage, slowly improving female literacy and so on. Finally, the paper simulates the level of LEB that would have been achieved in 10 regions of the world if the above determinants of health had continued developing over 1980–2000 as they did over 1960–1980. The results indicate that in seven of such regions (including China and India) in 2000 LEB would have been higher than actually observed. In this regard, the paper raises some doubts about the way globalisation has taken place and the way public policy oriented it. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Climate change and weather shocks pose major challenges for household income security and well-being, especially for smallholder farmers' communities. In such communities, imperfect risk insurance and labor markets may induce households to use traditional institutions such as polygyny to harness their size and composition to their resilience strategies against these shocks. This paper tests this hypothesis by analyzing how polygyny's interaction with droughts affects crop yields. For identification, the paper relies on the spatial variation in polygyny's prevalence across Mali's rural communes and the randomness of drought episodes. The findings show that polygynous communities are more resilient to drought-induced crop failure. Exploration of the mechanisms shows that polygynous communities diversify their income sources more than monogamous ones, including via child marriage—a phenomenon known to undermine women's outcomes. As the literature links polygyny to underdevelopment, interventions to eliminate it should make formal resilience and adaptation strategies available to drought-prone communities. Failure to do so may entrench political opposition to enforcing a ban on polygyny and child marriage.

This paper combines pre-pandemic face-to-face survey data with follow up phone surveys collected in April-May 2020 to quantify the overall and differential impacts of COVID-19 on household food security, labor market participation and local food prices in Nigeria. We exploit spatial variation in exposure to COVID-19 related infections and lockdown measures along with temporal differences in our outcomes of interest using a difference-in-difference approach. We find that those households exposed to higher COVID-19 cases or mobility lockdowns experience a significant increase in measures of food insecurity. Examining possible transmission channels for this effect, we find that COVID-19 significantly reduces labor market participation and increases food prices. We find that impacts differ by economic activities and households. For instance, lockdown measures increased households' experience of food insecurity by 13 percentage points and reduced the probability of participation in non-farm business activities by 11 percentage points. These lockdown measures have smaller impacts on wage-related activities and farming activities. In terms of food security, households relying on non-farm businesses, poorer households, those with school-aged children, and those living in remote and conflicted-affected zones have experienced relatively larger deteriorations in food security. These findings can help inform immediate and medium-term policy responses, including social protection policies aiming at ameliorating the impacts of the pandemic, as well as guide targeting strategies of governments and international donor agencies by identifying the most impacted sub-populations.