Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the effects of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, currently the world's largest public employment program, on household consumption and poverty rates in rural India. Combining regionally coded data from consumption surveys with information on the district-wise rollout of the program, we employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate program effects during the years 2007 and 2008. We find large, season-specific effects among a traditionally deprived sub-group of the rural population, whose incomes are particularly dependent on agricultural wage labor. We find that for this group of households,which accounts for thirty percent of India's rural population, employment opportunities under the scheme have cut poverty during the agricultural lean season by as much as one half while we find no effect during the agricultural peak season. In a cost-benefit analysis we find that consumption increases among this group of households are of the same order of magnitude as the wage outlays of the program. We document that consumption among this group of households had previously exhibited severe systematic seasonal fluctuations and conclude that the employment program has had a lasting effect on consumption smoothing across agricultural seasons.

We analyse the relationship between multidimensional poverty trends and changing dynamics of conflict in Nigeria in 2008–2018. We take a wide notion of poverty going beyond purely monetary hardships and considering simultaneously experienced non-monetary deprivations. Focusing on poverty experienced by people living in conflict affected areas, post conflict-areas and peaceful areas helps us understand how well-being changes with conflict, and how conflict may alter previous trends of poverty reduction. We pay particular attention to address the changing nature of conflict within zones and across neighbouring states. For this, we compare the poverty–conflict nexus across bordering regions in a spatial regression framework. We find that conflict arises not necessarily in the poorest Nigerian states, but in some of the relatively better-off states. Furthermore, we find that although levels of the Multidimensional Poverty Index decreased between 2008 and 2013, conflict may have played a major role in halting these trends, if not reverting them.

Abstract
The discourse on migration and poverty has largely shown that international labour migration reduces monetary poverty for the migrant-sending households. With the international consensus that poverty is multidimensional and goes beyond income alone, many studies evaluate the nexus between migration and non-monetary aspects of life, such as education and health. These show mixed evidence. Far fewer studies assess whether suffering from simultaneous deprivations in multiple indicators of well-being is affected by migration—which would be a full multidimensional poverty analysis at the household level. To assess the value-added of the latter, we empirically compare three approaches to measure poverty and the effect of migration on the three. These are (1) a solely monetary approach, (2) a dashboard approach that considers several non-monetary well-being deprivations, and (3) a counting approach that evaluates whether the multiple deprivations manifest themselves jointly. Using household panel data for rural Bangladesh, we assess how the association between international labour migration and poverty among the stay-behind household members changes in light of the three approaches. The endogenous nature of migration in this connection is explicitly addressed by applying a Hausman–Taylor estimation procedure. We corroborate that poverty is related to a lower likelihood of being monetary poor, but we do not find that it is associated with an increased likelihood of exiting multidimensional poverty altogether. However, we do find that it is associated with a lower likelihood of facing simultaneous deprivations in terms of sanitation, electricity, and asset-ownership among those who live in multidimensional poverty.

AbstractAs many other countries, India leverages on a pre‐existing workfare programme as a COVID‐19 response. We combine monthly administrative data with migration and poverty statistics and provide four insights on the recent expansion of the programme. First, poorer districts include more households, that is, increasing extensive margin. Second, in districts with a high proportion of return migrants, there is no increase, and third, unmet demand for work is higher than the national average of 22.7%. Fourth, despite the expansion, the programme provided just 13.5 days per rural household. The programme requires attention to fulfil its promise as a credible safety net.