Suchergebnisse

The mismatch between credit repayments and income seasonality can create serious distortions. However, typically Micro-Finance Institutes (MFIs) do not provide any adjustments due to the income seasonality. For instance in Northern Bangladesh, Income and consumption downfalls during the time of post-Aman rice plantation seasons are quite regular phenomenon which is locally known as "Monga". Poor landless agricultural wage laborers suffer the most due to this seasonality and usually they face difficulty to smooth their consumptions. As a result, it is extremely difficult to arrange the regular weekly loan repayments of the micro-credit, which they have taken during the productive part of the year. Using field experiments through RCTs in Northern Bangladesh, we randomly assigned seasonality adjusted flexible micro-credits and traditional rigid micro-credit to different borrowing groups. Examining the repayment behavior of the borrowers in the context of geographical classifications and loan designs; employing both survey and experimental methods, this study allows us to see the consequences of flexible loan repayment rules during the lean periods, and how they affect both MFIs and participating borrowers. The findings of this study have important policy implications for MFIs and policy-makers of the developing countries

This article aims at identifying the determinants of government expenditures of developing countries by placing emphasis on the political institutions and governance variables, which have not been addressed so much in the previous literature. Using a panel data analysis for 97 developing countries from the period 1984 to 2004, this study finds evidence that controlling for economic, social, and demographical factors, political institutional and governance variables significantly influence the consumption expenditure in developing countries. Political institutional variables such as the type of political ruling and political power in the parliament positively influence consumption expenditure; on the contrary, governance variables such as corruption influence negatively. Furthermore, we find that autocratic governments with military ruling are not particularly accommodative toward consumption expenditures as the public spending significantly shrinks under military dictatorship compared with other forms of governance. In order to check consistency of our findings, we ran alternative specifications as well as conducted extreme bound tests. Our results largely survived these tests showing robustness of our findings. (JEL E01, E02, E61, E62, H2, H4, H5, H6, O11, O5)

This paper investigates the interlinkage between microcredit and temporary seasonal migration, an issue which has been given little attention in the standard rural–urban migration literature. Seasonal migration due to agricultural downturns is a common phenomenon in developing countries. Using primary data from a cross‐sectional household survey of the northwest part of Bangladesh, this paper quantifies the factors that influence such migration decisions. Our results suggest that people with prior access to microcredit are more likely to migrate during an agricultural lean season. Furthermore, we find evidence of a negative selection effect between microcredit and seasonal migration, conditional on an individual's village of residence and observed characteristics. Our results have numerous potential policy implications, including the design of typical microcredit schemes for developing countries.

Access to electricity has the potential to improve the nutritional status of children by a variety of pathways such as increased wealth, reduced fertility through the change in time use, spread of information through technology such as TV, and improved health care services. Yet, the relationship between electrification and children's nutritional status is rarely explored in the literature. We attempt to fill this lacuna by offering microeconometric evidence from rural Bangladesh, where a rapid expansion of electrification and significant improvement in children's nutritional status were observed in the past two decades. We find that access to electricity has a positive impact on the nutritional status of children under five as measured by height-for-age Z-score (HAZ) by around 0.1–0.2 points using five rounds of Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey from 2000 to 2014. Our results also appear to indicate that the quality of electricity may influence the size of this positive impact. While our analysis of causal pathways is limited by the data availability, it suggests that the positive impact of electrification partially comes from increased wealth. For some years, the positive impact can also be attributed to reduced fertility and information exposure through TV viewing. On the contrary, we find little evidence that the impact is attributable to the improvement of local health facilities. Our findings underscore the importance of evaluating infrastructure programs such as rural electrification from a broad perspective as their impacts may go well beyond the economic benefits considered in a typical cost–benefit analysis. This in turn may encourage governments to invest more in basic infrastructure, which is still severely lacking in Bangladesh and many other countries in the rest of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

With over 700 million illiterate adults worldwide, governments in many developing countries have implemented adult literacy programs. Typically these programs have low rates of success partly because the quality of teaching is heterogeneous. Standardization of teaching provided by computer-aided instruction might be a solution. However, there is little rigorous evidence of the effectiveness of computer-based adult literacy programs in delivering high-quality literacy and numeracy in the developing world. To fill this void in the literature, we study the impact of a computer-based adult literacy program, Tara Akshar Plus, on the literacy and numeracy skills of previously illiterate adult women in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Through a randomized control trial, we measure learning outcomes with individual-level literacy and numeracy tests and find statistically significant positive impacts of this computer-aided program on literacy and numeracy outcomes of women who undergo the TARA Akshar Plus program—relative to the control group. The effects are statistically significant but small in magnitude for women who were entirely illiterate prior to the program. The learning impacts are substantially larger for learners who knew at least a handful of letters at the beginning of the program. We compare the improvement in learning to that of another adult literacy and numeracy program. We conclude that TARA Akshar Plus is the more effective of the two, but the literacy and numeracy level achieved are not large enough to make many entirely illiterate learners become functionally literate.