世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

The relationship between household wealth and educational enrollment of children can be estimated without expenditure data. A method for doing so - which uses an index based on household asset ownership indicators - is proposed and defended in this paper. In India, children from the wealthiest households are over 30 percentage points more likely to be in school than those from the poorest households, although this gap varies considerably across states. To estimate the relationship between household wealth and the probability that a child (aged 6 to 14) is enrolled in school, Filmer and Pritchett use National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data collected in Indian states in 1992 and 1993. In developing their estimate Filmer and Pritchett had to overcome a methodological difficulty: The NFHS, modeled closely on the Demographic and Health Surveys, measures neither household income nor consumption expenditures. As a proxy for long-run household wealth, they constructed a linear asset index from a set of asset indicators, using principal components analysis to derive the weights. This asset index is robust, produces internally coherent results, and provides a close correspondence with data on state domestic product and on state level poverty rates. They validate the asset index using data on consumption spending and asset ownership from Indonesia, Nepal, and Pakistan. The asset index has reasonable coherence with current consumption expenditures and, more importantly, works as well as - or better than - traditional expenditure-based measures in predicting enrollment status. The authors find that on average a child from a wealthy household (in the top 20 percent on the asset index developed for this analysis) is 31 percent more likely to be enrolled in school than a child from a poor household (in the bottom 40 percent). This paper - a product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to inform educational policy. The study was funded by the Bank`s Research Support Budget under the research project Educational Enrollment and Dropout (RPO 682-11).

Estimating Wealth Effects without Expenditure Data or Tears: With an Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

This paper has an empirical and overtly methodological goal. The authors propose and defend a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures. They construct an index based on indicators of household assets, solving the vexing problem of choosing the appropriate weights by allowing them to be determined by the statistical procedure of principal components. While the data for India cannot be used to compare alternative approaches they use data from Indonesia, Nepal, and Pakistan which have both expenditures and asset variables for the same households. With these data the authors show that not only is there a correspondence between a classification of households based on the asset index and consumption expenditures but also that the evidence is consistent with the asset index being a better proxy for predicting enrollments--apparently less subject to measurement error for this purpose--than consumption expenditures. The relationship between household wealth and educational enrollment of children can be estimated without expenditure data. A method for doing so - which uses an index based on household asset ownership indicators- is proposed and defended in this paper. In India, children from the wealthiest households are over 30 percentage points more likely to be in school than those from the poorest households.

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Estimating Wealth Effects Without Expenditure Data—Or Tears: An Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India

Returns to investment in education: A global update

This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of wellbeing education and health – in Africa. We expected to find, as we did in Latin America, that progress in the provision of public services and the focus of public spending in the social sector would contribute to declining poverty and inequality in health and education, even in an environment of stagnant or worsening levels of income poverty. Unfortunately, our results indicate that in the area of health, little progress is being made in terms of reducing pre-school age stunting, a clear manifestation of poor overall health. Likewise, our health inequality measure showed that while there were a few instances of reduced inequality along this dimension, there was, on balance, little evidence of success in improving equality of outcomes. Similar results were found in our examination of underweight women as an indicator of general current health status of adults. With regard to education, the story is somewhat more positive. However, the overall picture gives little cause for complacency or optimism that Africa has, or will soon reap the potential benefits of the process of globalization.

Inequality and Poverty in Africa in an Era of Globalization: Looking Beyond Income to Health and Education

It has been argued that the proximate causes of poverty among smallholders and its manifestation in extraordinarily high levels of malnutrition among preschool-aged children emanate largely from the inadequate size of landholdings, which produce insufficient food for the nutritional needs of the household.3 It has virtually become a convention in Malawi to define poverty by landholding size.4 As a consequence, a key element of the strategy to alleviate poverty and ensure food security in rural Malawi has been to promote at least a subsistence level of maize production by smallholders through increasing, or at

Modeling the Nutritional and Distributional Effects of Taxing Export Crops

This chapter reviews the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical literature that links health to economic prosperity. It concludes that by raising the productivity of the workforce, good health will help transform the African food system into a modern sector that contributes to economic growth and poverty alleviation. This conclusion is reached despite formidable econometric challenges in verifying causation. Problems such as missing variable bias and unobserved heterogeneity have limited the reliability of research in this area. Although much of the discussion in the chapter focuses on private returns to improvements in health and nutrition, it also highlights the need to better quantify the potential externalities and spillovers that result from policies designed to improve health and nutrition. Likewise, particular attention is given to gender dimensions of vulnerability to health shocks.

The Impact of Poor Health and Nutrition on Labor Productivity, Poverty, and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Socioeconomic Dimensions of HIV/AIDS in Africa: Challenges, Opportunities, and Misconceptions

This paper substantiates two claims - that Africa is poor compared to the rest of the world and that poverty in Africa is not declining consistently or significantly, in contrast to other regions of the world. We consider poverty in the dimensions of health and education, in addition to income, stressing the inherent conceptual and measurement issues that commend such a broader perspective. We note a lack of consistency in the movement of the poverty measures. During similar periods, we often find them moving in opposite directions. We therefore discuss the need go beyond examining each poverty measure individually, and present an approach to evaluating poverty reduction in multiple dimensions jointly. The results of the multidimensional poverty comparisons reinforce the importance of considering deprivation beyond the material standard of living and provide insight into how to reconcile differing stories that arise from examining each indicator separately.

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David E. Sahn

Papers

Inequality and Poverty in Africa in an Era of Globalization: Looking Beyond Income to Health and Education

Modeling the Nutritional and Distributional Effects of Taxing Export Crops

The Impact of Poor Health and Nutrition on Labor Productivity, Poverty, and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Socioeconomic Dimensions of HIV/AIDS in Africa: Challenges, Opportunities, and Misconceptions

Living Standards in Africa