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Deon Filmer

Bio: Deon Filmer is an academic researcher from World Bank. The author has contributed to research in topics: Poverty & Population. The author has an hindex of 43, co-authored 148 publications receiving 18682 citations. Previous affiliations of Deon Filmer include World Bank Group & International Monetary Fund.


Papers
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TL;DR: The authors analyzed the relationship between whether a young person has a disability, the poverty status of their household, and their school participation using 11 household surveys from nine developing countries and found that youth with disabilities are almost always substantially less likely to start school, and in some countries have lower transition rates resulting in lower schooling attainment.
Abstract: This paper analyzes the relationship between whether a young person has a disability, the poverty status of their household, and their school participation using 11 household surveys from nine developing countries. Between 1 and 2 percent of the population is identified as having a disability. Youth with disabilities sometimes live in poorer households, but the extent of this concentration is typically neither large nor statistically significant. However, youth with disabilities are almost always substantially less likely to start school, and in some countries have lower transition rates resulting in lower schooling attainment. The order of magnitude of the school participation disability deficit is often larger than those associated with other characteristics such as gender, rural residence, or economic status differentials.

22 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: The authors argue that the public sector typically chooses spending on inputs such that the productivity of additional spending on books and instructional materials is 10 to 100 times larger than that of extra spending on teacher inputs (for example, higher wages, small class size) and argue that this pervasive and systemic deviation of actual spending from the technical optimum requires a political, not economic or technical, explanation.
Abstract: The accumulated results of empirical studies show that the public sector typically chooses spending on inputs such that the productivity of additional spending on books and instructional materials is 10 to 100 times larger than that of additional spending on teacher inputs (for example, higher wages, small class size) The authors argue that this pervasive and systemic deviation of actual spending from the technical optimum requires a political, not economic or technical, explanation The evidence is consistent only with a class of positive models in which public spending choices are directly influenced by a desire for higher spending on teacher inputs, over and above their role in producing educational outputs This desire could be due either to teacher power, or bureaucratic budget-maximizing behavior, or political patronage The authors conclude by exploring the implications of these positive political models of educational spending behavior for various types of proposed educational reforms (localized control, parental participation, vouchers, and so on) which requires an examination of how the proposed reforms shift the relative powers of the stakeholders in the educational system: students and parents, educators, bureaucrats, and politicians

21 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Filmer et al. as discussed by the authors show that a household-targeted cash transfer in the Philippines increases the prices of perishable foods in some markets and raises stunting among non-beneficiary children by 11 percentage points (34 percent).
Abstract: Cash Transfers, Food Prices, and Nutrition Impacts on Ineligible Children Deon Filmer, Jed Friedman, Eeshani Kandpal, Junko Onishi Abstract: Can cash aid harm non-recipients by raising local prices? We show that a householdtargeted cash transfer in the Philippines increases the prices of perishable foods in some markets and raises stunting among non-beneficiary children by 11 percentage points (34 percent). Impacts increase in the size of the village income shock and remoteness-and are sustained 2.5 years after program introduction. Price effects from an experimental sample are confirmed with national expenditure surveys collected during program scaleup. Household-targeted cash transfers can thus generate local spillovers that undermine program goals. Selected geographic targeting may avoid price spillovers at moderate additional cost.

21 citations

Book ChapterDOI
24 Jan 2014
TL;DR: According to the latest Afrobarometer data, 65 percent of the surveyed population consider economic conditions in their country to be the same or worse than the year prior, 53 percent rate their national economic condition as “very bad” or “fairly bad,” and 48 percent say the same about their personal economic condition as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa has just experienced one of the best decades of growth since the 1960s. Between 2000 and 2012, gross domestic product (GDP) grew more than 4.5 percent a year on average, compared to around 2 percent in the prior 20 years (World Bank various years). In 2012, the region’s GDP growth was estimated at 4.7 percent—5.8 percent if South Africa is excluded (World Bank 2013). About one-quarter of countries in the region grew at 7 percent or better, and several African countries are among the fastest growing in the world. Medium-term growth prospects remain strong and should be supported by a rebounding global economy. At the same time, many Africans are dissatisfied with this economic progress. According to the latest Afrobarometer data, 65 percent of the surveyed population consider economic conditions in their country to be the same or worse than the year prior, 53 percent rate their national economic condition as “very bad” or “fairly bad,” and 48 percent say the same about their personal economic condition (Afrobarometer 2011–12. www.afrobarometer.org). The incidence of poverty has fallen as SubSaharan economies have expanded, yet overall growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has not been as pro-poor as growth in other regions. Each 1 percent increase in average per capita consumption has been associated with a reduction in poverty of 0.69 percent; elsewhere in the world, that reduction has averaged just over 2 percent (World Bank 2013). In part, Africa’s poverty reduction has been less marked because in many countries the source of growth is primarily oil, gas, and mineral extraction, not labor-intensive sectors such as agriculture or manufacturing. Young people, who have weaker links to the world of work than the general population, are therefore doubly disadvantaged. Although the current generation of Africans entering the labor force is the most educated ever, many are finding that their prospects for employment and earnings differ very little from those of their parents. In a few countries, they are worse. Youth in urban areas have been vocal about their dissatisfaction. Urban demonstrations

19 citations


Cited by
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TL;DR: This work estimates the relationship between household wealth and children’s school enrollment in India by constructing a linear index from asset ownership indicators, using principal-components analysis to derive weights, and shows that this index is robust to the assets included, and produces internally coherent results.
Abstract: 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).

4,966 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: A Treatise on the Family by G. S. Becker as discussed by the authors 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.
Abstract: 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. …

4,817 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures is proposed and defended, which uses an index based on household asset ownership indicators.
Abstract: 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.

4,661 citations

Posted Content
David Dollar1, Aart Kraay1
TL;DR: Dollar and Kraay as mentioned in this paper found that the share of income accruing to the bottom quintile does not vary systematically with the average income, and that when average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately.
Abstract: When average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately. This holds across regions, periods, income levels, and growth rates. But relatively little is known about the broad forces that account for the variations across countries and across time in the share of income accruing to the poorest fifth. When average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately. This is a consequence of the strong empirical regularity that the share of income accruing to the bottom quintile does not vary systematically with average income. Dollar and Kraay document this empirical regularity in a sample of 92 countries spanning the past four decades and show that it holds across regions, periods, income levels, and growth rates. Dollar and Kraay next ask whether the factors that explain cross-country differences in the growth rates of average incomes have differential effects on the poorest fifth of society. They find that several determinants of growth - such as good rule of law, openness to international trade, and developed financial markets - have little systematic effect on the share of income that accrues to the bottom quintile. Consequently, these factors benefit the poorest fifth of society as much as everyone else. There is some weak evidence that stabilization from high inflation and reductions in the overall size of government not only increase growth but also increase the income share of the poorest fifth in society. Finally, Dollar and Kraay examine several factors commonly thought to disproportionately benefit the poorest in society, but find little evidence of their effects. The absence of robust findings emphasizes that relatively little is known about the broad forces that account for the cross-country and intertemporal variation in the share of income accruing to the poorest fifth of society. This paper - a product of Macroeconomics and Growth, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study growth and poverty reduction. The authors may be contacted at ddollar@worldbank.org or akraay@worldbank.org.

3,407 citations