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

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.

Growth is Good for the Poor

Making Teachers Accountable

Although small (around 16 percent of the labor force), the wage employment sector represents Africa’s engine for employment and growth in the medium to long term, especially given the sector’s potential to exploit economies of scale and produce for export. Yet wage employment is growing unevenly across Africa. Modern manufacturing firms, in particular, account for only 3 percent of employment and export very little. This limited competitiveness in export markets is mainly the result of low productivity in the modern wage sector. It signals the presence of government and market failures, which vary across the subcontinent but have similar effects. Complementary inputs to labor (electricity, overland transport, and so on) are costly, regulations strangle business processes and the movement of goods, the high costs of financial intermediation starve investors of capital, and the small domestic markets and trade barriers suppress competition and reduce pressure to innovate and improve productivity. Governments in Africa can do much to remedy this situation. The most important step is to improve the business climate through key reforms to improve access to finance and infrastructure services, improve trade logistics, and ease regulatory constraints to entrepreneurship. Many reforms are not so expensive in monetary terms and can deliver huge impacts in the short run by reducing distortions and increasing efficiency. Selective and spatially targeted support to emerging clusters can promote agglomeration economies. For young people to be truly productive in modern firms, governments should foster a strong foundation in basic skills by improving the quality of general education. In the training sector, governments should focus on “public goods” such as quality assurance and information to foster a sector that is efficient and relevant to the market for skills. Programs for disadvantaged youth that integrate training with internships show promise, as do programs offering managerial training.

Raising Productivity in Africa’s Modern Wage Enterprises to Foster Job Growth for Youth

Addressing the question,"What is the work status of the world's working-age population and subgroups thereof?"The author gathers data for many countries and infers data where it is missing (which requires making"heroic assumptions") The results are of course only as good as the data are representative and accurate Data are least reliable for sub-Saharan Africa The high-income group is dominated (in population) by the United States, Germany, and Japan, which account for 58 percent of that group's working-age population The middle-income group is dominated by Indonesia, the Russian Federation, and Brazil, which account for 40 percent of that group's working-age population The low-income group is dominated by China and India, which account for 70 percent of that group's working-age population Among other things, the author's charts and tables show the breakdown on working-age employment - in services, industry, agriculture - and unemployment in various parts of the world

Estimating the world at work

The World Development Report (WDR) 2004 warns that broad improvements in human welfare will not occur unless poor people receive wider access to affordable, better quality services in health, education, water, sanitation, and electricity Without such improvements, freedom from illness and from illiteracy, two of the most important ways poor people can escape poverty, will remain elusive to many This report builds an analytical and practical framework for using resources, whether internal or external, more effectively by making services work for poor people The focus is on those services that have the most direct link with human development, education, health, water, sanitation, and electricity This presents an enormous challenge, because making services work for the poor involves changing, not only service delivery arrangements, but also public sector institutions, and how foreign aid is transferred This WDR explores the many dimensions of poverty, through outcomes of service delivery for poor people, and stipulates affordable access to services is low especially for poor people in addition to a wide range of failures in quality The public responsibility is highlighted, addressing the need for more public spending, and technical adjustments, based on incentives and understanding what, and why services need to be improved Thus, through an analytical framework, it is suggested the complexity of accountability must be established, as well as instruments for reforming institutions to improve services, illustrated through various case studies, both in developing, and developed countries The report further outlines that scaling up reforms means sectoral reforms must be linked to ongoing or nascent public sector reforms, in areas such as budget management, decentralization, and public administration reform, stimulated through information as a catalyst for change, and as an input to prod the success of other reforms

Informe sobre el desarrollo mundial 2004 : servicios para los pobres

Recent empirical and theoretical literature sheds light on the disappointing experience with implementation of primary health care programs in developing countries. This article focuses on the evidence showing two weak links in the chain between government spending for services to improve health and actual improvements in health status. First, institutional capacity is a vital ingredient in providing effective services. When this capacity is inadequate, health spending, even on the right services, may lead to little actual provision of services. Second, the net effect of government health services depends on the severity of market failures—the more severe the market failures, the greater the potential for government services to have an impact. Evidence suggests that market failures are the least severe for relatively inexpensive curative services, which often absorb the bulk of primary health care budgets. A companion paper, available from the authors (seep. 219), offers a perspective on how government fu...

Deon Filmer

Papers

Making Teachers Accountable

Raising Productivity in Africa’s Modern Wage Enterprises to Foster Job Growth for Youth

Estimating the world at work

Informe sobre el desarrollo mundial 2004 : servicios para los pobres

Weak Links in the Chain