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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: In this article, the authors focused on one measure of son preference in the developing world, namely the likelihood of continued childbearing given the gender composition of existing children in the family.
Abstract: A family preference for sons over daughters may manifest itself in different ways, including higher mortality, worse health status, or lower educational attainment among girls. This study focuses on one measure of son preference in the developing world, namely the likelihood of continued childbearing given the gender composition of existing children in the family. The authors use an unusually large data set, covering 65 countries and approximately 5 million births. The analysis shows that son preference is apparent in many regions of the developing world and is particularly large in South Asia and in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region. Modernization does not appear to reduce son preference. For example, in South Asia son preference is larger for women with more education and is increasing over time. The explanation for these patterns appears to be that latent son preference in childbearing is more likely to manifest itself when fertility levels are low. As a result of son preference, girls tend to grow up with significantly more siblings than boys do, which may have implications for their wellbeing if there are quantity-quality trade-offs that result in fewer material and emotional resources allocated to children in larger families.

4 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors present data on teacher earnings from 15 African countries and find that teachers' monthly earnings are lower than other formal sector workers with comparable levels of education and experience.

4 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study how cultural diversity, reducing costs, and avoiding discrimination are resolved in the World Bank's hiring processes and find that half of salary and grade differentials between men and women and staff from high and low income countries are attributable to differences in productive characteristics.
Abstract: Purpose – International organizations pursue multiple objectives in hiring policies including cultural diversity, reducing costs and avoiding discrimination among which there can be sharp trade‐offs. The paper has the purpose of studying how these trade‐offs are resolved in the World Bank's hiring processes.Design/methodology/approach – The paper estimates that half of salary and grade differentials between men and women and staff from high‐ and low‐income countries are attributable to differences in productive characteristics. Alternative explanations for the remainder are explored, including omitted variable bias, quotas and discrimination.Findings – The paper argues that the salary and grade differentials and differences in productive characteristics are not compelling explanations. Discrimination probably exists, though less than would be implied by a cost minimizing hiring policy.Originality/value – Provides a discussion of the World Bank's hiring processes.

4 citations

Book ChapterDOI
17 May 2017
TL;DR: Investing early in health, nutrition, early childhood development, and basic education helps to set those foundations and thus yields high returns, and the cognitive and psychosocial skills acquired in early life enable further strong health, learning, and full participation in society at a lower cost.
Abstract: The foundations of human capital are set early in life, with long-lasting effects in adulthood and in the next generation. Investing early in health, nutrition, early childhood development, and basic education helps to set those foundations and thus yields high returns. Early investments are subject to fewer efficiency tradeoffs, and the cognitive and psychosocial skills acquired in early life enable further strong health, learning, and full participation in society at a lower cost. Poverty and exposure to conflict are major risks in early life through the deprivations and stress they cause to children and adults. Cash transfers can sustain household consumption in the short run and the uptake of human development services, which may improve household welfare, in the long run. While some interventions show promising results at the pilot stage, scaling them up requires qualitative shifts, stronger coordination, and innovative delivery systems, entailing new partnerships between levels of government and with nonstate actors. The Foundations of Human Capital The New Evidence on Early Development The period between the first few days of pregnancy and two years of life (the first 1,000 days) is intense for both physical and cognitive development. Children are expected to grow, on average, 50 centimeters in utero, 24 centimeters in their first year of life, and 12 centimeters in their second year, after which growth slows down until adolescence. Language, vision, and hearing start forming in the womb, and development peaks in the first two years. Some capabilities linked to social functioning, such as habitual responses and emotional control, are also in peak development in those 1,000 days (figure 4.1). During this period, children need good nutrition and become more sensitive to infections and biological programming.1 At that time, they depend totally on others for nutrition, care, and 144 Key Investments to Build the Foundations of Human Capital From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 social interactions. For this reason, the environment that their caregivers provide is a key factor in their development. During this period, malnutrition has multiple apparent and insidious consequences: it affects growth, morbidity, intelligence quotient (IQ)–type intelligence, and mortality.2 Undernutrition translates into small-for-gestational-age, stunting (inadequate length or height-for-age, a symptom of chronic undernutrition), and wasting (inadequate weight-for-height, a symptom of acute undernutrition). Inadequate growth—the visible symptom—hides invisible symptoms, which include impaired brain development and immune system. Undernutrition can affect the hard-wiring of the brain, through malfunctions in the coating of the nerves (myelination) and the formation of connections between neural cells (synapses) (Yusuf 1992). Micronutrient deficiencies, linked to the quality of children’s diet, may affect development in other silent ways. Vitamin A deficiency can cause night blindness and is a risk factor for increased severity of infections, which leads to increased mortality. Vitamin B12 deficiency can cause involuntary muscle movements, apathy, and cerebral atrophy. Iron deficiency is associated with fetal and child growth failure, lower cognitive development in children (Georgieff 2007; Nyaradi and others 2013), lower physical activity and productivity in adults, and increased maternal mortality. Zinc deficiency is associated with stunting and higher incidences of diarrhea and pneumonia. Iodine deficiency affects cognitive development and reduces IQ. Joint effects of fetal growth restriction, suboptimum breastfeeding, stunting, wasting, and deficiencies Figure 4.1 Early Brain Development Sets the Basis for Many Skills High Preschool years Sensitive periods in early brain development

4 citations

Book ChapterDOI
17 May 2017
TL;DR: In this paper, Van der Ploeg et al. explored the long-term benefits of investing in human capital, in particular, how longterm benefits can be achieved by using human capital in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Abstract: Natural resource wealth has helped to drive up national income in many Sub-Saharan African countries. Although modestly lower in resource-rich countries, poverty is higher after factoring in gross national income per capita, suggesting that resource wealth is not generally shared. Countries rich in natural resources fare particularly badly in terms of education and health outcomes— school participation and completion rates are far below those that national income would predict; infant mortality and stunting rates are also higher, and vaccination rates are lower. Resource-rich countries invest less in education and health than their national income would predict, and their investments tend to be only weakly associated with better outcomes. Introduction Over the past 15 years, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has experienced a boom in natural resources, and virtually all countries in the region are exploring new oil, natural gas, or mineral reserves. The region’s exports of oil alone are nearly triple its aid receipts (van der Ploeg and Venables 2011). Countries that had not previously been considered resource-rich are seeing a windfall of resource rents. Ghana’s Jubilee oil field, which entered production in 2010, averages more than 85,000 barrels a day, and Uganda’s Lake Albert rift fields target production of 200,000 barrels a day. Natural gas exploitation could potentially bring returns of billions of dollars to Mozambique and Tanzania. Natural resources hold promise of being a great boon to economic growth and individual well-being, but numerous studies point to the economic as well as the social, political, and institutional challenges that accompany natural resource riches (Africa Progress Panel 2013; Venables 2016). The specter of a “resource curse” shrouds the promise (Sachs and Warner 1999, 2001). But the success of several countries—Chile, Malaysia, and Norway, for example—in transforming 32 Human Capital in Resource-Rich Countries From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 natural resources into long-term development suggests that such a curse is not inevitable (Lederman and Maloney 2007). Harnessing the returns from natural resource wealth can contribute substantially to eradicating extreme poverty and enhancing shared prosperity. Success requires a series of good decisions and sound implementation. Recent declines in oil prices highlight just one of the risks associated with growth driven by natural resource wealth. Revenues from natural resources are volatile, and government strategies for managing these resources need to take into account the possibility of busts as well as booms and to address the challenge of transforming finite, volatile resources into sources of growth (figure 1.1). Governments and other stakeholders must grapple with (at least) four central questions when they seek to transform a finite amount of natural resources into lasting development (Barma and others 2012; van der Ploeg and Venables 2011; Venables 2016): 1. What is the optimal contract between government and entities that extract natural resources to balance public benefits with incentives to the private sector? 2. What is the optimal timing of extraction to ensure the maximum stream of benefits from reserves? 3. What is the optimal portfolio allocation of mineral revenues between consumption, savings, and investments? And what should be the profile of investments with regard to financial assets, physical capital (for example, infrastructure), and human capital? 4. How can resource revenue be spent most effectively and efficiently, and what complementary activities or reforms are required to ensure effectiveness and efficiency? Answers to these questions determine whether the benefits of natural resource extraction will last through the long term. This book focuses on questions 3 and 4, exploring, in particular, how long-term benefits can be achieved by investing in human capital—in part because this issue is too often overlooked. As the book makes clear, investing in human capital—understood broadly to include education, capabilities, and health—should be a central part of the strategy for converting natural resources into long-term development. It extends the time horizon of the natural resource windfall by converting a finite resource into a form of capital that can be preserved through generations, it helps to promote growth by distributing wealth broadly, and it helps to lay the foundation for broad-based economic development as natural resource revenues decline. However, investing well in human capital is hard; the track record of using natural resource wealth to lessen poverty and promote better education and health outcomes is not good. Moreover, because resource-rich countries tend not to spend much on human capital, and, because the challenges in delivering services Human Capital in Resource-Rich Countries 33 From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 are exacerbated in these countries, the outcomes are not impressive. Spending wisely and directly confronting challenges that are unique to natural-resource-rich countries are both essential for success. Natural Resource Wealth, National Income, Poverty, and Inequality Natural resource wealth—and oil wealth in particular—has been supporting dramatic growth in national incomes in SSA countries. Between 1995 and 2013, gross national income (GNI) per capita in the region as a whole rose 50 percent. The gain was 80 percent in oil-rich countries, but substantially lower, at 40 percent, in non–resource-rich countries (figure 1.2). Countries identified as “potentially” resource-rich (with reserves identified but not yet extracted) also grew quickly (70 percent over the period), although this was from a much lower base and annual increases in income were smaller.1 Box 1.1 presents the country classifications. This chapter assesses the extent to which the higher national income resulting from this growth is associated with higher human capital outcomes and less inequality in those outcomes. It then assesses patterns of investment in human capital by different types of countries. The chapter uses new databases built from individual and household-level surveys to contrast levels and inequalities in outcomes between resource-rich and non–resource-rich countries, both within and beyond Sub-Saharan Africa. Figure 1.1 Strategies for Managing Resource Rents Need to Account for Booms and Busts: Index of the Real Price of Natural Resources, 1990–2015 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 19 90 19 91 19 92 19 93 19 94 19 95 19 96 19 97 19 98 19 99 20 00 20 01 20 02 20 03 20 04 20 05 20 06 20 07 20 08 20 09 20 10 20 11 20 12 20 13 20 14 20 15 20 16 In de x of p ric es (J an ua ry 2 01 0 = 10 0) Crude oil, average Natural gas index Copper Source: World Bank commodity price data (the Pink Sheet), http://www.worldbank.org/en/research/commodity-markets. 34 Human Capital in Resource-Rich Countries From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 Figure 1.2 In SSA, Oil-Rich Countries Grew Substantially Faster Than Other Countries: Cumulative Growth in GNI per Capita, 1995–2013

4 citations


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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