World Institute for Development Economics Research

About: World Institute for Development Economics Research is a facility organization based out in Helsinki, Finland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Poverty & Population. The organization has 110 authors who have published 525 publications receiving 17316 citations.

Quantifying the contribution of a subpopulation to inequality an application to Mozambique

Abstract: In this paper, I quantify the contribution of a subpopulation to inequality. This is defined as the sum of the contributions of its members, with these contributions computed as the impact on inequality of a small increase in the population mass at each point of the distribution (using the Recentered Influence Function). The decomposition is shown to verify various attractive properties. I also discuss alternative approaches used in the literature of factor inequality decompositions. I show that the RIF and the marginal and Shapley factor contributions are approximately equal in the case of the Mean Log Deviation, the index with the best additive decomposability properties, when the same normalization is used. In an empirical illustration, I use the approach to identify how the richest, highly educated, and urban population has disproportionally contributed to high and increasing inequality in Mozambique in recent years.

Collective Action and the Rules of Surfing

Abstract: This article examines the interaction between formal laws and informal social norms in generating de facto institutions for collective common pool resource governance. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork and a game theory model, this study illustrates how the informal rules of surfing — which emerged in response to a resource scarcity engendered in part by formal state law — inadvertently facilitate collective action for environmental conservation by increasing the individual benefits for local surfers to organize against environmental threats. Lessons learned regarding effective institutions for governing common pool resources are relevant to sustaining ecosystem services necessary for human well-being such as clean air and healthy fish and wildlife populations. How and why some groups of surfers have managed to cooperate to protect surf breaks — a de jure open access common pool resource — is salient to the larger theoretical question of how any social group can overcome the collective action problem and self-organize to provide a non-excludable public good.

Measuring non-economic well-being achievement

Abstract: It is common to treat human well-being as a multidimensional concept, enveloping diverse, separable or behaviourally distinct components, domains or dimensions (Finnis 1980; Nussbaum 1988; Sen 1990, 1993; UNDP 1990–2003; Doyal and Gough 1993; Galtung 1994; Cummins 1996; Qizilbash 1996; Stewart 1996; Narayan 2000; Alkire 2002, among many other studies).1 It is in particular thought to be a much richer or vital concept than economic well-being: much of the literature is justifiably emphatic about this point. Accordingly, there is a long history of efforts both to refocus attention away from the established, although invariably far less than perfect, monetary measures of national economic well-being achievement and to capture better non-economic well-being achievement. A plethora of indicators of national well-being achievement has been proposed for these purposes. Indicators of health and educational status are most widely-used in inter-country ordinal and cardinal assessments of national well-being achievement, and are now available for diverse samples of 160 or more countries (see UNDP 2003). Multidimensional indicators are also available for similar samples, based either solely or predominantly on these indicators, and include the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) and the very well-known Human Development Index (HDI).

The Impact of Credit on Income Poverty in Urban Mexico. An Endogeneity-Corrected Estimation

Abstract: In recent years, an important number of impact studies have attempted to examine the effect of credit on income poverty; however, many of these studies have not paid sufficient attention to the problems of endogeneity and selection bias. The few exceptional cases have employed econometric techniques that work at the village level. The problem is that the concept of village is inappropriate in the urban context where a large percentage of microfinance organisations in the developing world actually operate. This paper presents an econometric approach which controls for endogeneity and self-selection using data from a quasi-experiment designed at the household level, and conducted in three urban settlements in the surroundings of the Metropolitan area of Mexico City. The paper provides an estimation of the impact of credit, employing different equivalence scales in order to measure the sensitivity of the poverty impact to the intra-household distribution of welfare. We find a link between poverty impacts and lending technology. Group-based lending programmes are more effective in reducing the poverty gap but in doing so, they achieve insignificant impacts on the poverty incidence. By contrast, individual lending programmes reported significant and small impacts at the upper limits of deprivation but insignificant impacts on the poverty gap.

Fuelwood Consumption and Forest Degradation: A Household Model for Domestic Energy Substitution in Rural India

Abstract: This paper discusses domestic energy supply and demand in rural India. Links between forest scarcity and household fuel collection are analyzed in a non-separable household model, focusing on substitution of non-commercial fuels from the commons and the private domain. Based on data from villages bordering a protected area, a novel maximum entropy approach is used for estimation. It is found that households respond to forest scarcity and increased fuelwood collection time by substituting fuels from private sources for forest fuelwood. However, the magnitude of the response appears insufficient to prevent current fuelwood collection practices from causing serious forest degradation.