Showing papers in "World Development in 2011"

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the role of indigenous and foreign innovation efforts in technological change and catching up and their interactions in the emerging economies, and argue that despite the potential offered by globalization and a liberal trade regime, the benefits of international technology diffusion can only be delivered with parallel indigenous innovation efforts and the presence of modern institutional and governance structures.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a theoretical analysis of the relationship between GVCs and innovation systems and show that the learning mechanisms can vary widely within the various forms of governance of GVC: they can be the result of the pressure to achieve international standards, or be facilitated by direct involvement of the value chain leaders when the suppliers' competence is low and the risk of failure to comply is high.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors use stochastic frontier analysis to examine whether there is a trade-off between outreach to the poor and efficiency of micro-finance institutions (MFIs).

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the ex post impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties on crop income and poverty in rural Uganda, using propensity score matching methods, and found that adopting groundnut technology significantly increases crop income, and reduces poverty.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce a new dataset of foreign assistance, AidData, that covers more bilateral and multilateral donors and more types of aid than existing datasets while also improving project-level information about the purposes and activities funded by aid.

TL;DR: In this article, the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in World Development has been published, but changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors bring together recent empirical contributions with respect to a number of related and highly relevant issues on the economics of micro finance, and provide answers to the following two main questions: (1) does micro finance have an impact on the social and economic situation of the poor in developing nations; and (2) are microfinance institutions sustainable in the long term and is there a trade-off between sustainability and outreach?

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify factors underlying the dominance of owner-operated farms and ways in which these may change with development, and highlight that an assessment of the advantages of large operations, together with information on endowments, can provide input into strategy formulation at the country level.

TL;DR: This paper used endogenous switching regression and building on a survey of vegetable farmers in Kenya to find that participation in supermarket channels is associated with a 48% gain in average household income, which also contributes to poverty reduction.

TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of the impact of internal migration on the time allocation patterns of the left-behind elderly and children in rural China, 1997-2006, contributes to the literature on changes in the well-being of the Left-behind population.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use representative household data from Malawi and develop a demand systems approach to estimate income and price elasticities of food demand and nutrient consumption. And they show that given multiple nutritional deficiencies, income-related policies are better suited than price policies to improve nutrition.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the role of indigenous and foreign innovation efforts in technological upgrading in developing countries, taking into account sectoral specificities in technical change, and found that collective indigenous R&D activities at the industry level are the major driver of technology upgrading of indigenous firms that push out the technology frontier.

TL;DR: In this article, the role of incomplete rural property rights in the migration decisions of rural households was examined and the relationship between tenure insecurity and restrictions on land rentals, and participation in outside labor markets.

TL;DR: In the sub-discipline of development economics, entrepreneurship is largely absent from explanations of growth and development as mentioned in this paper, which may be because arguments and evidence marshaled by other economists studying entrepreneurship fail to convincingly show that entrepreneurship is a binding constraint on development in the poorest countries.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors review the theory underlying different causal mechanisms linking the rule of law to economic growth, and provide an introduction to some outstanding measurement issues, and find that the correlation among different components of the rule-of-law concept are not tight among developing countries and that some inferences about the effects of property rights protection may not be warranted.

TL;DR: This paper showed that the impact of financial openness on factor productivity growth is more important than the effect on capital growth, which explains why the growth effects of liberalization appear to be largely permanent, not temporary.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed whether politics affected voucher allocations in Ghana's 2008 fertilizer subsidy program and found that more vouchers were targeted to districts that the ruling party had lost in the previous presidential elections and more so in districts that had been lost by a higher percentage margin.

TL;DR: In nearly a third of ethnic civil wars since 1945, the conflict develops between members of a regional ethnic group that considers itself to be the indigenous "sons of the soil" and recent migrants from other parts of the country as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this paper, a survey of fresh produce export firms in 10 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the determinants of GlobalGAP certification and the returns in terms of expansion of export sales revenue, is presented.

TL;DR: Zhang et al. as discussed by the authors analyzed return migrants' occupational choice upon their return to their home village, by using an original rural household survey conducted in Wuwei county (Anhui province, China) in 2008.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate how stakeholder participation and adaptive co-management practices are linked to management performance and find that participation by local inhabitants is associated with a higher level of effectiveness in achieving development goals, and this higher effectiveness did not seem to be at the expense of biodiversity conservation.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a theoretical model of long and short-run behavior of informal labor and analyzes these relationships empirically, using the share of self-employment in the labor force as the proxy for informal employment.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a number of arguments for why and in which way energy access and affordability can play a key role in national development programs and in achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

TL;DR: This article found that new donors tend to focus on closer neighbors, care less for recipient need, exhibit a weaker bias towards badly governed countries, respond to disasters, but with fewer resources than old donors, and do not pursue commercial self interest.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the pattern of innovation and learning among state-owned enterprises in Chinese high-tech sectors and empirically estimated the impact of three types of investment for acquiring technological knowledge (in-house R&D, importing foreign technology, and purchasing domestic technology) on the innovation capabilities of firms.

TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of subsidy intensity on the efficiency of microfinance institutions was investigated using an original database of rating agencies, and they found that subsidies have had a positive impact on efficiency, in the sense that MFIs that received subsidies are more efficient than those that did not.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that domestic and regional value chains can offer greater upgrading opportunities, providing space for activities of higher value-added, better remunerated and difficult to replicate.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed the impact of remittances on household consumption instability in developing countries on a large panel of developing countries and highlighted the role played by remittance in dampening the effect of various sources of consumption instability.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors re-assess the treatment of religion in development studies 30 years after the publication of a special issue of World Development on "Religion and Development" and identify two implications of this for development studies.

TL;DR: The authors investigated the effect of religiosity on attitudes toward gender equality using World Values Survey data and found that religiosity is strongly correlated with gender inequitable attitudes across countries, and that gender inequity is associated with negative effects on seven measures of gender equality of well-being and public policy.