My Sanford School colleague Manoj Mohanan talks about one of his current research projects, which aims about assessing the impacts of telemedicine in India:
Published November 2, 2011
Category: Development
Published November 1, 2011
Where Do the Poor Live?
That’s the title of a new paper in World Development by Andy Sumner, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex. Here is the abstract:
This paper argues that the distribution of global poverty has changed and that most of the world’s poor no longer live in countries officially classified as low-income countries (LICs). It is estimated that the majority of the world’s poor, or up to a billion people, live in middle-income countries (MICs). This pattern is largely as a result of the recent graduation into the MIC category of a number of populous countries. The paper discusses the trends in the distribution of global poverty, and opens a wider discussion on the potential implications for aid and development cooperation.
This new paper looks like it is the published version of a Center for Global Development working paper published in October 2010 titled “The New Bottom Billion,” which is a play on the title of Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion.
To listen to an IDS podcast featuring both Andy Sumner and Paul Collier, who disagrees with Andy’s conclusion, click here. To follow Andy on Twitter, click here.
Published October 27, 2011
Conditional Cash Transfers and the Budget Share of Food
From a forthcoming paper by Attanasio et al. in the Economic Journal:
We study food Engel curves amongst the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer program in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total consumption and for the price variability across villages, our estimates imply that an increase in consumption by 10 percent would lead to a decrease of 1 percent in the share of food. However, quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of the program show that the share of food increases. This result is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the program could increase the bargaining power of women, inducing a more than proportional increase in food consumption.