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Category: Development

Published February 1, 2013

Pre-Colonial African Institutions and Contemporary African Development

A new article in Econometrica by Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou:

We investigate the role of deeply rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite images of light density at night. We document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic political centralization and regional development. This pattern is not driven by differences in local geographic features or by other observable ethnic-specific cultural and economic variables. The strong positive association between pre-colonial political complexity and contemporary development also holds within pairs of adjacent ethnic homelands with different legacies of pre-colonial political institutions.

 

Published January 31, 2013

The Demand for Food of Poor Urban Households in Mexico

A cool new article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy by Manuela Angelucci and Orazio Attanasio:

We use Oportunidades, a conditional cash transfer to women, to show that standard demand models do not represent the sample’s behavior: Oportunidades increases eligible households’ food budget shares, despite food being a necessity; demand for food and high-protein food changes over time only in treatment areas; the treatment effects on food and high-protein food consumption are larger than the prediction from the Engel curves at baseline; and the curves do not change in eligible households with high baseline bargaining power for the transfer recipient. Thus, handing transfers to women is a likely determinant of the observed nutritional changes.

Some of this might be a bit too technical for non-economists, so let’s take a closer look at their findings:

Continue readingThe Demand for Food of Poor Urban Households in Mexico
Published January 29, 2013

Hunger and Malnutrition: Data and Statistics

Last week, The Guardian‘s Poverty Matters blog had a great post linking to a number of hunger and malnutrition datasets.

There you can find a link that will allow you to download the entirety of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ food security indicators. Those are great data for anyone looking to write a term paper on food security, as the country-level annual data roughly span 1990 to 2012.

When I tweeted a link to the Guardian‘s post, Filip Spagnoli, a Brussels-based writer and philosopher, linked me to a post on his blog where he has a bunch of statistics on hunger.