Lit in Review: Child Undernutrition and Labor

Harttgen, Klasen, and Vollmer, "Economic Growth and Child Undernutrition in Africa," GlobalFood Discussion Paper.

They add to the short but slowly growing literature on the impact of economic growth on child undernutrition that I based my dissertation work on. They add Klasen (08), Friedman and Schady (09), and Subramanyam et al (11) to the ones I knew about.

They identify a micro-macro paradox: increasing household income reduces undernutrition significantly but increasing average incomes doesn't make nearly the same difference. It is rather disturbing to me to see for how many SSA countries there has been significant improvement in GDP/capita, but a worsening of child hunger. Among the things they find that matter more than GDP/capita, household asset rank matters, suggesting that inequality may be an important part of the story.

Bhagowalia, Menon, Quisumbing, and Soundararajan, "What Dimensions of Women's Empowerment  Matter Most for Child Nutrition?' IFPRI Discussion Paper 01192

Women's empowerment can be a fairly vague (their preferred word: complex) term, so it is nice to see the authors breaking various dimensions of it down to see which are correlated with better outcomes. From the abstract: "Results from logit models indicate that both a greater degree of women’s empowerment and greater maternal endowments [read: height and education] are associated with better long-term nutritional status of children [in Bangladesh]. Attitudes toward domestic violence have an effect on child stunting and mobility; participation in decisionmaking is an important influence on dietary diversity. Consistent with previous studies, maternal height and maternal schooling decrease the probability of stunting, and maternal schooling is positively associated with dietary diversity. While these are not immediate measures of empowerment, they are positively associated with child nutritional outcomes and reflect prior investments in women and girls." However, they have almost no control variables in the regressions, so it is uncertain how much is due to these factors directly, and how much is the fact they signal correlation with socio-economic status or other factors.

De Paoli and Mendola, "Does International Migration Increase Child Labor?" Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano Development Studies Working Paper 339.

An interesting data combination allows them to look out how out-migration of workers from different skills impact local labor markets, and how those impacts affect some 200,000 children studied in 38 different countries. They find that allowing low-skilled workers to emigrate increases local wages for the parents, reducing child labor. It might have also been the case that it raised the wage for child labor, which would increase child labor, but this does not seem to be a significant factor. They also see that female emigration reduces child labor by more than male emigration. "According to our estimates, a 10% increase in the migration rate decreases the probability of child labor by 1.2 percentage points (p.p.) and the total time of weekly work by 7.3 hours." I count 209 reported regressions and, at first glance at least, the vast majority tell the same overall story.

Lit in Review: Impacts of thte 2010/11 Surge in Food Prices

Ivanic, Maros, Will Martin, Hasan Zaman. (2011). “Estimating the Short-Run Poverty Impacts of the 2010-11 Surge in Food Prices.” World Bank Development Research Group, Policy Research Working Paper 5633, Apr

In the 2007/08 price increase, most of the price increase was concentrated in staple cereals. This meant the effects were concentrated on the poor who had few outside options to shift to. In the current price shock, however, food prices have increased in many more commodities and by less overall. This means there are more substitutions available and much of the hit has affected foods the poor consume less of anyway. As a result, they estimate that only 44 million more people are poor instead of the 105 million more in 07/08.

However, it appears that price transmission is higher this time than last.

African Agriculture: Chicken Imports, Bananas, and Bangladesh Land Grab

The Bangladesh government joins the group of countries purchasing and leasing land in Africa to grow food for home. They have contacted governments in west Africa (Ghana, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, and Liberia). Unlike many other "land grab" proposals, these appear to promise a 50/50 split of food grown so that if Bangladeshi investments can double yields, it is possible for the countries to increase their food availability. As I highlight in my upcoming food policy textbook, cereal yields in west Africa are still more than half what they are in other regions of the world so such a large increase is possible.

Zimbabwe's chicken farmers are upset that the government lifted the temporary ban on chicken imports. Most of the imports come from Brazil and South Africa, which farmers claim heavily subsidize their chicken industries. One kg of chicken costs only $1 to raise in Brazil, but about $2.85 in Zimbabwe which forgoes the use of GMO-inputs. Local chicken sells for roughly $4-5 per kg while the imported chicken goes for $2/kg. The Zimbabwe Poultry Association head complains that "the problem is" lack of government price fixing to prevent retailers from raising the prices on local chickens, which cost much less at wholesale than retail and unfair dumping. Unmentioned are ways government could reduce local costs, help chicken farmers move into other industries, or support both farmers and consumers. Most of what he would like to see happen would benefit producers at the expense of consumers and pit one group of producers against another.

An article praises the benefits of banana culture research and constructing a center to provide marketing and extension services in central Kenya.

The perils of buying more ... or less!

Bangladesh has announced that the minimum wage for garment industry workers will be doubled, from $18/month to $35. This would - potentially and eventually - bring some 2.5 million people above the $1/day poverty measure ... but it's actually $1.25 these days, so nevermind. Workers had asked for $55, so the move hasn't stopped the riots. Apparently, a coalition of NGOs and trade unions have decided that the "Asia floor wage" should be about $140/month. Reading a little further into the AFW website shows that even this is pretty low: it would need to be around $250/month to match the $5/hour minimum wage rate we used to have once different prices are included (PPP).

Johnstone discusses fair trade clothing and laments that "many employers will take months or years to implement it or fiddle the figures by imposing impossible production targets that can be met only by unpaid overtime." Western customers can get invigorated by occasional, brand-specific boycotts, but aren't willing to make the connection between cheap clothing and the low wages that made it possible. The recession has moved even more customers into the cheaper clothing, "so the budget fashion industry has had a good recession."

Between that and the 6kg of C02 reportedly released in the creation and transportation of jeans, she decided not to buy any clothes in 2010. "So far I have managed to stick to my resolve. Of course, this is the last thing that my garment worker in Dhaka wants. After all, if she wasn't paid tuppence a piece to make T-shirts, how else might she be obliged to make her living?"

What IFPRI has been doing

They've been very busy at IFPRI recently....

The Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) is a new data base with some two dozen indicators regarding African agriculture, designed at the request of NEPAD. Immediately from the home page you can generate many comparative maps on GDP, poverty, hunger like the one below showing that they now estimate 90% of the adult population of the Democratic Republic of Congo are hungry.

Ghana has a goal: "In the past five years, Ghana has experienced fairly high levels of poverty-reducing growth, and the country has set 2015 as a target date to achieve middle-income status." They are already classified as lower-middle and are about half-way to upper-middle status.


IFPRI has a useful report out on Gender and Governance in Rural Services in India, Ethiopia, and Ghana. It looks at women's access to agricultural extension and water supplies. Each country has a very different system in place, with different pros, cons, and different recommendations for what to do next. Available for free online, but you can only print 1-2 pages at a time.

A number of PowerPoints on mitigatingclimate change through agriculture came from a meeting last week in Bonn. Includes a proposed study on Payment for Environmental Services to reduce livestock-land degradation cycles. Another paper finds that rural people living near national parks in Costa Rica and Thailand are doing better financially than rural people who are further away from them, largely as a result of new jobs in conservation and ecotourism.

They are releasing a new dataset on chronic poverty in Bangladesh using both qualitative and quantitative panel data on 2000 households. Other papers on Bangladeshi poverty and food security that came out quite recently include:
Agricultural marketing, price stabilization, value chains, and global/regional trade
Cross-cutting issues: Governance and gender
Food utilization and nutrition security
Growth and development potential of livestock and fisheries in Bangladesh
Income growth, safety nets, and public food distribution
Investing in crop agriculture in Bangladesh for higher growth and productivity, and adaptation to climate change

Brought to you by the letter M

MDGs, MVs, Migrants, and Monsters

How to make the inevitable next round of development goals more realistic, achievable, and productive.- Todd Moss of CGD says:

1. Bottom up, not global down.
2. Based on ambitious yet reasonably achievable expectations.
3. Aimed, where possible, on intermediate outcomes.
4. Considered warning markers rather than operational goals.
5. Able to identify success. 

Speaking of the MDGs, the one where we have made the least progress worldwide is reducing maternal mortality. Canada and the US are trying to raise more money to focus on them maternal mortality rates at the G8 and G20 meetings in two weeks.

Of course, we all know that Africa is failing most of the MDGs. Easterly points out, however, that that is partly an artifact of the way the goals were set up: some in levels, some in percentage change, other using other criteria. The thing is, a percentage increase of something good of which you have little is much easier than rising to a set limit the farther you are from it. Similarly, reducing something bad by a given percentage is harder than reducing it by a specific amount if you have a lot of that bad thing. Nearly every goal, however, was chosen in the hardest possible way:

Had the goals been chosen at the + signs instead - reducing poverty and increasing school enrollment by a fixed percent, for instance, Africa would look like it's doing much better.

I think the MDG design was unintentional after some conversation with the original creators of the goals, who did not intend the MDGs to be applied at the regional or country levels. What is less forgivable is the aquiescence in making Africa look like a failure after the bias was clear to anyone who would bother to check. Of course, there are areas and time periods where Africa has done badly, but is that any reason to take the successes and make them look like failures?

How have the Millennium Villages been doing? The first report is in, but not many people have been commenting on it, according to Aid Watch:

The new data give a picture of encouraging results across all sectors compared to the baseline. In Mwandama, Malawi, for example, bednet use for children under five increased from 14 percent to 60 percent and malaria prevalence for all age groups fell from 19 percent to 15 percent. Maize yields increased dramatically from .8 tons per hectare to 4.5 tons per hectare. 

Note: crop increases do not necessarily imply profit increases, but given the high subsidies they're receiving, I think that's a safe bet. The question is whether incomes increase by more than the subsidies and how long lasting the increases are after the donors leave: ie - is this enough to get the farmers out of the assumed poverty trap?

Unfortunately the results are also not that useful: Three years is too short a period to know how to interpret this dramatic increase in maize yields, for example. Is this consistent with normal variation in crop yields? Was 2006 an unusually good or bad year for maize? We don’t know.
The results also don’t help us determine whether current and future resources should be shifted away from other existing or even yet-to-be invented approaches, towards the MVP template. Will those short-term gains last beyond the timeline of the project? Can the project become self-sustaining?
Again, we don’t know, in part because not enough time has passed.

Investing in migration, Michael Clemens does some quick and dirty calculations for Bangladesh:

Hussain reports that the average Bangladeshi pays about $3,150 to migrate—mostly to the Middle East—covering costs of travel, intermediaries, and so on.  A stint abroad earns the average migrant $3,690 per year, or about $11,050 total for a typical three-year spell.  Of that, about $6,850 is either remitted home or brought home as savings. ...
That’s a stunningly profitable investment.  The large, up-front cost of emigration is yielding these migrants a 117% annual return. Most of that is spent in Bangladesh. For comparison, Mark Pitt and Shahidur Khandker estimate the returns to much-vaunted microcredit for Bangladeshi men at just 11%... .

Does Bill Easterly want to eliminate aid? Vote in the comments section.

How many want to come here?

Gallup reports that of the 700 some-odd million people who want to permanently emigrate, 165 million of them want to come to the US. That would be a group of people roughly equivalent to 53% of the current US population. Though far fewer people want to move to Singapore, they would see an even larger population increase by percent.

The top ten countries whose people want to move here are:

China - 23 million - 2% of them
India - 17 million - 1.5% of them
Nigeria - 17 million - 11% of them
Ethiopia - 10 million - 13% of them
Bangladesh - 8 million - 5% of them
Brazil - 8 million - 4% of them
Mexico - 6 million - 5.5% of them
Philippines - 6 million - 6.5% of them
Vietnam - 5 million - 6% of them
Japan - 3 million - 2% of them

We let in less than 0.6% that many.

Out of that 165 million, Wiki tells me that a record 1 million became naturalized US citizens in 2008, mostly from Mexico, India, and the Philippines. In 1890, 15 percent of the people living here were foreign-born. "By 1970 immigrants accounted for 4.7 percent of the US population, rising to 6.2 percent in 1980 and to an estimated 12.5 percent today."

Successes: Yogurt in Bangladesh

Kale at the Poverty News Blog (left) reports:

Paul Bennett is a business innovation consultant who goes to corporation boardrooms to give them creative ideas. For inspiration, Bennett recently visited Bangladesh and Professor Muhammad Yunus. Bennett not only wanted to talk to to Yunus about Grameen Bank, but also on their cooperation with Dannon Yogurt.

Yunus and Dannon create a vitamin packed yogurt at a low price that even the poor children of Bangladesh can afford. Dannon and Grameen run the company so that all profits go back into the company to maximize the benefit to the people of Bangladesh.

In his essay for the Financial Times, Bennett says there is a lot to be learned from this cooperation.

Then there is the Grameen-Danone collaboration, which started after Frank Riboud, chief executive of the French company, met Prof Yunus in 2005. Again, scale is an overwhelming theme: a tiny, "cute" factory (as Prof Yunus describes it), a 10th the size of a regular Danone plant, which makes a batch-produced, nutritionally complete yoghurt product, using local milk, collected jug-by-jug in rural villages - as I saw for myself. It is sold door-to-door by Dan-one's yoghurt ladies and marketed cleverly by a man in a Danone-branded lion suit teaching children the value of a nutritious diet.

He then also confirms that, yes, this does make money, but it does something more important as well:

It makes money but it also ignites employees' passions and teaches them new ways of working. In its collaboration with Danone, this philosophy is reaping more benefits for both than the purely financial.