David Locke Newhouse

Does Health Aid Matter

This paper examines the relationship between health aid and infant mortality, using data from 118 countries between 1973 and 2004. Health aid has a beneficial and statistically significant effect on infant mortality: doubling per capita health aid is associated with a 2 percent reduction in the infant mortality rate. For the average country, this implies that increasing per capita health aid by US

The Magnitude and Distribution of Fuel Subsidies: Evidence from Bolivia, Ghana, Jordan, Mali, and Sri Lanka

1.60 per year is associated with 1.5 fewer infant deaths per thousand births. The estimated effect is small, relative to the 2015 target envisioned by the Millennium Development Goals. It implies that achieving the MDG target through additional health aid alone would require a roughly 15-fold increase in current levels of aid.

The Effect of School Type on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Indonesia

With the recent jump in world oil prices, the issue of petroleum product pricing has become increasingly important in developing countries. Reflecting a reluctance of many governments to pass these price increases onto energy users, energy price subsidies are absorbing an increasing share of scarce public resources. This paper identifies the issues that need to be discussed when analyzing the fiscal and social costs of fuel subsidies. Using examples from analyses recently undertaken for five countries, it also identifies the magnitude of consumer subsidies and their fiscal implications. The results of the analysis show that - in all of these countries - energy subsidies have significant social and fiscal costs and are badly targeted.

Health Aid and Infant Mortality

Using data from Indonesia, Newhouse and Beegle to evaluate the impact of school type on academic achievement of junior secondary school students (grades 7-9). Students that graduate from public junior secondary schools, controlling for a variety of other characteristics, score 0.15 to 0.3 standard deviations higher on the national exit exam than comparable privately schooled peers. This finding is robust to OLS, fixed-effects, and instrumental variable estimation strategies. Students attending Muslim private schools, including Madrassahs, fare no worse on average than students attending secular private schools. The results provide indirect evidence that higher quality inputs at public junior secondary schools promote higher test scores.

How Did the Great Recession Affect Different Types of Workers? Evidence from 17 Middle-Income Countries

This paper examines the relationship between health aid and infant mortality, using data from 118 countries between 1973 and 2004. Health aid has a statistically significant effect on infant mortality: doubling per capita health aid is associated with a 2 percent reduction in the infant mortality rate. For the average country, this implies that increasing per capita health aid by US

How survey-to-survey imputation can fail

1.60 per year is associated with 1.5 fewer infant deaths per thousand births. The estimated effect is small, relative to the targets envisioned by the Millennium Development Goals.

Working through the crisis : jobs and policies in developing countries during the great recession

This paper examines how different types of workers in 17 middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Impacts on different types of workers varied by country and were only weakly related to the severity of the shock. Among active workers, youth experienced by far the largest adverse impacts on employment, unemployment, and wage employment, particularly relative to older adults. The percentage employment reductions, for example, were greatest for youth in each sector of the economy, as firms reacted to the shock by substituting away from inexperienced workers. Employment rates, as a share of the population, also plummeted for men. Larger drops in male employment were primarily attributable to mens higher initial rate of employment, although mens concentration in the hard-hit industrial sector also played an important role. Within each sector, percentage employment declines were similar for men and women. Added worker effects among women were mild, even among less-educated workers. Differences in labor market outcomes across education groups and urban or rural residence tended to be smaller. These findings bolster the case for targeted support to displaced youth and wage employees. Programs targeted to female and unskilled workers should be undertaken with appropriate caution or empirical support from timely data, as they may not benefit the majority of affected workers.

The Role of Sectoral Growth Patterns in Labor Market Development

This paper proposes diagnostics to assess the accuracy of survey-to-survey imputation methods and applies them to examine why imputing from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey into the Labor Force Survey fails to accurately project poverty trends in Sri Lanka between 2006 and 2009. Survey-to-survey imputation methods rely on two key assumptions: (i) that the questions in the two surveys are asked in a consistent way and (ii) that common variables of the two surveys explain a large share of the intertemporal change in household expenditure and poverty. In addition, differences in sampling design can lead validation tests to underestimate the accuracy of survey-to-survey predictions. In Sri Lanka, the causes of failure differ across sectors. In the urban sector, the primary culprit is differences between the two surveys in the design of the questionnaire. In the rural and estate sectors, the set of common variables in the prediction model does not adequately capture changes in poverty. The paper concludes that in Sri Lanka, survey-to-survey imputation between the Household Income and Expenditure Survey and the Labor Force Survey cannot produce accurate poverty estimates unless the Labor Force Survey adds additional questions on assets and is redesigned to use a questionnaire that is compatible with the Household Income and Expenditure Survey. Alternatively, a new welfare-tracking survey that satisfies these conditions could be established.

The Distributional Impact of Fiscal Policy in Honduras

This document seeks to examine how the Great Recession affected labor markets in developing countries and how governments responded. The recession that began with the collapse of housing markets in the United States and Europe in late 2008 hit the labor markets particularly hard. Employment outcomes worsened sharply as economies shrank. Advanced economies and countries in Central and Eastern Europe suffered the most, with a sharp fall in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In Latin America and the Caribbean, output fell significantly. And although the economies of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East did not contract, their trend growth rates of GDP decelerated significantly. Globally, it is estimated that about 30 million jobs were lost over a period of two years. Where employment did not fall, accommodating the contraction of aggregate demand entailed a sharp drop in total earnings. This document is divided into seven chapters including the overview chapter, and discusses how the crisis affected output across countries, how labor markets adjusted, which workers were more likely to be affected, and which types of policies were implemented. In doing so, the chapters bring together a unique compilation of data and analysis from very different sources, including an inventory of policies implemented during the crisis among countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Evaluating the relationship between spatial and spectral features derived from high spatial resolution satellite data and urban poverty in Colombo, Sri Lanka

This paper investigates the relationship between sectoral growth patterns and employment outcomes. A broad cross-country analysis reveals that in middle-income countries, employment responds more to growth in less productive and more labor-intensive sectors. Employment in middle-income countries is susceptible to a resource curse, and grows rapidly in response to manufacturing and export manufacturing growth. Within Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico, the effects of different sectoral growth patterns are context dependent, but differences in sectoral growth effects on employment and wages are substantially reduced in states or provinces with higher measured labor mobility. Consistent with this, aggregate employment and wage effects of growth by sector are close to uniform when examined over longer time horizons, after labor has an opportunity to adjust across sectors. The results reinforce the importance of growth in more labor-intensive sectors, and suggest that job mobility may be an important mechanism to diffuse the benefits of capital-intensive growth.