Nobuhiko Fuwa

The Poverty and Heterogeneity Among Female-Headed Households Revisited: The Case of Panama

Investigating whether female-headed households (FHHs) are particularly disadvantaged requires more systematic means of comparing poverty than are typically found in past studies. In Panama, while FHHs as a whole appear to be better-off on average, such results are somewhat sensitive to assumptions about economies of scale in household consumption. More disaggregated analysis reveals that particular segments of FHHs, particularly self-reported FHHs with common-law partners living in urban areas, are disadvantaged in both consumption and some nonconsumption dimensions. Thus less systematic analysis could fail to identify such pockets of poverty that might deserve special policy attention.

Growth, Inequality and Politics Revisited: A Developing-Country Case

Key issues in the empirical study on growth are addressed using provincial data in the Philippines. We find a high rate of absolute convergence, a positive relationship between inequality and growth, and a positive relationship between political competitiveness and growth.

A Note on the Analysis of Female-Headed Households in Developing Countries

In this paper, we will attempt to clarify some issues commonly found in recent discussions surrounding female headship analysis, in general, and will also discuss recent literature on the relationship between female headship and poverty, in particular. The issues addressed here include: the confusion between female headship analysis and gender analysis of poverty; the existence of alternative definitions of household headship; and the existence of different analytical purposes of using the concept of household headship and the need for using appropriate headship definitions for each purpose.

The Net Impact of the Female Secondary School Stipend Program in Bangladesh

This paper examines the impact of the secondary school stipend program for female students on student enrolment in Bangladesh. After a brief description of the stipend program, we examine both nationwide and project-level data on student enrolment. While the former data show little identifiable impact of the stipend program, the project-level data show significant positive impact of the program. We find that, on average, the stipend program increased female student enrolment by 2% above the prevailing trend rate of increase while the program had significantly negative impact on male enrolment. Thus the program had a major effect in closing the gender gap, thereby accelerating the trend that had already existed in Bangladesh before the stipend program was introduced in 1994.

How Does Credit Access Affect Children's Time Allocation?: Evidence from Rural India

Abstract Using a unique dataset obtained from rural Andhra Pradesh, India that contains direct observations of household access to credit and detailed time use, results of this study indicate that credit market failures result in a substantial reallocation of time use pattern by children, leading to a significant increase in remunerative work and a similarly significant decrease in leisure time. While the direct impact on schooling time per se does not appear to be large, longer work and shorter leisure could arguably constrain effective learning opportunities of children, hampering human capital formation.

The impacts of a community forestry program on forest conditions, management intensity and revenue generation in the Dang district of Nepal

A growing literature documents the positive impact of community management on non-timber forest conservation, but not on the management of timber forests which require higher management intensity than do non-timber forests. We find in Nepal that better market access encourages felling of mature timber trees before but not after the community management began and that population pressure leads to deforestation, which would have taken place under government management, but encourages forest management in recent years under community management. Longer period of community management is found to be associated with the higher density of larger trees, indicating that the community management facilitates rehabilitation of timber forests.

Should We Track Migrant Households When Collecting Household Panel Data? Household Relocation, Economic Mobility, and Attrition Biases in the Rural Philippines

Based on household panel data that tracked migrant households (with an additional survey cost of 17 percent), this article describes behavior of household relocation and quantifies the extent of attrition biases in estimating the determinants of percapita household consumption and of its growth rate. Many households relocate for non-economic reasons, and to rural destinations, while the small number of urban migrants improved their wellbeing faster than did others. Such heterogeneity among migrants may be a reason behind the negligible attrition biases caused by the omission of migrants, in the inference on the average behavioral coefficients among the original population.

An Analysis of Social Mobility in a Village Community: The Case of a Philippine Village

Abstract We apply transition probabilities and multinomial logit models to analyze household class mobility in a Philippine village. We find that better access to land facilitates accumulation in agriculture. Schooling has positive effects on upward mobility in both agriculture and non-agricultural sectors. Macroeconomic growth has positive effects on upward mobility in non-agricultural sector, and its quantitative effects are large relative to those of household characteristics. We find little indication of farm households being responsive to prices or non-agricultural opportunities. The life-cycle stages have significant effects. A larger number of children have positive effects on accumulation among lower strata but negative effects among upper strata.

How inefficient are small-scale rice farmers in Eastern India really? : examining the effects of microtopography on technical efficiency estimates

We focus on the impact of failing to control for differences in land types defined along toposequence on estimates of farm technical efficiency for small-scale rice farms in eastern India. In contrast with the existing literature, we find that those farms may be considerably more technically efficient than they appear from more aggregated analysis without such control. Farms planted with modern rice varieties are technically efficient. Furthermore, farms planted with traditional rice varieties operate close to the production frontier on less productive lands (upland and mid-upland), but significant technical inefficiency exists on more productive lands (medium land and lowland).

The Transformation of Hayami’s Village

One of the most important areas of inquiries in development economics is the choice of the most appropriate economic system that promotes economic development. In reality, an economic system is a combination of various interactions of three important organizations, that is, the community, market, and state. A community is defined as a small group of people characterized by intensive social interactions that tend to minimize information asymmetry between transacting parties, thereby lowering transaction costs of economic activities (Aoki and Hayami, 2001). A market is an organization that coordinates the activities of profit-maximizing firms and utility-maximizing individuals under the guidance of prices, while a state specializes in the supply of public goods by means of legitimate coercive power (Hayami and Godo, 2005).