Richard Palmer-Jones

What has luck got to do with it? A regional analysis of poverty and agricultural growth in rural India

This article explores the role of agro-ecological factors associated with agricultural growth and poverty outcomes in India. Using a new operationalisation of agro-ecological factors and incorporating within-State variations in poverty and other variables we show that agricultural growth and poverty reduction appear to depend on underlying agro-ecological conditions which are favourable to the spread of irrigation and hence agricultural development, which in turn in associated with poverty reduction. Promotion of agriculture in less favoured areas in unlikely to have similar effects on agriculture in less favoured areas is unlikely to have similar effects on agricultural growth even if the effects of agricultural growth on poverty remain similar, unless conditions for irrigation are favourable or rainfall is sufficiently abundant and reliable. This suggests that considerable caution may be needed in drawing policy conclusions from empirical analysis by state alone, and without regard to their underlying factor endowments.

High Noon for Microfinance Impact Evaluations: Re-Investigating the Evidence from Bangladesh

Recently, microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified the microfinance phenomenon. This paper applies propensity score matching (PSM), which has become widely used for the analysis of observational data, to the study by Pitt and Khandker (1998) which has been labelled the most rigorous evidence supporting claims that microfinance benefits the poorest especially when targeted on women. After carefully reconstructing the data we differentiate outcomes by gender of borrower, take account of borrowing from several formal and informal sources, and find that the mainly positive impacts of microfinance that we observe are shown by sensitivity analysis to be highly vulnerable to selection on unobservables, and we are therefore not convinced that the relationships between microfinance and outcomes are causal.

Rethinking gendered poverty and work.

This article argues for the development of an approach to labor in gender and poverty analyses which would attend to the content and character of work as fundamental to the experience of well-being by persons and to the formulation of development policies and research for poverty reduction and gender equity. An analysis of physical work is included. The existence of biological differences sociocultural lines and differences in personal projects suggests that there are gender differences in relation to the experience of heavy manual labor. Hard labor is connected to ill- and well-being through nutrition-health productivity linkages through intrahousehold allocations of resources and consumption and through local social relations valuations and discourses surrounding work. In combination these elements may generate new forms of gendered energy traps. Investigation of the various stressors experienced by poorer people in their labor dependent livelihoods together with the health consequences of these stressors would perhaps be most useful.

Assessing ‘what works’ in international development: meta-analysis for sophisticated dummies

Many studies of development interventions are individually unable to provide convincing conclusions because of low statistical significance, small size, limited geographical purview and so forth. Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are forms of research synthesis that combine studies of adequate methodological quality to produce more convincing conclusions. In the social sciences, study designs, types of analysis and methodological quality vary tremendously. Combining these studies for meta-analysis entails more demanding risk of bias assessments to ensure that only studies with largely appropriate methodological characteristics are included, and sensitivity analysis should be performed. In this article, we discuss assessing risk of bias and meta-analysis using such diverse studies.

Missing women in Indian districts: a quantitative analysis

Abstract The ratio of women to men in India reveals socially determined excess female mortality. The cultural and economic variables used to explain variations in the juvenile sex ratio are interrelated with each other and with other demographic and economic variables, and show large regional differences within India. Our empirical study is built on an extension to Sens entitlements framework and spatial lag and spatial error econometric procedures. We find that low female labour participation (FLP) is an important determinant of anti-female child bias in regions characterised by both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian kinship systems, but where Indo-Aryan kinship predominates, mainly in Northern India, the effect of FLP is much more significant.

Work intensity, gender and sustainable development

Abstract Is labour-intensive employment compatible with social justice and environmental sustainability? This paper examines the question of how far small-scale, intermediate technology based on energy-intensive human work, which is central to prescriptions for poverty alleviation and sustainable development, is compatible with development objectives emphasizing gender equity. Work intensity is a neglected characteristic of labour but significant in the determination of human well-being and in the intra-household distribution of welfare. The intensification of energy expenditure does not affect men and women in a uniform way and needs to be gender disaggregated in order to reveal potential trade-offs between development strategies based on ‘labour intensive growth’ and the well-being of men and women. The paper draws upon the experience with treadle pumps for irrigation in Bangladesh as an illustration of such potential trade-offs and argues for more rigorous analyses of gender divisions of labour, which include work intensity in combination with time allocation.

Literacy Sharing, Assortative Mating, or What? Labour Market Advantages and Proximate Illiteracy Revisited

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which Basu, Narayan and Ravallion (2002) report using Household Income and Expenditure data from Bangladesh. BNR attribute a considerable wage premium for proximate-illiterate women in off-farm employment to labour productivity gains from intra-household literacy sharing. This wage premium also suggests that women may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men. We propose that any such relationship might not be due to higher labour productivity but may have other explanations such as systematically different and unobserved attributes of illiterate females married into literate households. We also pay attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non-farm wage employment, which contrary to received wisdom suggests that household literacy may not be unambiguously progressive for females. We propose that the widely reported finding that female literacy impacts more positively than male literacy on child wellbeing may not extend into similar effects in other realms of household activities where males may be more efficient transmitters of literacy externalities. Using more recent Bangladesh and similar Indian data we find somewhat different results for household literacy externalities on non-farm wage employment of household illiterates, and also show that any such effects are conditioned on the social identity of the individuals, their geographic location and their sector of employment. We caution against drawing conclusions from one finding using one data set apparently ignoring contrary findings, where that finding is congruent with fashionable development views, such as the advantages of females as generators of development.

Agricultural wages in Bangladesh: What the figures really show?

The impact of the ‘green revolution’ on poverty has been the subject of much concern and fears that it leads to impoverishment have affected many people in a position to influence agricultural policy. Real agricultural wages rates have been used as an indicator of poverty, in the absence of more direct measurements. This article starts by examining two recent studies of the trends and regional variations of real agricultural wage rates in Bangladesh both of which argue that agricultural growth has not been favourable to real wage rates. One concludes that there has been an ‘alarming’ downward trend since the mid‐1960s, and the other that the contribution of technological change to labour demand has not been strong. Using more recent information and re‐working the original data it appears that these conclusions cannot be supported.

Replication of Quantitative Work in Development Studies: Experiences and Suggestions

There is a growing demand for replications of authoritative works in development studies, which reflects recent trends in other social sciences as well as challenges to important quantitative works in development studies where replications have made contested contributions to understanding. At the same time, there is a strong trend within development towards adoption of medical models of evidence-based policy to find out what policies and interventions work. Replication is a key practice of medical (and natural science) research and was advocated frequently over several decades without success. This article addresses the incentives for replication going beyond a narrow focus on extrinsic rewards, reviews some significant examples, discusses behaviour during replication and draws lessons for replicators and replicatees.

Improving the quality of development research: What could archiving qualitative data for reanalysis and revisiting research sites contribute?

As the emphasis on evidence-based policymaking in international development increases, so too should the attention paid to the quality of the research on which this evidence is based. One way to encourage this is by archiving research data to enable reanalysis, but this requirement is often ignored or resisted by development researchers. Similarly, ambivalent feelings are expressed about revisits to former research sites to conduct further research by original and other researchers. In this article, we outline why and how researchers archive and reanalyze qualitative data and revisit research sites, and discuss the potential benefits and challenges of these practices for development research.