Tewodaj Mogues

'Moving in place': Drought and poverty dynamics in South Wollo, Ethiopia

Abstract This article discusses the impact of drought on poverty dynamics in the South Wollo area of northeastern Ethiopia. Using both survey and anthropological/qualitative data covering a six-year period, the paper assesses which households were able to hold on to assets and recover from the 1999–2000 drought and which were not. It suggests that while the incidence of poverty changed very little during 1997 to 2003 despite the occurrence of a major drought, the fortunes of the poorest improved, but not enough to keep them from poverty. The study concludes by asking how current policies affect patterns of poverty and inequality and what might be done to improve welfare in South Wollo.

What Determines Public Expenditure Allocations? A Review of Theories, and Implications for Agricultural Public Investment

This paper addresses the determinants of public expenditure policies, by reviewing theories and empirical investigations of what features explain the budget process and how the various attributes of actors—including politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups, and donors—and of institutions and political and economic governance environments affect the prioritization of public investments. It draws conclusions with regard to the determinants of agricultural public investments.

Does Freer Trade Really Lead to Productivity Growth? Evidence from Africa

Theory predicts that trade liberalization should raise average total factor productivity (TFP) among manufacturing firms. However, this is a generic prediction and depends on maintained assumptions about industries, factor markets, and trade patterns that may not fit well for developing countries. Using firm-level data from Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania during the 1990s, a period of fairly rapid trade policy liberalization, we estimate productivity effects of trade. Our analysis confirms the well-known association between export intensity and higher productivity of the firm; however, the evidence for “learning by exporting,” or an increase in productivity associated with greater exports, is mixed, with several instances of negative average TFP growth among exporters. Our analysis indicates that such declines are likely attributable to the effects of lower external tariffs, because the firm-level productivity margin below which exporting is unprofitable moves down as the external tariff rate is reduced. We also find that sales to the rest of the world and sales to other African economies have differential effects on productivity growth rates, and that for country-specific reasons, these effects are not uniform. Controlling for initial productivity and the destination of exports (within or outside Africa) helps us understand why in some cases, export participation is associated with negative rates of TFP growth.

Filling the Legal Void? Experimental Evidence from a Community-Based Legal Aid Program for Gender-Equal Land Rights in Tanzania

Gender disparities continue to exist in women’s control, inheritance, and ownership of land in spite of legislation directing improvements in women’s land access. Women are often excluded from traditional patrilineal inheritance systems, often lack the legal know-how or enforcement mechanisms to ensure their property rights are maintained, and often lack initial capital or asset bases to purchase land through market mechanisms. Community-based legal aid programs have been promoted as one way to expand access to justice for marginalized populations, through provision of free legal aid and education. Despite promising programmatic experiences, few rigorous evaluations have studied their impacts in developing countries. We evaluate the effect of a one-year community-based legal aid program in the Kagera Region of northwestern Tanzania using a randomized controlled trial design with specific attention to gender. We measure impacts of access to legal aid on a range of land-related knowledge, attitude, and practice outcomes using individual questionnaires administered to male and female household members separately. Effects were limited in the short term to settings with minimal transaction costs to the paralegal. Treatment women in smaller villages attend legal seminars and are more knowledgeable and positive regarding their legal access to land. Cost-effectiveness analysis shows that the costs of bringing about these changes are moderate. The difference between the impact of the intervention on men and on women is narrowed when taking into account the gender-differentiated paralegal effort, and thus costs, allocated to women and men.

Filling the legal void? Impacts of a community-based legal aid program on women’s land-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices

Abstract Securing women’s property rights improves overall welfare. While governments in Africa often make provisions for gender-equal legal rights, the dichotomy between de jure and customary practices remains. Community-based legal aid (CBLA) has been promoted to address this chasm through provision of free legal aid and education. We evaluate a one-year CBLA program in Tanzania using a randomized controlled trial. Results show women in treatment communities had higher exposure to legal services and increased their legal knowledge. Women who had access to a trained voluntary paralegal experienced a 0.31 standard deviation increase in a legal service index, and a 0.20 standard deviation increase in an index documenting their knowledge of land-related regulations. These changes were, however, insufficient to shift women’s attitudes or result in more favorable gendered land practices. Estimates by village size and progressiveness reveal that transaction costs and social context influence program success.

Social networks near and far: The role of bonding and bridging social capital for assets of the rural poor

With formal insurance and credit markets either absent or inaccessible to rural agents in most poor rural economies, social networks play a highly important role in mitigating the risks that agricultural households face. These kinds of informal insurance schemes are presumed to be most effective in the face of idiosyncratic risk. However, social mechanisms also exist in developing countries that may reduce locally correlated risk such as the adverse economic effects of climatic conditions that affect multiple residents in a village. This paper analyzes the role of localized (bonding) and of spatially dispersed (bridging) social capital in mitigating the impact of idiosyncratic and of locally correlated shocks on farm households’ livestock endowments. Using dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) system estimation with seven‐period panel dataset of over 400 households, we find that bonding social capital is able to protect households’ livestock assets against idiosyncratic shocks, but bridging social capital does not play a role in mitigating the impact of correlated shocks. The results hold up to multiple robustness checks. A test of different hypotheses about the nature of these assets’ trajectories rejects the asset poverty trap hypothesis, and instead finds that livestock asset dynamics are characterized by a single stable equilibrium.

The making of public investments: Champions, coordination, and characteristics of nutrition interventions

To better support allocations of public investment—especially where needs are high and resources scarce—it is first instructive to have an in-depth understanding of what drives realized public investment behavior. The study applies a process-tracing approach to test and build theories around models that center on the characteristics of investments and the role of agents. In the context of public investment in nutrition in a low-resource economy, the analysis finds that public decisionmakers strongly favor highly visible nutrition investments with a short lag between spending incurred and outcomes achieved. Coordination among agents that allocate funds to nutrition takes mostly a spatial nature, resulting in greater geographic equity of public investment. Champions as change agents have an influential role in attracting more funding to nutrition and improving its allocation, but their influence is fleeting and difficult to sustain.