Tomoki Fujii

Micro-level estimation of child malnutrition indicators and its application in Cambodia

One of the major limitations in addressing child malnutrition is lack of information that could be used to target resources. By combining demographic and health survey (DHS) and population census data, the author disaggregates the estimates of the prevalence of child malnutrition in Cambodia from currently available 17 DHS strata into 1,594 communes. The methodology is built on the small-area estimation technique developed by Elbers, Lanjouw, and Lanjouw. The author extends it to jointly estimate multiple indicators and to allow for a richer structure of error terms. Average standard errors for the commune-level estimates in this study were about 4 percent, a magnitude comparable to those for stratum-level estimates derived from DHS only. The author demonstrates three applications of these estimates. First, he explores the relationship between malnutrition, consumption poverty, and inequality. The nonlinear effects of consumption on nutritional status of children are a key component of the relationship. Second, he conducts a decomposition analysis of health inequality and finds that the between-location share of health inequality is lower than with consumption inequality. Finally, he evaluates the potential gains from geographic targeting. The author finds that the savings in the cost of a nutrition program from commune-level targeting is on average at least two to three times higher than that from stratum-level targeting when the per capita cost of the program is fixed.

Commune-Level Estimation of Poverty Measures and its Application in Cambodia

In this study, we combined the Cambodian socioeconomic survey for 1997 and the countrys population census of 1998 to produce poverty measures at the commune-level in Cambodia using the small-area estimation technique developed by Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw. While there are a number of communes for which the standard errors associated with the estimates are too high, we found that they are on average small enough to be useful. We illustrate the application of poverty maps with reference to education programmes.

How Does Vietnam's Accession to the World Trade Organization Change the Spatial Incidence of Poverty?

Trade policies can promote aggregate efficiency, but the ensuing structural adjustments generally create both winners and losers. From an incomes perspective, trade liberalization can raise gross domestic product per capita, but rates of emergence from poverty depend on individual household characteristics of economic participation and asset holding. To fully realize the growth potential of trade, while limiting the risk of rising inequality, policies need to better account for microeconomic heterogeneity. One approach to this is geographic targeting that shifts resources to poor areas. This study combines an integrated microsimulation-computable general equilibrium model with small area estimation to evaluate the spatial incidence of Vietnams accession to the World Trade Organization. Provincial-level poverty reduction after full liberalization was heterogeneous, ranging from 2.2 percent to 14.3 percent. Full liberalization will benefit the poor on a national basis, but the northwestern area of Vietnam is likely to lag behind. Furthermore, poverty can be shown to increase under comparable scenarios.

Geographic Decomposition of Inequality in Health and Wealth: Evidence from Cambodia

Applying the small-area estimation methods to Cambodia data, we decompose the total inequality in wealth (consumption) and health (child undernutrition) indicators into within-location and between-location components. Because the knowledge of the pattern of spatial disparity in poverty and undernutrition is important for the geographic targeting of resources, we conduct a geographic decomposition of the variance of the Foster-Greere-Thorbecke index in addition to the standard decomposition exercise based on the generalized entropy measures. We find that a sizable proportion of wealth inequality is due to between-location inequality, whereas health inequality is mainly due to within-location inequality. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2013

Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application to the Philippines

In this paper, we propose a new method of poverty decomposition. Our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time-reversion consistency and subperiod additivity. It integrates the existing methods of growth-redistribution decomposition and sector-based decomposition, because it allows us to decompose poverty change into growth and redistribution components for each group (e.g., regions or sectors) in the economy. We extend our method to have six components and provide an empirical application to the Philippines for the period of 1985 to 2009.

How Does Childbirth Alter Intrahousehold Resource Allocation? Evidence from Japan

Exploiting unique panel data that include direct measurements of resource allocation within households, we investigated the impact of childbirth on intrahousehold allocation for married Japanese couples. Based on a collective model of the household, we developed reduced-form and structural-form estimation equations that allow us to focus on private goods to track the changes in intrahousehold resource allocation. We found one additional child is associated with a reduction in the wifes private expenditure share by at least two percentage points. This may be because she substitutes more say in decisions on the children for her own private expenditure share.

Two-Sample Estimation of Poverty Rates for Disabled People: An Application to Tanzania

Estimating poverty measures for disabled people in developing countries is difficult, partly because relevant data are not available. We develop two methods to estimate poverty by the disability status of the household head. We extend the small-area estimation proposed by Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw (2002, 2003) so that we can run a regression on heads disability status even when such information is unavailable in the survey. We do so by aggregation and by moment adjusted two sample instrumental variable estimation. Our results from Tanzania show that both methods work well, and that disability is indeed associated with poverty.

How Well Can We Target Resources with 'Quick-and-Dirty' Data?: Empirical Results from Cambodia

Poverty reduction is a top priority for international organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations. The aid resources available for poverty reduction are, however, severely constrained in many countries. Minimizing the leakage of aid resources to the non-poor is a key to maximize poverty reduction with limited amount of resources availble. One way to minimize such leakage is to target resources geographically. That is, policymakers can move resources to the poorest parts of the country. Geographic targeting can be quite effective when poverty is unevenly distributed across the country, and this proves to be the case in many countries.

Numerical Analysis of Non-Constant Discounting With an Application to Renewable Resource Management

The possibility of non-constant discounting is important in environmental and resource management problems where current decisions affect welfare in the far-distant future, as with climate change. The difficulty of analyzing models with non-constant discounting limits their application. We describe and provide software to implement an algorithm to numerically obtain a Markov Perfect Equilibrium for an optimal control problem with non-constant discounting. The software is available online. We illustrate the approach by studying welfare and observational equivalence for a particular renewable resource management problem.

Is urban food demand in the Philippines different from China

It is essential to understand the consumption pattern of food and how it changes over time to formulate sound economic policies as well as marketing and pricing strategies. In this study, we estimate the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System with six rounds of the Family Income Expenditure Survey exploiting the conditional linearity of the demand system. We find that the Filipino diet has become westernized and that the changes in urban food demand elasticities are qualitatively similar to those in urban China, especially for meat, fruits, and vegetables. We also offer some policy and business implications.