Search results for "Development economics"

On the mechanics of progress in primary education

2003

03045; International audience; As countries grow rich, education improves in many ways. The sector enjoys more resources for education per primary school-aged child, not because of bigger budget allocations, nor an easing of the demographic burden on the system, but because the cost of inputs, especially teacher salaries, decline substantially relative to the per capita GNP. The extra resources enable countries to expand coverage and reduce the pupil–teacher ratio, with the latter receiving increasing emphasis during the past 20 years. The implicit trade-off against coverage raises questions about the efficiency and equity of education policies in developing countries, particularly in setti…

All that glitters is not gold. The rise of gaming in the COVID-19 pandemic

2020

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented situation, with incalculable health, social, and economic consequences. At the start of the outbreak, the financial markets collapsed, although not all sectors suffered equally. The gaming and eSports industry is one of those that has suffered the least from the fall in the markets. Millions of people locked up at home, bored, stressed, and anguished, gave gaming and eSports companies growing prominence throughout the first half of 2020. This prominence has elicited interest in analyzing which variables can influence the returns in an industry in better financial health than many others. Using a logit–probit model, this research aim…

The price of improvements: agrarian contracts and agrarian development in nineteenth-century eastern Spain1

2011

Fixed-rent contracts do not free landlords from the need to supervise the land if it is of high value and fragile fertility, nor do they free them from the costs of monitoring farmers if they are poor peasants prone to fall into arrears. In such cases, however, compensation for improvements will encourage tenants to farm with care and act as a bond against non-payment of rent. This article studies the repercussions of these kinds of situations by analysing what happened in nineteenth-century Valencia, where being the owners of the improvements led to tenants eventually becoming the owners of the land.

Raaj Sah y Joseph E. Stiglitz, Peasants versus City-dwellers. Taxation and the Burden of Economic Development, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, 223 pp.…

1993

M. Tracy: Government and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1880–1980, 3.a ed., Herfordshire, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 382 pp.

1990

Green Barons, Force-of-Circumstance Entrepreneurs, Impotent Mayors. Rural Change in the Early Years of Post-Socialist Capitalist Democracy

2015

Do microfinance institutions benefit from integrating financial and nonfinancial services?

2017

This article examines the impact of microfinance ‘plus’ (i.e. coordinated combination of financial and nonfinancial services) on the performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Using a global data set of MFIs in 77 countries, we find that the provision of nonfinancial services does not harm nor improve MFIs’ financial sustainability and efficiency. The results however suggest that the provision of social services is associated with improved loan quality and greater depth of outreach.

The importance of consecutive spells of poverty: a path-dependent index of longitudinal poverty

2011

In this paper we propose a new index of individual poverty in the longitudinal perspective, taking into account the way poverty and non-poverty spells follow one another along individual life courses. The Poverty Persistence Index (PPI) is based on all the pairwise distances between the waves of poverty. The PPI is normalized and it assigns a higher degree of (longitudinal) poverty to people who experience poverty in consecutive, rather than separated, periods, for whom the distances from the poverty line are larger along time and moreover, when the worst years are consecutive and/or recent. We also propose an aggregate index of persistence in poverty (APPI) in order to measure the distribu…

Decentralization and growth: what if the cross-jurisdiction approach had met a dead end?

2013

International audience; The relationship between decentralization and economic growth is generally studied from a perspective stressing universal or quasi-universal regularities across jurisdictions. That approach has generated many insights but seems to reach its limits. The paper explains why it allows contrasting positions with regard to the benefits of decentralization even among proponents of free and competitive markets. And it seems from the empirical literature that no robust and economically significant cross-jurisdiction relation between decentralization and economic performance or growth, except perhaps their independence, has been found. The absence of a relation valid across ju…

Does one size fit all? The impact of cognitive skills on economic growth

2016

Les Documents de Travail de l'IREDU, n°2016-1; This paper tests for heterogeneous effects of cognitive skills on economic growth across countries. Using a new extended dataset on cognitive skills and controlling for potential endogeneity, we find that the magnitude of the effect is about 60 per cent higher for low-income countries compared to high-income countries, and it more than doubles when low TFP countries are compared to high TFP countries. There are also marked differences across geographic regions. Using data on the share of the population with advanced and minimum skill levels, our results also indicate that high-income countries should focus on increasing the number of high skill…