A general equilibrium assessment of climate change–induced loss of agricultural productivity in Nepal

The impact of climate change on agriculture has been one of the most discussed topics in the literature on climate change. Multi-regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) models have frequently been used to examine the impact of climate change on agriculture. However, these studies do not focus on country-specific issues related to the link between climate change and agriculture. This paper aims to address this gap by investigating the economy-wide impacts of climate change on Nepalese agriculture. Nepal makes an interesting case study as it has one of the most vulnerable agricultural economies in South Asia. This paper develops a comparative static multi-household CGE model to trace the direct and indirect impacts of climate change in Nepal. The results suggest that climate change has a significant negative impact on the overall Nepalese economy due to the induced loss of agricultural productivity. The results further reveal that rural households in Nepal, whose livelihoods primarily depend on subsistence farming, will face additional climate change–induced stresses due to already overstrained poverty and a weak social welfare system. The results indicate an urgent need to mainstream adaptation strategies to lessen the negative impacts of any climate change–induced loss of agricultural productivity in Nepal.     

Agricultural Productivity Growth and Household Food Security Improvement in Nepal

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. Using the panel data of the Nepal Living Standard Measurement Survey (NLSS), the poverty rate in 1995–96 was estimated to be about 40%, while in 2003–04 it was estimated at roughly 30%. Political instability has prevented the development of industry and threatened the food security of poor people, but scholarship on the factors contributing to food security is incomplete; while the determinants of food security have been mentioned in past research, prior studies have analyzed cross‐sectional data and thus could not have omitted heterogeneity bias. This paper analyzes the change in agricultural productivity in real terms and the impact on household food security by using the panel data of NLSS in 1995–96 and 2003–04. This analysis reveals that growth is observed in real agricultural productivity in spite of land segmentation; the growth in agricultural productivity in real terms has a positive impact on household food security; and the lower a farmer's income becomes, the more positive its impact on food security. Therefore, advancements in agricultural productivity play a critical role in promoting food security at the individual and household levels.     

Work‐Related Migration and Poverty Reduction in Nepal

Using two rounds of nationally representative household survey data in this study, we measure the impact on poverty in Nepal of local and international migration for work. We apply an instrumental variables approach to deal with nonrandom selection of migrants and simulate various scenarios for the different levels of migration comparing observed and counterfactual household expenditure distribution. Our results indicate that one‐fifth of the poverty reduction in Nepal occurring between 1995 and 2004 can be attributed to higher levels of work‐related migration and remittances sent home. We also show that while the increase in international work‐related migration was the leading cause of this poverty reduction, domestic migration also played an important role. Our findings demonstrate that strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction in Nepal should consider aspects of the dynamics of domestic and international migration.     

Examining energy poverty in Chinese households: An Engel curve approach

This article is first to model energy poverty in Chinese households using an Engel curve approach. To analyse the determinants of energy poverty and energy expenditures across households, we avail the 2015 wave of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). Possible presence of endogeneity is accounted for in the model specification as well as by using the Lewbel heteroscedasticity identified endogenous variables estimator. In addition, we are the first to scrutinise disparity and discrimination by conducting the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition of energy poverty model by gender, ethnicity, region (Eastern vs. non-Eastern provinces), and urbanisation status (rural vs. urban residents). Our analysis shows: (i) education is the key determinant of various energy poverty measures and energy expenditure shares across Chinese households; (ii) other determinants including fossil fuel mix and electricity price discrimination are found to worsen energy poverty, on average. However, fossil fuel mix is found to increase expenditure share of total energy, electricity, and coal and decrease that of biomass; and (iii) the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition analyses show no statistically significant gender or ethnic discrimination in energy poverty rates. However, there is substantial divide between Eastern and non-Eastern provinces and between rural and urban households—with these groups also discriminated against when accessing clean cooking fuels and technologies. The Blinder–Oaxaca results also generally support the logistic and the Lewbel energy poverty model findings.     

包容性金融发展与农村居民贫困减缓——基于全要素生产率视角的分析

本文用DEA—Malmquist指数法测算了全要素生产率指数，结合2006—2016年中国内地省际面板数据，基于全要素生产率视角，运用中介效应模型实证分析了包容性金融发展对农村居民贫困的影响。实证结果表明：（1）包容性金融发展能够通过全要素生产率的中介效应发挥减贫作用。（2）进一步的研究发现，包容性金融服务渗透度的提升对贫困的影响最为显著；同时，包容性金融发展可通过技术进步和效率提升作用来推动全要素生产率增长，进一步作用于贫困。（3）稳健性检验表明，我国东部与中西部地区包容性金融发展水平差异较大，对全要素生产率的提升乃至农村减贫的贡献表现出较大不平衡性。本文的政策建议为：首先，应持续推进包容性金融发展，充分发挥全要素生产率的中介效应，以更快实现2020年全面脱贫目标；其次，要继续加强农村金融基础设施建设，以实现金融 服务均等性，充分发挥金融减贫的优势；最后，要合理配置金融资源，注重地区间发展的公平性，以实现经济社会均衡发展。     

Wealth Heterogeneity and Escape from the Poverty–Environment Trap

A mutual link between poverty and environmental degradation is examined in an overlapping generations model. Environmental quality affects labor productivity and wealth dynamics, whereas wealth distribution determines the degree to which agents rely on technology that has a large environmental load, and therefore the evolution of environmental quality. This interaction creates a “poverty–environment trap,” where a deteriorated environment lowers income, which, in turn, accelerates environmental degradation. We show that greater wealth heterogeneity is the key to escaping from the poverty–environment trap, although it can have negative effects on both the environment and output when not in the trap.     

Estimating money demand functions for South Asian countries

In this paper, we estimate a money demand function for a panel of five South Asian countries. We find that the money demand and its determinants, namely real income, real exchange rate and short-term domestic and foreign interest rates are cointegrated both for individual countries as well as for the panel, and panel long-run elasticities provide robust evidence of statistically significant relationships between money demand and its determinants. Our test for panel Granger causality suggests short-run causality running from all variables, except foreign interest rate, to money demand, and we find evidence that except for Nepal money demand functions are stable.      

Socioeconomic Impacts of Public Forest Policies on Heterogeneous Agricultural Households

Nepal has a long history of returning public forests to local people as part of its community forestry programme. In principle the community forestry programme is designed to address both environmental quality and poverty alleviation. However, concern has been expressed that forest policies emphasise environmental conservation, and that this has a detrimental impact on the use of community forests in rural Nepal where households require access to public forest products to sustain livelihoods. To study the effect of government policies on forest use, an economic model of a typical small community of economically heterogeneous households in Nepal was developed. The model incorporates a link between private agriculture and public forest resources, and uses this link to assess the socioeconomic impacts of forest policies on the use of public forests. Socioeconomic impacts were measured in terms of household income, employment and income inequality. The results show that some forest policies have a negative economic impact, and the impacts are more serious than those reported by other studies. This study shows that existing forest policies reduce household income and employment, and widen income inequalities within communities, compared to alternative policies. Certain forest policies even constrain the poorest households?? ability to meet survival needs. The findings indicate that the socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies may be underestimated in developing countries unless household economic heterogeneity and forestry??s contribution to production are accounted for. The study also demonstrates that alternative policies for managing common property resources would reduce income inequalities in rural Nepalese communities and lift incomes and employment to a level where even the poorest households could meet their basic needs.     

Is there a link between alcohol consumption and the level of poverty?

In many developing countries, in addition to household income, there are a number of other socio-economic determinants of poverty. One such hidden socio-economic factor is alcohol consumption and some studies argue that there is a link between alcohol consumption and poverty. The main aim of this study is to measure the effects of alcohol consumption on the level of poverty in a systematic way. Using Sri Lanka as a case study, this article demonstrates that the consumption of various types of alcoholic beverages, particularly, the illegal beverages, has a significant positive association with the level of poverty. The findings of this study suggest that, in Sri Lanka, the consumption of illegal alcoholic beverages increases the likelihood of being in a poor household by 2–3%. The results of this study also find that households who are characterized as nonpoor but are just above the poverty line behave more like the poor rather than the nonpoor in terms of alcohol consumption. Some of the conclusions from this Sri Lankan case study can be applied to other developing countries.     

POVERTY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH WITH APPLICATION TO CÔTE D'IVOIRE

This paper explores the relation between economic growth and poverty, and develops the methodology to measure separately the impact of changes in average income and income inequality on poverty. The paper also provides a link between the growth rates in various sectors of the economy and the total poverty. The methodology proposed is applied to the data taken from the Côte d'lvoire Living Standards Survey conducted in 1985.     

Liberalization,growth and structural change: evidence from Nepalese manufacturing

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the consequences of liberalization on industrial structure in Nepal, a least developed country with weak institutions and severe infrastructure bottlenecks. Results suggest some structural change in manufacturing output and trade orientation which appears to be due to a change in incentive structure, but no significant improvements were recorded in total factor productivity growth which is of central importance for a least developed country like Nepal. Export intensity rose significantly in the postliberalization period despite poor productivity performance of export-oriented industries while import intensity fell due mainly to improved competitiveness in import competing industries and a fall in imports for smuggling to India.     

POVERTY, NON-WHITE POVERTY, AND THE SEN INDEX

This paper investigates the impact of economic growth, and more specifically robust economic growth along with other macroeconomic determinants, on poverty levels using both the U.S. official measure of poverty and an estimated time series of Sen indices of poverty. The results reveal that the period of robust economic expansion that the U.S. economy experienced during the 1990s did not have a significant impact on poverty using either measure. In addition, we find that the impact of growth and other macro controls is dramatically different when a subset of the poverty population, namely non-white poverty, is investigated. The percentage of households headed by women is shown to be a significant factor in examining poverty for this subgroup.     

Aid allocation and poverty reduction

This paper derives a poverty-efficient allocation of aid and compares it with actual aid allocations. The allocation of aid that has the maximum effect on poverty depends on the level of poverty and the quality of policies. Using the headcount, poverty-gap, and squared poverty gap measures of poverty, alternatively, all yield similar poverty-efficient allocations. Finally, we find that the actual allocation of aid is radically different from the poverty-efficient allocation. With the present allocation, aid lifts around 10 million people annually out of poverty in our sample of countries. With a poverty-efficient allocation, the productivity of aid would nearly double.     

Industry Mix and Curvilinear Spillovers from FDI in China

This paper uses industry and province specific Chinese industrial data to demonstrate a potential causal link between two strands of the FDI literature. The first strand suggests that the impact of spillovers from inward FDI is less robust in middle-income economies than in either high-income or low-income economies. The second strand suggests diminishing returns of inward FDI on horizontal labor productivity in low-technology industries but not in high-technology industries. This paper suggests a link between these two phenomena. Specifically, if both FDI intensity and industry mix vary with the level of economic development, then an industry-dependent relationship between inward FDI and horizontal spillovers could cause middle-income economies to derive fewer benefits from inward FDI than either high- or low-income economies. This paper also verifies the curvilinear relationship between FDI in low-technology industries and horizontal labor productivity without relying on problematic FDI from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao.     

Redistribution of Economic Resources due to Conflict: The Maoist Uprising in Nepal

Nepal has seen a significant reduction in poverty over the period 1995–2010 which encompasses the decade-long Maoist-led civil war. So was the post-conflict provision of economic resources to districts related to their involvement in promoting the Maoist cause? We tackle this question combining theory and empirics. Our model predicts that poorer districts are more likely to support the Maoists and in return they get promised economic gains conditional on the Maoists prevailing post-conflict. Combining data on conflict with consumption expenditure data from the Nepal Living Standards Survey and data on foreign aid, we test these predictions. Our panel data estimates and our cross-sectional analysis consistently find strong support for our hypotheses. These are confirmed by the IV analysis that we perform at the panel level.     

POVERTY IN RURAL INDIA: CASTE AND TRIBE

This paper analyzes the determinants of rural poverty in India, contrasting the situation of scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) households with the non-scheduled population. The incidence of poverty in SC and ST households is much higher than among non-scheduled households. By combining regression estimates for the ratio of per capita expenditure to the poverty line and an Oaxaca-type decomposition analysis, we study how these differences in the incidence of poverty arise. We find that for SC households, differences in characteristics explain the gaps in poverty incidence more than differences in transformed regression coefficients. In contrast, for ST households, differences in the transformed regression coefficients play the more important role.     

Analyses of technical efficiency using SDF and DEA models: evidence from Nepalese agriculture

Alleviation of poverty is a central issue in Nepal. Given the limited stock of land and the infant/unorganized manufacturing sector, increased demand for food has to be satisfied by improving production efficiency. This article examines how this could be achieved. Stochastic distance function and data envelopment analysis models identify the existence of a high degree of technical inefficiency in Nepalese agriculture, suggesting that there is a substantial prospect of increasing agricultural productivity using the existing level of inputs and resources more efficiently. Among the three farm sizes in the data set, medium size farmers achieve a higher technical efficiency than large and small farm sizes, suggesting that productive efficiency can be increased with the encouragement of creating medium size holdings. The observed decreasing returns to scale also implies that productivity gains could be achieved by breaking up of large farms into small family farms. The technical inefficiency model suggests the potential for shifting the production frontier upwards by providing ownership of land, increasing farmers’ education and knowledge, and increasing land quality, including irrigation facilities.     

Product and process innovation and total factor productivity: Evidence for manufacturing in four Latin American countries

The literature on firm productivity recognizes the important role played by firm innovation activities on firm productivity in developed countries. However, the literature for developing and emerging economies is scarce and far from conclusive. The aim of this paper is to study the innovation–productivity link (distinguishing between process and product innovations) for manufacturing at the firm level for four Latin American countries (two classified as upper‐middle income countries by the World Bank—Argentina and Mexico—and two as lower‐middle income—Colombia and Peru). We aim testing whether the level of development is a mediating factor in the innovation–productivity link. The data used have been drawn from the World Bank panel enterprise surveys, for 2006 and 2010. First, we estimate total factor productivity (TFP) and, second, we use the estimated TFP as a regressor or as dependent variable, in two models for testing self‐selection of the most productive firms into innovation or the existence of returns to innovation in terms of productivity. Our results confirm the mediating role of the level of development in the innovation–productivity link: both the self‐selection and the returns‐to‐innovation hypotheses work only for the upper‐middle income countries.     

Flows of people,flows of ideas,and the inequality of nations

The present paper examines a neglected determinant of aggregate productivity: temporary cross-border flows of people. We hypothesize that interaction between people from different nations facilitates the international diffusion of ideas, thus stimulating aggregate productivity. In order to assess the causal impact of people flows on productivity, we construct an instrument for people flows. By analogy to the trade/growth literature, this instrument is derived from a fitted gravity equation involving geographic determinants of bilateral travel flows. Our cross-section analysis reveal that greater international interaction leads to higher productivity; a very similar result, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, is obtained when we employ dynamic panel data methods for the purpose of identification.     

Liberalization,bankers’ motivation and productivity: A simple model with an application

Proponents of financial liberalization argue that deregulation motivates bankers to increase their effort and operate at a higher level of efficiency and productivity. Sceptics, however, see that liberalization engenders economic instability and banking crises, and impedes growth. Bank efficiency and productivity, following liberalization, is extensively examined. Nonetheless, the core issue of bankers’ self-motivation remains implicitly assumed and unaddressed. Does liberalization self-motivate bankers and increase their efforts and productivity? This paper models bank productivity from this perspective and evaluates what proportion of banks’ total factor productivity is accounted for by the self-motivated productivity of bankers. We provide a micro-founded framework for the analyses of bankers’ optimal level of effort and effort-driven productivity. Our model also captures banks’ unit input-output prices, optimal wages, bank spread and the overall cost of bank services – measures that are important in evaluating reform policies. We assess the financial liberalization of Nepal as a test case and find that (i) bankers’ efforts and productivity have notably improved in Nepal, although banking services have become costly, and (ii) bank spread has moderately declined in recent years. Our approach is parametric which differs from DEA, hence complements the literature. We hope this analytical framework will be useful to evaluate reform episodes elsewhere.