Spatial patterns of rural poverty and their relationship with welfare-influencing factors in Bangladesh

This study determines the spatial variation of rural poverty in Bangladesh and its relation to people’s livelihood assets affecting their ability to procure food. We estimated household income for over 1 million census households using a predictor model based on a nationally representative sample survey data set. We computed and mapped poverty indices for 415 rural subdistricts revealing distinct areas with high poverty incidence that correspond with ecologically depressed areas. However, other livelihood-influencing factors such as education, accessibility and services are significantly correlated with poverty. This indicates the need for continued focus on providing education and access to income-generating opportunities so that the poor can better meet their food needs. Geographically weighted regression analysis indicated spatial differences in the relative importance of various poverty-influencing factors. Multivariate clustering of the local parameter (β) estimates of the determinant factors revealed distinct spatial relationships, which have implications on poverty alleviation interventions specific to the different regions.     

Farm production diversity is associated with greater household dietary diversity in Malawi: Findings from nationally representative data

Farm production diversity has the potential to influence the diversity of household diets, an important nutrition outcome associated with the nutrient adequacy of diets and the nutritional status of individuals. Yet, little empirical research has assessed the relationship between farm diversity and diet diversity or the plausible causal mechanisms that may operate between these two constructs. This research examines cross-sectional data from the Malawi Third Integrated Household Survey (IHS3), a nationally representative sample of farming households in Malawi, implemented from March 2010–March 2011 as part of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA). These data were used to determine the relationship between farm production diversity and household dietary diversity, and to identify determinants of this relationship. Two indicators of dietary diversity, a modified Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), and the Food Consumption Score (FCS), were calculated along with three indicators of farm production diversity including the Simpson’s Index, a metric accounting for both species richness and evenness. In multiple regression analyses, adjusting standard errors for the complex survey design of the IHS3 and controlling for the effects of several covariates on household dietary diversity, farm production diversity was consistently positively associated with dietary diversity (P < 0.0001). The association of increased farm diversity as measured by a combined crop and livestock measure on dietary diversity was significantly greater in woman-headed households compared to those headed by men (HDDS: P = 0.008; FCS: P = 0.076). The positive association of farm diversity with dietary diversity was also greater in wealthier households (P < 0.05). Consumption of legumes, vegetables and fruits was especially strongly associated with greater farm diversity. More diverse production systems may contribute to more diverse household diets. However, this relationship is complex; it may be influenced by gender, wealth, control of household decisions, the relative market-orientation of a household’s agricultural production, and the specific nature of farm diversity.     

Food price surges and poverty in urban Colombia: New evidence from household survey data

The present study simulates the impacts of price surges in 2006–2008 on poverty in the main Colombian cities drawing upon household survey data. It is found that the price surges increased both extreme and moderate poverty in urban areas, but the magnitude of poverty rise was not homogeneous across geographical locations or in terms of household characteristics, such as, education or gender of the household head. As a policy option we suggest “geographical targeting” or “demographic targeting” that will select and support poor households by locations or socio-demographic characteristics guided by the degree of household vulnerability to food price shocks.     

The economics and nutritional impacts of food assistance policies and programs

Recent evidence on malnutrition and poverty raise important questions on the role of food assistance policies and programs. In this review article, we examine evidence on the economic and nutritional impacts of international food assistance programs (FAPs) and policies. The returns on investments in FAPs are, on average, high but depend considerably on the targeting and cost structures as well as on food quality and role of complementary activities. We disaggregate findings into four classes of recipients. Returns to FAPs are highest for children under two. But, FAPs oriented towards early childhood interventions are less well funded than are interventions aimed at school-age children or at the broader, largely adult population even though available evidence indicates that these latter classes of interventions offer considerably lower average returns in economic, health, and nutrition terms. Nonetheless, FAP effectiveness in achieving any of several objectives varies with a range of key factors, including targeting, additionality, seasonality, timeliness, incentive effects, social acceptability and political economy considerations.     

Issues and strategies in ex-post evaluation of intervention against animal disease outbreaks and spread

Animal disease outbreaks pose a significant threat in terms of potential economic losses, reduced productivity, and negative impacts on public health, food security and nutrition. This paper considers four issues in ex-post evaluation of animal disease interventions: firstly, a counterfactual involves simulating disease trajectories without the intervention. But some diseases can become endemic or become dormant after an outbreak, making it a challenge to know the true trajectory without the intervention. Secondly, without adequate design of controls and treatments, how can the estimated impacts be attributed to a given intervention? Thirdly, how do we assess costs saved by the intervention? Fourthly, given data uncertainty, would a stochastic simulation give better estimates than a deterministic one in solving for key variables? This paper addresses these issues and proposes solutions that bridge the gap between household level analysis and macro-level simulations in modelling the impact of animal diseases outbreaks.     

Conflict,food price shocks,and food insecurity: The experience of Afghan households

Using nationally-representative household survey data and confidential geo-coded data on violent incidents, we examine the relationship between conflict and food insecurity in Afghanistan. Spatial mappings of the raw data reveal large variations in levels of food insecurity and conflict across the country; surprisingly, high conflict provinces are not the most food insecure. Using a simple bivariate regression model of conflict (violent incidents and persons killed or injured) on food security (calorie intake and the real value of food consumed), we find mixed associations. But once we move to a multivariate framework, accounting for household characteristics and key commodity prices, we find robust evidence that in Afghanistan levels of conflict and food security are negatively correlated. We also find that households in provinces with higher levels of conflict experience muted declines in food security due to staple food price increases relative tohouseholds in provinces with lower levels of conflict, perhaps because the former are more disconnected from markets. Gaining a better understanding of linkages between conflict and food insecurity and knowing their spatial distributions can serve to inform policymakers interested in targeting scarce resources to vulnerable populations, for example, through the placement of strategic grain reserves or targeted food assistance programs.     

Food aid targeting in Ethiopia: A study of who needs it and who gets it

The need for systematic, empirical analysis of food aid targeting and impacts is overwhelming, especially given the large numbers of people concerned and volume of funds allocated to the problem of feeding Ethiopia's food insecure. This research examines the efficiency of food aid targeting in rural Ethiopia based on empirical evidence from a nationally representative survey of 4166 farm households.A key finding of the study is that there is no significant association between household food insecurity (vulnerability) and food aid receipts—a result of high errors of exclusion and inclusion at both the wereda and household levels. Four factors are identified as causes of the high level of targeting error: (1) the primary beneficiaries of food aid programs are found to be households at the extremes in terms of food availability: those with the least and those with the most food available; (2) a disproportionate number of female and aged heads of households received food aid, irrespective of their food needs; (3) an inability of the food aid system to reach households outside of the historically deficit areas; and (4) a disproportionate concentration of food aid in the region of Tigray.     

Child dietary quality in rural Nepal: Effectiveness of a community-level development intervention

Nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions have the potential to improve child dietary quality in rural households, as evidenced by a growing body of work which concurrently measures agricultural and nutrition indicators. Our objective was to investigate whether children in rural farming communities of Nepal participating in a community-level, nutrition-sensitive development intervention had improved dietary quality compared with children living in non-participating matched rural communities. Six rural communities of Nepal where livelihoods were predominantly agricultural were selected to participate in the phased implementation of a community-level development intervention by Heifer International. Households and children in each community were surveyed at baseline, and follow-up surveys were implemented every six months for twenty-four months. Detailed data on food consumption for children older than 6 months of age were collected using a 24 h recall for 17 foods and food groups; parents responded for children. A difference-in-differences model with household fixed-effects and an analysis of covariance model were used to analyze the resulting panel data. Results indicated that the impacts of the intervention varied by agro-ecological region and by season. In the Hills region, which is poorer on average and more conducive to livestock production, children who had received the intervention for two years were 2.2 times as likely to have consumed food from an additional food group, 1.27 times as likely to have achieved minimum dietary diversity and 1.38 times as likely to have consumed animal source foods as children who received the intervention for only one year. In the Terai region, which is more conducive to crop production, there was no significant change in dietary quality attributable to the intervention. These results provide evidence that particularly vulnerable families can take advantage of community-level development activities. Given that the effects of community-level development activities were disparate across communities within the same country, we conclude that tailoring development activities for particular locations is necessary for success.     

Clustering Methods for Real Estate Portfolios

A clustering algorithm is applied to effective rents for twenty-one metropolitan U.S. office markets, and to twenty-two metropolitan markets using vacancy data. It provides support for the conjecture that there exists a few major "families" of cities: including an oil and gas group and an industrial Northeast group. Unlike other clustering studies, we find strong evidence of bicoastal city associations among cities such as Boston and Los Angeles. We present a bootstrapping methodology for investigating the robustness of the clustering algorithm, and develop a means for testing the significance of city associations. While the analysis is limited to aggregate rent and vacancy data, the results provide a guideline for the further application of cluster analysis to other types of real estate and economic information.     

产业结构、对外贸易与碳排放——基于长三角地区41个地级市的实证分析

本文选取长江三角洲41个地级市作为研究对象,基于近20年的面板数据,将产业结构、对外贸易和碳排放结合在一起,分析长三角地区碳排放空间特征,采用空间邻接权重矩阵、地理距离矩阵和经济距离矩阵结合空间杜宾模型探究产业结构、对外贸易与碳排放的联系。研究发现:(1)长三角地区碳排放量存在显著的正空间相关性;(2)从直接效应来看,产业结构高级化和产业结构合理化会抑制本地区碳排放量的增长,但会增加邻近地区的碳排放量;(3)对外开放水平的提高会增加本地区和邻近地区的碳排放量。     

Targeting population nutrition through municipal health and food policy: Implications of New York City’s experiences in regulatory obesity prevention

Obesity remains a major public health challenge across OECD countries and policy-makers globally require successful policy precedents. This paper analyzes New York City’s innovative experiences in regulatory approaches to nutrition. We combined a systematic documentary review and key informant interviews (n = 9) with individuals directly involved in nutrition policy development and decision-making. Thematic analysis was guided by Kingdon’s three-streams-model and the International Obesity Task Force’s evidence-based decision-making framework. Our findings indicate that decisive mayoral leadership spearheaded initial agenda-change and built executive capacity to support evidence-driven policy. Policy-makers in the executive branch recognized the dearth of evidence for concrete policy interventions, and made contributing to the evidence base an explicit goal. Their approach preferred decision-making through executive action and rules passed by the Board of Health that successfully banned trans-fats from food outlets, set institutional food standards, introduced menu labeling requirements for chain restaurants, and improved access to healthy foods for disadvantaged populations. Although the Health Department collaborated with the legislature on legal and programmatic food access measures, there was limited engagement with elected representatives and the community on regulatory obesity prevention. Our analysis suggests that this hurt the administration’s ability to successfully communicate the public health messages motivating these contentious proposals; contributing to unexpected opposition from food access and minority advocates, and fueling charges of executive overreach. Overall, NYC presents a case of expert-driven policy change, underpinned by evidence-based environmental approaches. The city’s experience demonstrates that there is scope to redefine municipal responsibilities for public health and that incremental change and contentious public discussion can impact social norms around nutrition.     

The politics of success in the fight against malnutrition in Peru

The dramatic reduction in children’s chronic malnutrition in Peru observed in recent years has defied the patterns of stunting reduction worldwide. After nearly a decade of stalled progress, the government reported a reduction in stunting rates of nearly 10 points, from 29.8% in 2005 to 18.1% in 2011. The specialized literature has acknowledged the critical role that immediate (e.g. increasing breastfeeding promotion) and underlying (e.g. investments to improve household food security) interventions have played in reducing stunting (Black et al., 2013), as well as the contributing role of enabling factors related to economic performance. This paper offers an alternative explanation to success by looking at the shift in the government’s nutrition strategy after 2006 with the formation of the Child Malnutrition Initiative (CMI), a civil society working platform, and the adoption of a national poverty reduction strategy prioritizing nutrition interventions (known as CRECER) and conditional cash transfers (JUNTOS). The paper uses veto players theory to explain how these changes effectively contributed to policy change by reducing the effective number of nutrition stakeholders involved and facilitating policy agreements around a common policy platform and established goals. The Peruvian case also highlights the importance of the government’s public commitment to reduce chronic malnutrition in children under five by 5 percent in 5 years (“5 by 5 by 5”) and the accompanying role, advocacy and monitoring from civil society organizations.The paper looks at the success of implementing the nutrition strategy in three dimensions. Horizontally, it looks at the coordination between government and non-government agencies to converge around a common policy discourse;vertically, it looks at the implementation of the nutrition strategy across national, regional and municipal governments;and financially, it looks at the coordinated and conditional allocation of nutrition funding and how this created greater incentives for horizontal and vertical coordination. The paper draws some theoretical and policy implications for improving the effective and accountable delivery of nutrition interventions in Peru and other countries outside Latin America.     

Predicting Spatial Patterns of House Prices Using LPR and Bayesian Smoothing

This article is motivated by the limited ability of standard hedonic price equations to deal with spatial variation in house prices. Spatial patterns of house prices can be viewed as the sum of many causal factors: Access to the central business district is associated with a house price gradient; access to decentralized employment subcenters causes more localized changes in house prices; in addition, neighborhood amenities (and disamenities) can cause house prices to change rapidly over relatively short distances. Spatial prediction (e.g., for an automated valuation system) requires models that can deal with all of these sources of spatial variation. We propose to accommodate these factors using a standard hedonic framework but incoporating a semiparametric model with structure in the residuals modeled with a partially Bayesian approach. The Bayesian framework enables us to provide complete inference in the form of a posterior distribution for each model parameter. Our model allows prediction at sampled or unsampled locations as well as prediction interval estimates. The nonparametric part of our model allows sufficient flexibility to find substantial spatial variation in house values. The parameters of the kriging model provide further insights into spatial patterns. Out–of–sample mean squared error and related statistics validate the proposed methods and justify their use for spatial prediction of house values.     

Impact of the eKutir ICT-enabled social enterprise and its distributed micro-entrepreneur strategy on fruit and vegetable consumption: A quasi-experimental study in rural and urban communities in Odisha,India

This paper reports results of a quasi-experimental study designed to assess the impact of an information and communication technology (ICT) –enabled ecosystem, led by the social enterprise eKutir, on household fruit and vegetable consumption in Odisha, India. eKutir aims at providing self-sustaining solutions to poverty and undernutrition in developing countries by leveraging ICTs through ecosystem development anchored into a distributed micro-entrepreneurial strategy. eKutir’s farming micro-entrepreneurs (FME) provide agricultural knowledge, inputs, and market linkages at household and community level, followed by progressive integration of other micro-entrepreneurs at different points along the value chain on both supply and demand sides. The present case examined core FMEs along with retail micro-entrepreneurs (RMEs) deployed in low-resource rural and urban communities. Structural equation modeling was used to compare rural outcomes and the role of homegrown consumption as a mediator. Multivariable linear regression and ANOVA were used to test group differences in the urban sample. Positive β coefficients represent an increase in fruit and vegetable consumption in communities exposed to the eKutir ecosystem in contrast to the comparison group. Farmers in rural communities exposed to the eKutir ecosystem consumed more overall fruit and vegetables (β = 0.30, p < 0.001) and fruits alone (β = 0.53, p < 0.05) than those farmers in comparison villages unexposed to the eKutir ecosystem. This effect was concentrated in households exposed to both FMEs + RMEs (β = 0.60, p < 0.0001) and was mediated by homegrown consumption. A non-significant directional effect was observed in comparing fruit and vegetable consumption in rural households exposed to RMEs only over comparison communities. Urban consumers, exposed to the eKutir ecosystem through access to RMEs operating in their neighborhood community, did not increase their fruit or vegetable consumption compared to non-intervention communities. The results reveal the potential of reaching nutritional impacts through homegrown consumption and with farm-level support outside of governmental/philanthropic interventions through an ICT-enabled social enterprise. They also underscore, however, the challenges of both changing eating behaviour and intervening along the agri-food value chain. Implication for more effective digital ecosystem design and intersectoral policies are discussed.     

Quinoa quandary: Cultural tastes and nutrition in Peru

Using a model of household food demand that incorporates regional preferences (tastes) for culturally appropriate food, I investigate whether tastes for quinoa in the Puno region of Peru reduced household nutrition intakes when quinoa prices dramatically increased between 2004 and 2012. Adapting a model from Atkin (2013) and utilizing data from a national Peruvian household survey (ENAHO), I am able to deconstruct regional changes in household nutrition over time into several general equilibrium effects; in particular, I isolate the effect of regional tastes for quinoa on nutrition outcomes. This effect is identified by an exogenous spike in quinoa prices driven by international demand for quinoa. While I find evidence that regional tastes for quinoa do exist in the Puno region, these tastes do not have a statistically significant impact on nutrition outcomes. My results lend support to the conjecture that tastes for culturally appropriate food do not meaningfully affect household nutrition if the food in question is a sufficiently small component of a household’s overall diet.     

我国软件外包承接城市效率评价与驱动因素研究

就 业问题、环境污染以及从业人员研发能力下降已经成为制约软件外包承接城市发展的瓶颈问 题。文章运用DEA方法构建考虑非期望产出和非合意变量的软件外包承接效率评价模型，重 点比较不同模型下我国软件外包承接城市效率的差异，并引入Tobit回归分析软件外包承接 城市效率的驱动因素。研究发现：我国软件外包承接城市的投入产出组合在逐步优化，且东 部沿海城市的效率值明显优于中西部城市，其中大连市的效率值始终为1，处于生产的前沿 面。另外，人才竞争力对软件外包承接城市效率有显著的正向影响，信息技术基础设施竞争力与承接效率的关系呈显著负相关。     

长江三角洲区域的城市网络化发展内涵研究

目前，长江三角洲区域的不少城市都提出了城市网络化的发展战略。但是，城市网络化发展除了表现为以交通为载体的空间融合以外，还具有哪些深层次的意义，其完整内涵、集结动因、构成要件以及发展层次等都有待于进一步探索。本文将在经济全球化背景下，展望长江三角洲城市群网络化发展的努力方向。     

Investor Confidence as a Determinant of China's Urban Housing Market Dynamics

China's urban housing market dynamics suggest that evolving investor confidence may be a relevant demand shifter. Such investors are continually updating their beliefs about the state of the macroeconomy and the policy uncertainty related to national and local housing policies. We build a 35 Chinese city real estate confidence index that varies over time and across cities. This index predicts subsequent house price appreciation and new housing sales. We document evidence of heterogeneous effects of investor confidence depending on a city's demographics and the city's elasticity of housing supply. Our results based on a new household‐level expectations survey bolster the case that investor expectations are an important determinant of real estate price dynamics.     

Concentrated Housing Code Enforcement in St. Louis

This research employs probit analysis to examine the selection criteria governing nonuniform application of concentrated housing code enforcement in the city of St. Louis. The study has three specific objectives: (1) to identify the goals and geographic selection criteria characteristic of St. Louis' concentrated code enforcement program during the twenty years that it was in effect; (2) to establish whether program goals and selection criteria changed over time and, if so, why; and (3) to provide some judgment on the value of code enforcement as a policy tool to either reverse or slow neighborhood decline. Although fundamentally a case study, the conclusions should be of interest to those concerned with conservation of the housing stock in older cities throughout the country.     

Economic Effects of Racial Integration: An Analysis of Hedonic Housing Prices and the Willingness to Pay

This study evaluates household economic effects stemming from neighborhood racial integration in Oakland, California. To that end, housing market data are applied to estimate hedonic price and willingness-to-pay functions for neighborhood racial composition. Results of the analysis indicate the problematic nature of the constant willingness-to-pay assumption and suggest this standard method may underestimate the household economic effects of racial integration. The paper concludes with implications for neighborhood integration policy.