I presented my paper on "Natural Hazards and Child Health" at the Pacific Development Conference at SFSU in San Francisco this last Saturday. Anoshua Chaudhuri did a great job at arranging the conference (Anoshua is a graduate from the UW graduate programme and is an assistant professor at SFSU). The only "problem" with the conference is that it is almost too short; only one day which does not allow a lot of time to chat with people.
3ie (International Initiative for Impact Evaluation) has a new questionnaire out, where they are looking for people's opinions about what the most important questions in development are. Below are the details and the link to the questionnaire.
Dear colleagues
3ie is a new organization dedicated to enhancing development outcomes through the promotion of evidence-based policy making. A survey has been launched to identify the most important questions on which 3ie should commission impact studies to produce evidence for policy-makers in low and middle income countries. The questions listed in the survey were collected in an earlier exercise, but there is an opportunity in the survey to propose new questions.
To take the survey please follow this link
http://www.3ieimpact.org/page.php?pg=medium
Please forward this message to ALL your colleagues to help us obtain a good response to this survey, encouraging them to also forward it. The survey will close on Friday January 30th.
Many thanks for your time
Howard White Executive Director, 3ie
3ie website www.3ieimpact.org
Okay, so this is strictly speaking not about research, but it has interesting applications for developing countries. There is a nice article about Ubuntu and Shuttleworth (its sponsor or benefactor) in this Sunday's NY Times (see link below). Essentially, Ubuntu is a open-source operating system based on Linux. The difference from previous flavours of Linux is that it is very easy to deal with and has a very nice interface. I have it on both of my desktops (home and work), on my new eee 1000 pc, my old lap top and a version of it runs my mail, web, music and file server at home.
What really makes it interesting for developing countries, however, is the price: USD 0. You can download it for free and install it for free. In addition, there is a substantial amount of help available if you do run into trouble. Combine this with other open source programs like OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird and a user in a developing country can save a substantial amount of money and not fall foul of the anti-piracy laws. Of course, it will not get you an internet connection or even electricity if you do not have that, but then again neither will any of the other operating systems.
A Software Populist Who Doesn't Do Windows By ASHLEE VANCE A version of the Linux operating system called Ubuntu represents the fastest-growing threat to Microsoft in developed countries.
This is a highly recommended conference. More information on the conference below or you can get in touch with me. Pacific Conference for Development Economics Saturday, March 14, 2009 http://bss.sfsu.edu/economics/newsevents/pacdev.htm San Francisco State University
Please note that the conference submission deadline is fast approaching. If you have not already sent in your paper, please submit your paper (or extended abstract) by February 1st. Submission and registration information is available on the conference website.
I went to Boston for the annual NEUDC conference last weekend. It is always interesting to see what people are working on ... and catching up with old friends. My paper on adult literacy in Ghana (which is joint work with Niels-Hugo Blunch) was part of the poster session and we got some good comments (plus it gave me a chance to figure out how to make posters in LaTeX!). The final result is here.
This is not quite new (January 2008), but it is a very interesting look at whether Hepatitis B can really explain a substantial part of the sex ratio in China as claimed by Oster 2005. The paper is by Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank and you can find the paper here. The abstract nicely sums up the main problem with the Oster argument:
China has a large deficit of females, and public policies have sought to reduce the son preference that is widely believed to cause this. Recently a study has suggested that up to 75 percent of this deficit is attributable to hepatitis B infection, indicating that immunization programs should form the first plank of policy interventions. However, a large medical dataset from Taiwan (China) shows that hepatitis B infection raises women's probability of having a son by only 0.25 percent. And demographic data from China show that the only group of women who have elevated probabilities of bearing a son are those who have already borne daughters. This pattern makes it difficult to see how any biological factor can explain a large part of the imbalance in China's sex ratios at birth -- unless it can be shown that it somehow selectively affects those who have borne girls, or causes them to first bear girls and then boys. The Taiwanese data suggest that this is not the case with hepatitis B, since its impact is unaffected by the sex composition of previous births. The data support the cultural, rather than the biological, explanation for the "missing women."
Niels-Hugo Blunch and I have revised our paper "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs" for resubmission to Economic Development and Cultural Change. The abstract is below.
This paper examines the effects of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a ten percent increase in consumption per adult equivalent. There is, however, little evidence that other households benefit from participation in terms of welfare. The improvements in literacy and numeracy rates are also mainly concentrated among participants with little or no formal schooling, although most participants appear to gain in skills to some extent. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost we argue that the social returns to adult literacy programs are substantial.
I presented at the Labour and Development brown bag today. The topic was a grant proposal that I am trying to put together in cooperation with University of Witwatersrand and people here at UW. You can find the slides for the presentation here
The Times (the real one) has an article about a potential cheap and effective treatment for malaria that could be available within a decade after scientists genetically engineered a form of yeast to make the key ingredient of the drug best able to fight the disease.
There are a couple of interesting recent article on the BBC News website relating to sex selective abortion and changes in India. The first is about a doctor and his assistant who have been sentenced to two years in jail for revealing the sex of a female foetus and then agreeing to abort it. This is the first time this has happend in India since a law was introduced in 1994 banning the practice.
The second is about what is supposedly the increased import of bride to the state of Haryana, which is one of the states in India with the most unequal sex ratio.
PRI's The World did a technology podcast about new ways of connecting developed countries small lenders with developing countries small borrows. You can listen here. Unfortunately, the links mentioned in the podcast are no longer available on their home page, but if you listen carefully enough you should be able to write them down yourself.
British Oxfam (one of the leading development NGOs) have a web site, Oxfam Unwrapped, where people can buy gifts that then goes to developing countries. According to the Times (the real one) the surprise hit of the Christmas shopping season was the goat, which costs GPD 24. From the "product description":
No if's or butts a goat is a great gift. Even the kids can get involved. You start with one and end up with a herd. They can then be sold to raise cash for school fees, or tools and start to reduce poverty. Best of all, the first female kid is given to another family and the process starts all over again. So why not invest in a goat?
Well, nothing is so good that it is not bad for something (normally the other way around I believe), so promtly The World Land Trust (WLT), also from the UK, have complained that the animals (you can also get a camel, calf or donkey) will have a “devastating environmental impact”. You can read more here.
PS Notice that the product decision specificly mentions kids. Next, someone will complaing that Oxfam is encouraging child labour!