Most important questions in development?

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

Ubuntu

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.

PACDEV 2009 Submission Deadline on Feb 1

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.

Panel on Iraq and development

Friday 14 November I was on a panel on Iraq, organised by the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, with Prof. Ellis Goldberg from political science, UW, and Judy Joseph from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. My role was mainly to answer questions from the officers about development economics and how it might apply to Iraq. It was a very interesting experience, although giving much guidance is difficult since the brigade does not even know where in Iraq they are going.

NEUDC conference in Boston

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.

Seminar at SMU, Dallas

I gave a seminar at SMU in Dallas 26 September 2008. The paper was "Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education."

Missing women in China and Hepatitis B

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."

Literacy, Skills and Welfare

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.

Population Association of America

At the Population Association of America's Annual Meeting in New Orleans I presented a preliminary version of my paper, "Hurricanes, Hoarding and Replacement: Estimating the Causal Effect of Mortality on Fertility," on the effect of mortality on fertility using exposure to hurricanes to identify exogenous changes in mortality. The presentation can be found here. I also discussed four papers in the session on "Infant and Child Mortality".

Pacific Development Conference

I recently presented a revised version of Niels-Hugo Blunch and my paper, "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs," on the effects of participating in adult literacy programs in Ghana for the department and at the 2008 Pacific Development Conference held at UCSD. If you are interested in the preliminary results, please see the presentation. The PacDev is a great opportunity to present work and see what else is going on in the development field on the West Coast. This year, Mark Anderson, who is a 2nd year student at the department, presented his paper on crime in South Africa and received a lot of praise and good comments. The paper was originally written for my Econ 591 and Econ 543 classes. I will try to link to his paper when the next version is ready.

Craig McIntosh did a great job at putting together a very interesting conference with lots of good papers. Next year the conference will be in the San Francisco, arranged by Anoshua Chaudhuri (SFSU), who is a former graduate student at UW Economics. Since we will be going back to San Francisco there were discussions about whether the name should be changed back to the original name: the Bay Area Development Association (you figure out what the "appropriate" acronym would be ;-) ).

ASSA meetings

I presented my paper "Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education" at the AEA annual meeting in New Orleans and discussed a paper (Siwan Anderson and Mukesh Eswaran, "What Determines Female Autonomy? Evidence from Bangladesh"). My presentation is here if you are interested.

HIV, Household Behaviour and Economic Development

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

Sometimes it *is* just that easy...

I always tell my students not to "over-think" what they do, especially when it comes to exams. Well, sometimes it is not easy to take your own advice. When the students return assignments I get them zipped from Catalyst's "Collect It" with each student's paper in a separate directory named after their UW NetID (which most of the times seems to have little or no relation to their actual name). The problem is that I need to print out all those papers. The "easy" way if of course to open each file individually in OpenOffice and then print (all my computers run Ubuntu, so no MS products here). With almost 40 students that can take a while even if done via the command line. It does not make it any easier that some of them submit pdf files, so I need to open Evince for those (I actually prefer these but that is another story).

Always wanting to be efficient I have been looking for a way to automate the printing process. After a fair bit of searching it seemed like my only option was to write a shell script and get around the problem that way. Now, I do not mind doing that (I am a geek, what can I say), but those things take time to put together, especially since what I was contemplating was writing something that searched through each sub-directory for the relevant file. Well, it turns out that the answer to my question was two very simple lines:

$ oowriter -p */*.doc $ lp */*.pdf

Doh!! That took me about an hour to figure out, but at least I will get the printing done in 2 minutes in the future instead of the more than 30 minutes I used to spend on it ;-).

Now, if I could only find a program that would also grade the papers that would be cool...