Economics

This paper examines the role of long standing institutions – identified through geography, disease ecology, colonial legacy, and some direct measures of political and economic governance – on human development and its non income components across countries. The study ...

The aim of the study is to analyse the impacts of catastrophic floods of 2010 on achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Pakistan. Since 2006, Pakistan has been facing many obstacles in its way to achieve the MDGs, stemming from rise in insurgency, electricity crisis, a sudden meltdown of the global economy in 2008, along with a sharp rise in oil and food prices earlier in that year. The floods in 2010, have destroyed lives, houses, croplands and road infrastructure, causing enormous suffering and damages across an area the size of Italy. These damages have put the country to a state from where it may take decades to recoup. It has been estimated that approximately 20 million people in 78 districts in Pakistan have been affected. Moreover, 2,000 people died, cropped areas of 2 million hector and 2 million houses were also damaged. Standing crops, animal farms, livestock the major sources of income for rural families, have been destroyed causing further rise in the incidence...

This paper explores the welfare implications of an optimal tax-transfer schedule to two-earner households. In the analysis, each household member is considered as a rational economic agent who optimizes his or her labor supply over market work and home production. I present a model to examine the impact of both joint-and individual-based taxation on non-cooperative couples, taking into account their altruistic preferences. An intra-family transfer program is proposed to examine whether it plays a role in household decisions. The impacts of such an income redistributive program on household's decisions are shown to vary by taxation. Under joint taxation, when husband's wage is sufficiently low, he supplies more time to home production if the share of transfer he receives is larger; by contrast, when the wife's wage is sufficiently high, she supplies more time to home production if the share of transfer she receives is smaller. Under individual taxation, the transfer program is shown to have no impact on the time allocation decisions of both spouses. Results from numerical estimation suggest that a move from individual to joint taxation improves the overall welfare of the altruistic spouses.

Privatizing the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is a major step in China's economic transition. This paper examines the impact of privatization reform on gender wage gap in urban labor market based on a comprehensive nationwide survey, the Chinese Household Income Projects (CHIP). We observe that gender wage gap widens between 1995 and 2007, and privatization is associated with increase in women's relative productivity and wage premium for more-educated women. The results of decomposition show the rapid growth of non-state sector has contributed to the increasing gender wage gap, and the rising gap is mainly attributed to the increase in gender discrimination. We also find that, although privatization increase gender segregation in occupational attainments, it is less obvious that segregation can account for the gender wage gap.

Agricultural input subsidy programs have once again become a major plank of policies in Africa, aimed at productivity improvements and poverty reduction among farmers. In Ghana, a nationwide Fertilizer Subsidy Program (GFSP) was commenced in 2008. How- ever, there has been limited rigorous evaluation of its impact on crop yields to date. Using matching methods, this study estimated the treatment effect of GFSP on a cross-sectional sample of 5,923 cereal households drawn from a population-based survey dataset for 2012/13 and 2016/17. Results showed that cereal yield enhancement attributable to GFSP was 24.5%. Additionally, the effect disaggregated by type of cereal showed that farmers cultivating maize benefited the most. These findings support the ability of GFSP ability to improve productivity.

Using the first round of the 2003 cohort of the New Immigrant Survey, a nationally representative sample of new legal immigrants to the United States, we investigate the relationship between the process of becoming a legal permanent resident alien (the process of obtaining a green card) and the self-reported health status of U.S immigrants. Results from ordered-logitistic regressions indicate that immigrants who felt sad, blue or depressed because of the process of becoming a legal permanent resident in the U.S. were more likely to report a lower health status.

In the progression towards economic growth, countries consider investment as a critical feature in raising productivity levels by boosting technological progress and reducing the unemployment rate. In recent years, the government of South Africa and Kenya have both enacted policies to entice Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the view of creating more jobs and bolstering the economy. However, in the bid to attract these foreign investors, FDI may either end up complementing or stifling local investments over time. From this perspective, the objective of the study is to investigate the impact of FDI on Domestic Investments in Sub -Saharan Africa (SSA) with an individual investigation on Kenya and South Africa. Analyzing annual series of data from 1972 2011 , our Pooled OLS results shows that FDI has no impact on domestic investment in SSA countries. Using time series to dig deeper to establish the relationship between FDI and domestic investment in both countries, we found out that F...

Selecting ideal health insurance coverage entails a trade-off between the gain from risk reduction and the deadweight loss from moral hazard (Manning and Marquis, 1996). This paper investigates students’ willingness to pay for student health insurance which will serve as a primary plan. Variables such as demographics, student insurance enrollment and coverage, student insurance utilization and satisfaction were used to assess students’ Willingness to pay for student insurance as a primary plan. Both qualitative and quantitative statistics were used to explain the willingness of students to pay for student insurance as a primary plan.