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Begin New Search Topic Economics Political Geography South Asia Content Type Working Paper Publication Year within 5 Years Publication Year within 3 Years

1. Gender preference at birth: A new measure for son preference based on stated preferences and observed measures of parents’ fertility decisions

Author:
Mehwish Ali, Ashton de Silva, Sarah Sinclair, and Ankita Mishra
Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Investigating preference for sons is a continuing focal area of development economics and demographic research. Son preference presents a challenge in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of ‘no poverty’, ‘good health and wellbeing’, and ‘gender equality’ by 2030. It is thus important to investigate son preference to inform policy-makers of the potential challenges in achieving these goals. Inaccurate interpretation of the mechanisms of son preference could misinform policy analysis and result in unintended consequences. Existing measures including sex ratios and gender composition of children do not reflect the true extent of son preference in high fertility countries such as Pakistan, where the success of policy action is limited and significant barriers to sex-selective technologies exist. Given the likely impact of son preference on fertility behaviour in Pakistan, accurate measurement of the forms this gender bias can take is necessary to appropriately gauge the influence of son preference on the fertility outcomes. The limited capacity of existing measures to accurately depict son preference in countries with high fertility combined with limited demarcation between pre- and post-birth son preference warrants development of a new measure for son preference to evaluate its effects. In this paper, a new measure of son preference called ‘gender preferences at birth’ (GPB) is presented. GPB combines stated fertility preferences and observed fertility outcomes to acknowledge that households in countries with high fertility and low contraception usage have less control over their fertility decisions.
Topic:
Economics, Sustainable Development Goals, Welfare, Family Planning, Fertility, and Gender
Political Geography:
Pakistan, South Asia, and Global Focus

2. Mapping Religion, Space, and Economic Outcomes in Indian Cities

Author:
Sripad Motiram and Vamsi Valuabharanam
Publication Date:
08-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract:
We deploy a socio-spatial approach and use a spatially representative survey that we conducted in Hyderabad and Mumbai to analyze the relation between city space and religion. After documenting the relative status of religious groups in urban India and different types of cities using secondary databases, we identify poor-ghettos and elite-enclaves in Hyderabad and Mumbai. In both cities, ghettos have a high proportion of Muslims, while enclaves are dominated by non-Muslim inhabitants. Ghettoization of Muslims is far more pronounced in Hyderabad than in Mumbai. A key finding on the relation between city space and religion is that compared to segregated neighborhoods, mixed (“grayer”) neighborhoods produce better economic outcomes like lower poverty. We argue that while Indian cities are becoming less integrated along religious lines over the last 3-4 decades, this process is far from complete, and needs to be reversed.
Topic:
Economics, Religion, Space, and Cities
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

3. Measuring Trade Facilitation: Evidence from India

Author:
Vijay Singh Chauhan and Sruti Vijayakumar
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
The World Trade Organization’s Trade Facilitation Agreement has placed trade facilitation initiatives high on the agenda of international governments. This case study of India studies what trade facilitation may mean for a fast-paced economy. In this paper the authors use the trigger presented by the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) to undertake a comprehensive review of various publicly available studies for India relating to performance measurement of the ecosystem that handles the cross-border movement of goods, focusing on the period since 2015. The paper summarizes the results of six key composite performance indicators—namely, (1) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) trade facilitation indicators (TFIs); (2) the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business (EODB) Index; (3) the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index (LPI); (4) the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) Global Competitiveness Index (GCI); (5) the World Bank’s World Governance Indicators (WGIs); and (6) the United Nations’ Global Survey on Trade Facilitation and Paperless Trade Implementation (GSTF-PTI). This paper, by examining these composite survey-based indicators and the intertemporal trends they exhibit for India, reveals that they have not been moving in agreement with each other and that some of the trends are evidently counterintuitive. A comparison between delineated subindicators of select composite indicators sometimes indicates surprising trends. Import cargo release times (a performance measurement prescribed by the TFA) for the largest containerized port in the country, the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), have been extracted from various studies that have relied on the data from the customs automation system; the container tracking system, which employs radio-frequency identification (RFID); and survey-based studies, including the Trading Across Borders (TAB) component of the World Bank’s EODB Index. These import cargo release time studies present a consistent trend of improvement since 2017. The paper, therefore, highlights the greater robustness of cargo release time trends, based particularly on technology-enabled data-driven studies as a more meaningful metric for measurement of performance of border management agencies and practices vis-à-vis survey or perception-based indicators representing “enablers” of trade facilitation.
Topic:
Economics, Trade, and WTO
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

4. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the poor: Insights from the Hrishipara diaries

Author:
Risto Rönkkö, Stuart Rutherford, and Kunal Sen
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
In this paper, we examine the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of the poor. We use an unusually rich data set from a ‘financial diaries’ study known as the Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project. The data set tracks the economic and financial transactions of 60 individuals and their families in a semi-rural setting in Bangladesh on a real-time basis from October 2019 to September 2020. We document individual diarists’ behavioural responses to COVID-19, which reveal the varied experiences of the poor during the pandemic. We find that the pandemic and associated government lockdowns had significant negative effects on the livelihoods of the poor in our study, with financial inflows and outflows, incomes, and household expenditures below pre-pandemic levels during the pandemic period. To cope with the pandemic, households drew down on their cash reserves at home, as well as cutting down on non-food expenditures to protect their spending on food.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Finance, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Bangladesh and South Asia