This paper reports analysis of the impact of Kenya's Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children Programme on the household decisions on productive activities using data from a randomized experimental design. Results show that the programme had a positive and significant impact on food consumption coming from home production, accumulation of productive assets, especially on the ownership of small livestock and on formation of nonfarm enterprise, especially for females. The programme has provided more flexibility to families in terms of labour allocation decisions, particularly for those who are geographically isolated. The programme was also found to have reduced child labour, an important objective of the programme. However we find very little impact of the programme on direct indicators of crop production.

Amazonian indigenous populations are approaching a critical stage in their history in which increasing education and market integration, rapid population growth and degradation of natural resources threaten the survival of their traditions and livelihoods. A topic that has hardly been touched upon in this context is migration and population mobility. We address this by analysing a unique longitudinal dataset from the Ecuadorian Amazon on the spatial mobility of five indigenous groups and mestizo co-residents. Analyses reveal traditional and new forms of population mobility and migrant selectivity, including gendered forms of marriage migration and rural-urban moves driven by education. These results illustrate a dynamic present and an uncertain future for indigenous populations in which rural, natural-resource-based lifeways may well be sustained but with increasing links to urban areas.

This paper investigates the interplay between the Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) and the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) in Malawi. We take advantage of data collected from a seventeen-month evaluation of a sample of households eligible to receive SCTP, which also provided information about inclusion into FISP. We estimate two types of synergies: i) the complementarity between SCTP and FISP, i.e. whether the impact of both interventions run together is larger than the sum of the impacts of these interventions when run separately, and ii) the incremental impact of receiving FISP when a household already receives SCTP, as well as the incremental impact of receiving SCTP when a household already receives FISP. The analysis shows that there are synergies between the two policy interventions, mainly in terms of incremental impact of each programme over the other, in increasing expenditure, agricultural production and livestock.

Participatory learning and action women's groups (PLA) have proven effective in reducing neonatal mortality in rural, high-mortality settings, but their impacts on women's agency in the household remain unknown. Cash transfer programmes have also long targeted female beneficiaries in the belief that this empowers women. Drawing on data from 1309 pregnant women in a four-arm cluster-randomised controlled trial in Nepal, we found little evidence for an impact of PLA alone or combined with unconditional food or cash transfers on women's agency in the household. Caution is advised before assuming PLA women's groups alone or with resource transfers necessarily empower women.

Given its modest position as a lower-middle income country, Vietnam stands out from the rest of the world with its remarkable performance on standardized test scores, school enrollment, and completed years of schooling. We provide an overview of the factors behind this exemplary performance both from an institutional viewpoint and by analyzing several different data sources, some of which have rarely been used. Some of the highlights are universal primary school enrollment, higher girls' net enrollment rates, and the role of within-commune individual factors. We further discuss a host of challenges for the country-most of which have received insufficient attention to date.

This paper uses the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a natural experiment to estimate returns to capital over time. With a sample of surviving fishermen who lost their boats and received aid boats, we find that more productive fishermen before the disaster retained their productive edge ex-post, controlling for boat quality and fishing conditions. Returns to innate ability, measured by ex-ante productivity, became more important over time; while returns to physical capital became less important. These findings highlight the importance of innate ability in explaining long-run productivity.

Using data on women aged 50 and over from the WHO's Survey of Ageing and Adult Health for China, Ghana, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa (N=17,009), we assess associations between widowhood and socio-economic, health and quality of life deprivations. We find variations in the prevalence and timing of widowhood across the study countries, and associations between widowhood and being in the poorest wealth quintile for all five countries. For other deprivations, national experiences varied, with stronger and more consistent effects for India and China. These findings challenge generalised claims about widowhood and call for more contextualised analysis.

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to analyse the impact of an integrated agriculture and nutrition programme in Burkina Faso on women's and men's assets, and norms regarding ownership, use and control of assets. We use a cluster-randomised controlled trial to determine whether productive asset transfers and increased income-generating opportunities for women increase women's assets over time. Qualitative work on gender norms finds that although men still own and control most assets, women have greater decision-making power and control over home gardens and their produce, and attitudes towards women owning property have become more favourable in treatment areas.

This paper uses a Preston Curve approach to test for changes over time in agriculture, nutrition and food policy, comparing national averages in Africa and elsewhere at each level of national income per capita from the 1990s to the 2010s. Our statistical tests and data visualisations reveal that, at each level of income, African countries have faster rural population growth, a larger share of workers in agriculture and lower agricultural labour productivity than countries elsewhere, with no significant shift in these patterns from the 1990s to the 2010s. In contrast, there have been structural shifts towards less child stunting everywhere, and towards more adult obesity in high-income countries. The overall pattern of African governments' food policies and government expenditures have not shifted, however, as they continue price interventions and low investment levels characteristic of low-income countries around the world.

Climate change is projected to dramatically disrupt rainfall patterns and agricultural yields in Sub-Saharan Africa. These shocks to food production can mire farming households in poverty traps. This study investigates whether unconditional cash transfers can help households cope with agricultural production and price shocks. We find that cash empowers poor, rural households facing these negative shocks to employ coping strategies typically used by the non-poor and enables them to substantially increase their food consumption and overall food security. Extending relatively small cash payments unconditionally to the rural poor is a powerful policy option for fostering climate-resilient development.

Clean cooking fuels promise substantial health benefits for rural households, but almost three billion people continue to rely on traditional biomass for their cooking needs. We explore the role of gender in the adoption of LPG, a clean cooking fuel, in rural India. Given that women are responsible for most households' cooking needs, we propose that gender inequality is an obstacle to LPG adoption because men may fail to appreciate the full benefits of clean cooking fuels. Using data for 8,563 households from the ACCESS survey, we demonstrate that households where women participant in decison-making are more likely to adopt LPG for cooking than households in which a man is the sole decision-maker. We extend our analytic framework to evaluate the relationship between household characteristics and LPG and firewood use. Access and cylinder costs were both negatively associated with LPG use and while LPG adoption reduced firewood use, fuel stacking remains the norm in study households. This study has implications for future policy designs to increase LPG adoption and use to obtain the multiple benefits of cleaner cooking.

India's cities face key challenges to improving public health outcomes. First, unequally distributed public resources create insanitary conditions, especially in slums - threatening everyone's health, as suggested by poor child growth even amongst the wealthiest. Second, devolving services to elected bodies works poorly for highly technical services like public health. Third, services are highly fragmented. This paper examines the differences in the organisation and management of municipal services in Chennai and Delhi, two cities with sharply contrasting health indicators. Chennai mitigates these challenges by retaining professional management of service delivery and actively serving vulnerable populations - while services in Delhi are quite constrained. Management and institutional issues have received inadequate attention in the public health literature on developing countries, and the policy lessons from Chennai have wide relevance.

This paper uses panel data from the Young Lives Survey to examine the effect of the world's largest public works program and India's flagship social protection program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), on children's learning outcomes such as grade progression, reading comprehension test scores, writing test scores, math test scores, and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) scores. We find that the program has strong positive effects on these outcomes in both the short-and-medium run. Finally, the impact estimates reported here are robust to a number of econometric concerns such as -program placement, selective attrition, and type I error.

What are the prospects for using population policy as tool to reduce carbon emissions? In this paper, we review evidence from population science, in order to inform debates in population ethics that, so far, have largely taken place within the academic philosophy literature. In particular, we ask whether fertility policy is likely to have a large effect on carbon emissions, and therefore on temperature change. Our answer is no. Prospects for a policy of fertility-reduction-as-climate-mitigation are limited by population momentum, a demographic factor that limits possible variation in the size of the population, even if fertility rates change very quickly. In particular, a hypothetical policy that instantaneously changed fertility and mortality rates to replacement levels would nevertheless result in a population of over 9 billion people in 2060. We use a leading climate-economy model to project the consequence of such a hypothetical policy for climate change. As a standalone mitigation policy, such a hypothetical change in the size of the future population - much too large to be implementable by any foreseeable government program - would reduce peak temperature change only to 6.4°C, relative to 7.1°C under the most likely population path. Therefore, fertility reduction is unlikely to be an adequate core approach to climate mitigation.

Using a unique Chinese survey of parents and adult children, this paper examines how married children negotiate with their spouses for time devoted to caring for their own parents. Applying a collective bargaining framework, I show that the sex ratio at marriage shifts household bargaining in favour of the husband's parents when women are less scarce, or against his parents when women are scarcer. Such changing dynamics in the family may potentially reverse the current preference for sons in China, implying that those with sons, rather than daughters, may be increasingly in need of state support.

Resource poor smallholders in developing countries often lack access to capital goods such as farm machinery. Enabling adequate access through machinery services can thereby significantly contribute to food security and farm incomes. At the core of the service provision model is the lead farmer, who makes the initial investment in agricultural machinery, and provides services to others on a fee-for-service basis. Profiling the lead farmers can thereby provide important lessons and scaling implications. The present paper provides a case study of Bangladesh, using primary data to characterise the lead farmers. General education, credit availability and risk taking attitude play significant roles in whether or not a farm household will be a lead farmer in Bangladesh.

Relative to chronic hunger, seasonal hunger in rural and urban areas of Africa is poorly understood. This paper examines the extent and potential correlates of seasonal hunger in Malawi using panel data from 2011-2013. We find that both urban and rural households report seasonal hunger in the pre-harvest months. Certain strategies to smooth consumption, including crop storage and livestock ownership, are associated with fewer months of hunger. In addition, we find that Malawian households that experience seasonal hunger harvest their crops earlier than average - a short-term coping mechanism that can reduce the crop's yield and nutritional value, possibly perpetuating hunger.

Exposure to open defecation has serious consequences for child mortality, health, and human capital development. South Asia has the highest rates of open defecation worldwide, and although the incidence declines as household income rises, differences across South Asian countries are not explained by differences in per capita income. The rate of open defecation in sub-national regions of Bangladesh, India and Nepal is highly correlated with the fraction of the population that identifies as Hindu, in part because certain rituals of purity and pollution discourage having latrines in close proximity to one's home. Almost all open defecation occurs in rural areas, and this paper estimates how much the rate could be reduced if rural households in regions that have a higher fraction of Hindus, where open defecation is still common, altered their behaviour to reflect that of non-Hindu households in regions that are predominantly non-Hindu, where the rate of open defecation is much lower. Using nonparametric reweighting methods, this paper projects that rural open defecation in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal could be reduced to rates of between 6 and 8 per cent, compared to the prevailing level of 65 per cent.

Donor country publics typically know little about how much aid their governments give. This paper reports on three experiments conducted in Australia designed to study whether providing accurate information on government giving changes people's views about aid. Treating participants by showing them how little Australia gives or by showing declining generosity has little effect. However, contrasting Australian aid cuts with increases in the United Kingdom raises support for aid substantially. Motivated reasoning likely explains the broad absence of findings in the first two treatments. Concern with international norms and perceptions likely explains the efficacy of the third treatment.

Using data from 433 firms operating along Uganda's charcoal and timber supply chains we investigate patterns of bribe payment and tax collection between supply chain actors and government officials responsible for collecting taxes and fees. We examine the factors associated with the presence and magnitude of bribe and tax payments using a series of bivariate probit and Tobit regression models. We find empirical support for a number of hypotheses related to payments, highlighting the role of queuing, capital-at-risk, favouritism, networks, and role in the supply chain. We also find that taxes crowd-in bribery in the charcoal market.

While community health workers (CHWs) are a core feature of many low-resource healthcare systems, evidence on both their health impacts and the mechanisms behind these impacts remains limited. Using a difference-in-differences design with a control and treatment group, this study evaluated a CHW programme in southwestern Uganda aimed at improving maternal health outcomes. We found relatively little evidence of an overall programme effect on health behaviours, including antenatal care attendance and delivery under skilled supervision. Analysis of heterogeneity by gestational age at first antenatal visit - which should have modulated exposure to the intervention - provided suggestive evidence that treatment effects varied predictably with gestational age. Altogether, the absence of strong programme effects may have been due to suboptimal performance by CHWs, thus highlighting the importance of studying and instituting appropriate monitoring and incentive schemes for such programmes. Additionally, in contrast to the weak treatment effect findings, analysis of the entire study sample between the pre- and post-intervention periods showed large improvements in healthcare-seeking behaviour across both the treatment and control groups. These changes may have arisen from concurrent supply-side health facility improvements affecting the entire study population, spillover effects from the CHWs, or background health trends.