The effect of extractive activity on economic growth and development is a long debated issue in economics literature. While most of the existing literature focuses on the macroeconomic impacts of natural resource abundance, there is a rather limited but growing strand of literature that studies...

Using Life in Transition Survey data for 27 transition countries, the findings of this paper suggest that higher life satisfaction is correlated with lesser experience of unpleasant events such as labor market shock or economic distress, mostly in the recent past. Social capital such as trust,...

In 1993, in response to persistent unemployment, and rising poverty and social unrest, the government of Albania introduced an anti-poverty program, namely Ndihma Ekonomike; in 1995 it was extended to all poor households. This paper estimates the separate effects of participation in this income...

This paper studies the relationship between gender and corruption in the health sector. It uses data collected directly from health workers, during a recent public expenditure tracking survey in Tajikistan's health sector. Using informal payments as an indicator of corruption, women seem at...

As mobile phone ownership rates have risen in Africa, there is increased interest in using mobile telephony as a data collection platform. This paper draws on two pilot projects that use mobile phone interviews for data collection in Tanzania and South Sudan. The experience was largely a...

This paper presents a simple simulation framework for understanding and analyzing vulnerability to stunting. We utilize Demographic and Health Surveys merged with satellite data on climatic shocks. Children aged 0-5 years are grouped into three categories: consistently stunted, vulnerable, and...

The Nigerian government uses food import prohibition as part of policies that seeks to protect existing domestic producers and reduce the country's dependence on imports. This paper argues that such policies have negative effects on net consumers of such products due to higher prices. With 70...

Using data from Kenya, the determinants of gender differences in the overall distribution of earnings are estimated as part of explaining the positive association between the return to measured and unmeasured human capital attributes as formalised by human capital theory (Mincer in 'Schooling...

The literature on migration has documented the benefits of sending migrants abroad, but much less attention has been paid to the adverse consequences of international migration on those left behind. In this paper, we examine the role of international migration on the accumulation of human...

Cote d'Ivoire is the world's leading cocoa producer, supplying nearly 40 percent of world cocoa production. Developments in the cocoa sector can have significant implications for poverty reduction and shared prosperity given that the sector is a source of livelihood for about one-fifth of the...