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Technology can help to reduce inefficiencies and inequalities in developing countries. Although whether this happens in practice often depends on the social and geographic context. Deployment of solar home systems (SHS) across Nepal provides one such example. We examine a policy to promote SHS through a subsidy for adoption and its downstream benefits - children’s education, time allocated to agricultural and household work (both unpaid), and working for a wage. We overcome the challenges of the non-random assignment of subsidies by using geographic regression discontinuity design using (cost) distance as the assignment variable. This is based on the assumption that households cannot perfectly control the assignment variable because migrating to a different region, simply to acquire an additional solar subsidy of maximum NRs4000, is challenging and unlikely in the case of Nepal. Our results show that subsidy-eligible households are about 43% more likely to adopt SHS. We find a positive effect of the SHS adoption on the grade for age and educational z-score of children’s educations with the effect being higher on girls than boys. We also find that females are 14.2% more likely to participate and spend more time (about 19 extra days in a year) in agricultural practices by reducing their engagement in family work. However, there is no effect on the participation rates across the labour market. Results also show that males increase their contribution to household work.

In fragile states and areas beset by insecurity and conflict, the time available for a face-to-face interview is typically limited. That prevents administering the lengthy household consumption expenditure surveys used for measuring poverty. This paper presents a new approach to obtain unbiased estimates of poverty when the time to conduct interviews is a binding constraint. The finite list of consumption recall items is partitioned selectively into a core module and algorithmically into nonoverlapping optional modules. Each household is systematically assigned the core module and randomly assigned one of the optional modules. Multiple imputation techniques are then used to estimate total household consumption. Based on ex post simulations, the approach is demonstrated to yield reliable estimates of per capita consumption and poverty using data from a regular household budget survey collected in Hargeisa, Somaliland. The approach is then applied to a survey conducted in Mogadishu where interview time could not exceed 60 minutes.

International audience; We offer a flexible latent type approach to rank populations according to unequal health opportunities. Building upon the latent-class method, an approch increasingly adopted to estimate health inequalities, our contribution is to let the number of socioeconomic groups considered vary to obtain an opportunity-inequality curve for a population that gives how the between-type inequality varies with the number of types. A population A is said to have less inequality of opportunity than population B if its curve is statistically below that of population B. This version of the latent class approach allows for a robust ranking of 31 European countries regarding inequality of opportunity in health.

International audience; Motivated by the pertinence of Pigou–Dalton (PD) transfers for inequality measurement when only one attribute is involved, we show that inframodular functions are consistent with multidimensional PD transfers and that weakly inframodular functions fit more accurately with the traditional notion of PD transfers. We emphasize, for inequality rankings of allocations of multiple attributes in a population, the similarities of the inframodular order, defined using inframodular functions, with the concave order in the unidimensional framework.

Recent decades have witnessed a growing focus on two distinct income patterns: persistent pay inequity, particularly a gender pay gap, and growing pay inequality. Pay transparency is widely advanced as a remedy for both. Yet we know little about the systemic influence of this policy on the evolution of pay practices within organizations. To address this void, we assemble a novel data set combining detailed performance, demographic and salary data for approximately 100,000 US academics between 1997 and 2017. We then exploit staggered shocks to wage transparency to explore how this change reshapes pay practices. We find evidence that pay transparency causes significant increases in both the equity and equality of pay, and significant and sizeable reductions in the link between pay and individually-measured performance.

An earlier version of this paper has been published here : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02497274v1; There are significant differences across countries in terms of redistribution by the government. This corresponds to underlying dissimilarities in preference for redistribution. Particularly, previous literature compared the US and Europe and proposed several explanations of these differences, from aggregation of individual determinants (e.g. one’s income) to more holistic ones such as shared values at the national level (i.e. social beliefs). This paper, therefore, aims to analyse the impact of socio-demographic factors and social beliefs on preference for redistribution. First, we focused on two di_erent dimensions of preference —the government’s role in reducing the difference in income and the approach of the tax system with high income. Secondly, we extended the comparison by including a developed Asian country, Japan. Based on the results, the following two attitudes are not fully compatible: many people support the governmental intervention, but not for more tax on the rich, especially in Japan. Furthermore, the di_erence in the attitude on the governmental intervention mainly comes from the variance in the role of social beliefs. On the other hand, the average income and wealth do not explain the difference in preference. Countries are characterized by different social beliefs, which affects the differences in sub-preferences. However, not only the distribution of social beliefs, but also their statistical relation to the sub-preferences explains the country level disparity. In addition, the US and Europe comparison under/over-estimates these statistical associations in the world, since an Asian country, such as Japan, may have a different structure.

In the face of rising income inequality (Acemoglu & Autor, 2011; Atkinson, Piketty, & Saez, 2011; Piketty, 2014; World Economic Forum, 2014), one recent proposal is to provide consumers with information about the income inequality across those involved in the production of each good, at the point of purchase. This has been shown to depress overall inequality (Hill, 2020), though its impact depends crucially on whether people are willing to pay more for goods whose production involves less income inequality. Here we investigate this largely unexplored empirical question through an incentivised, behavioural choice experiment on a representative sample of the English population. We find that a large majority are willing to pay significantly more for goods associated with less inequality. How much more people are willing to pay varies with political leaning and increases with the extent of the inequality reduction, but is positive across the political spectrum and for all studied inequality differences. Moreover, it is typically higher when inequality is reported in more intuitive and informa- tive formats. Our results bode well for the effectiveness of product-level inequality information provision as a tool for moderating income inequality, promising impacts even in markets where all goods involve relatively high inequality levels and potential participation across the political spectrum.

This paper studies the effect of transportation networks on spatial inequality within metropolitan areas. It uses a spatial equilibrium model featuring nonhomotheticities and worker heterogeneity, allowing to capture rich patterns of workers sorting on commuting costs and amenities. The model is calibrated for the Paris urban area. Counterfactual simulations study the effects of a) the Regional Express Rail and b) restricting car use in the city center. Despite a strong contribution to suburbanization and reducing welfare inequality, the public transport network plays no role in reducing income segregation. The effects of banning cars depends critically on the response of residential amenities in the city. If it is low enough, it reduces income disparities between Paris and its suburbs at the cost of a substantial welfare loss. If it is high enough, the policy creates welfare gains but steepens the income gradient.

International audience; The distinction between effort and other factors, such as family background, matters for correcting policies and normative reasons when we appeal to inequality of opportunity. We take advantage of a purposefully designed survey on secondary schools in rural Bangladesh to offer a comprehensive view of the importance of overall effort when measuring inequalities of opportunity in education. The analysis comprises decomposition exercises of the predicted variance of student performance in mathematics and English by source (effort, circumstances, etc.) and subgroup (within- and between-schools) based on parametric estimates of educational production functions. Pupils’ effort, preferences, and talents contribute between 31% and 40% of the total predicted variances in performance scores. The contribution of overall effort falls by 10% when the correlation between effort and circumstances is taken into account. These findings are robust to the choice of estimation strategy (i.e. combined within- and between-schools variation models versus multilevel random-effect models). All in all, these results advocate that social determinism in education can be mitigated by individual effort at school.

We investigate wealth returns on an administrative panel containing the disaggregated balance sheets of Swedish residents. The expected return on household net wealth increases with net worth, exceeding the risk-free rate by 9% for households in the top 0.01%. The expected wealth return is driven by systematic risk-taking and exhibits strong persistence. Idiosyncratic risk is transitory but sufficiently large among business owners to generate substantial long-term dispersion in returns in top brackets. We estimate the distribution of the geometric average return on gross wealth over a generation. Heterogeneity in returns explains most of the historical increase in top wealth shares.

Background: Knowledge of the aggregate effects of multiple socioeconomic vulnerabilities is important for shedding light on the determinants of growing health inequalities and inequities in maternal healthcare.Objective: This paper describes patterns of inequity in maternal healthcare utilization and analyzes associations between inequity and multiple socioeconomic vulnerabilities among women in Vietnam.Design: This is a repeated cross-sectional study using data from the Vietnam Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys 2000, 2006, and 2011. Two maternal healthcare indicators were selected: (1) skilled antenatal care and (2) skilled delivery care. Four types of socioeconomic vulnerabilities – low education, ethnic minority, poverty, and rural location – were assessed both as separate explanatory variables and as composite indicators (combinations of three and four vulnerabilities). Pairwise comparisons and adjusted odds ratios were used to assess socioeconomic inequities in maternal healthcare.Results: In all three surveys, there were increases across the survey years in both the proportions of women who received antenatal care by skilled staff (68.6% in 2000, 90.8% in 2006, and 93.7% in 2011) and the proportions of women who gave birth with assistance from skilled staff (69.9% in 2000, 87.7% in 2006, and 92.9% in 2011). The receipt of antenatal care by skilled staff and birth assistance from skilled health personnel were less common among vulnerable women, especially those with multiple vulnerabilities.Conclusions: Even though Vietnam has improved its coverage of maternal healthcare on average, policies should target maternal healthcare utilization among women with multiple socioeconomic vulnerabilities. Both multisectoral social policies and health policies are needed to tackle multiple vulnerabilities more effectively by identifying those who are poor, less educated, live in rural areas, and belong to ethnic minority groups.Keywords: healthcare; skilled antenatal care; skilled delivery; multiple socioeconomic vulnerabilities; inequity; inequality(Published: 29 February 2016)Citation: Glob Health Action 2016, 9: 29386 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/gha.v9.29386This paper is part of the Special Issue: Millennium Development Goals in Vietnam: the Progress and Social Determinants. More papers from this issue can be found at www.globalhealthaction.net