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Objectives To analyze the role of both demand- and supply-side factors affecting birth registrations in East and Southern Africa by combining information on children, mothers, and their household on the one hand and information on the areas where they live on the other hand. Study design The study used deidentified data from recent Demographic and Health Surveys implemented in five East and Southern African countries: Malawi (2015), Mozambique (2011), Uganda (2016), Tanzania (2015), and Zambia (2013–2014). The analysis was based on children under the age of five whose mothers provided information on whether the child's birth was registered administratively and whether they have a birth certificate. Methods Multivariate logistic regression was conducted, and the odds ratios with the 95% confidence intervals are reported. The dependent variable is binary and indicates whether a child was registered or not. Separate analyses were performed for each country to test for similarity in results across countries. In addition, regression analysis was carried out on a pooled sample of the countries. Results There are differences between countries in the variables for which statistically significant associations with the likelihood of birth registration are observed. For example, the birth order of the child is statistically significant only for Mozambique with later children more likely to be registered. In addition, delivery in a healthcare facility is associated with a marginal gain in the likelihood of registration, except for Mozambique. By and large, when considering all five countries, there is no large gain or loss of residing in an urban area after controlling for the other independent variables included in the analysis. Generally, a higher level of educational attainment for the mother is associated with a higher likelihood of registration, with especially large gains in Tanzania and Mozambique at the postsecondary level. The effect of education remains statistically significant in the pooled sample. Conclusions Birth registration matters for a wide range of development outcomes and ensuring universal registration is a key target under the Sustainable Development Goals. Unfortunately, many low-income countries continue to have low rates of birth registration, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Changing the status quo will require considering both demand-side and supply-side factors constraining birth registrations.

Summary At a time when many countries might not achieve the health targets of the Millennium Development Goals and the post-2015 agenda for sustainable development is being negotiated, the contribution of faith-based health-care providers is potentially crucial. For better partnership to be achieved and for health systems to be strengthened by the alignment of faith-based health-providers with national systems and priorities, improved information is needed at all levels. Comparisons of basic factors (such as magnitude, reach to poor people, cost to patients, modes of financing, and satisfaction of patients with the services received) within faith-based health-providers and national systems show some differences. As the first report in the Series on faith-based health care, we review a broad body of published work and introduce some empirical evidence on the role of faith-based health-care providers, with a focus on Christian faith-based health providers in sub-Saharan Africa (on which the most detailed documentation has been gathered). The restricted and diverse evidence reported supports the idea that faith-based health providers continue to play a part in health provision, especially in fragile health systems, and the subsequent reports in this Series review controversies in faith-based health care and recommendations for how public and faith sectors might collaborate more effectively.

This paper investigates whether the poor benefit more or less than the non-poor from an expansion in public services and whether this depends on the type of service provided. Using data from Bolivia, this study investigates the allocation of education and basic infrastructure services across jurisdictions. Results indicate that the marginal benefit incidence is higher for the poor than for the non-poor in education, but lower in the case of access to infrastructure services. A model is proposed to suggest that the distribution of the observed marginal benefits from an expansion in the public provision of services is consistent with local Governments maximizing average access rates. This maximization appears to occur without policymakers taking into account distributional weights in their implicit social welfare function.

This note clarifies the relationship between β-convergence and σ-convergence in a univariate setting. In such a setting, σ-convergence implies β-convergence, but β-convergence does not imply σ-convergence. The results imply that caution should be used for the interpretation of the very concept of β-convergence in empirical work.

Summary This paper provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of three child-health outcomes related to the Millennium Development Goals: the infant mortality rate, the child mortality rate, and the prevalence of malnutrition. Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys, the paper goes beyond traditional crosscountry regressions by exploiting the variability in outcomes and explanatory variables observed within countries between asset quintiles. The findings suggest that apart from traditional variables (income, assets, education, and direct health interventions), better access to basic infrastructure services has an important role to play in improving child-health outcomes.

While it may be feasible to target those receiving relief after a natural disaster, it is difficult to differentiate the amount of relief provided among beneficiaries. This is because much of the relief consists of food, clothing, and medicine, all goods for which the absorptive capacity of households is limited. Empirical tests using data from Honduras following Hurricane Mitch confirm this hypothesis. The probability of receiving relief was negatively correlated with wealth and positively correlated with assets losses (with a higher weight placed on losses than pre-disaster wealth) and the fact that households suffered damage to their dwelling. By contrast, controlling for whether households suffered damage to their dwelling, the amount of relief received was related neither to pre-Mitch wealth, nor to assets losses.

The use of grouped data results in a downward bias in estimates of inequality because grouping omits intra-group inequality. This note shows that using grouped data may not lead to similar difficulties when estimating statistics such as the Gini income elasticity, which provides information on the impact on inequality of a marginal change in an income source, tax, or transfer.

This paper assesses the extent to which Hurricane Mitch affected the rural poor in Honduras and whether national and international aid efforts succeeded in providing relief. One of every two surveyed households incurred medical, housing, or other costs due to Mitch. One in three suffered from a loss in crops. One in five lost assets. One in 10 lost wages or business income. Relief was most often provided by churches and nongovernmental organizations. It consisted mainly of food, clothing, and medicine, and it amounted to less than one-tenth of the losses incurred by households.

An optimal control model is developed to model the choice between short-term safety nets (shelter beds) and longer term investments (low income housing) for the alleviation of literal homelessness (people sleeping on the street). Society's objective function depends negatively on literal homelessness and the budget expenditure to fight it. A steady-state saddle point solution is found. The model is extended to take into account incentive effects in the provision of shelters and leakage effects in the provision of low income housing. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: H53, R21, C61.

This paper compares the performance of targeting indicators to identify the poor. If the ROC curve of one indicator lies above that of another, the first indicator dominates the second for all social welfare functions based on the two types of errors involved in targeting. The method is applied to Bangladesh. Fifteen indicators are used, including location, land ownership, education, occupation, demographics, age, family structure, and housing. The analysis is applied at the national, urban, and rural levels with two poverty lines. Education dominates land ownership in urban areas. The ranking is reversed in most cases in rural areas.

There is ample evidence that utility subsidies imbedded in inverted block and other tariff structures are not well targeted to the poor, simply because the poor tend to have much lower access rates to water and electricity networks than richer households. This paper provides an analysis of the changes over time in the targeting performance of water consumption subsidies in Nicaragua. Becuase access rates to piped water increased substantially between 2001 and 2005, the targeting performance of consumption subsidies improved, despite the fact that the tariff structure remained essentially the same over time. It is shown that the observed changes in access rates had a much higher impact for improving the targeting performance of consumption subsidies than changes in the tariff structure could have had if they had been implemented. The results suggest that one of the best ways to improve the targeting of consumption subsidies may be to increase access rates, so that the poor have a better chance of receiving the subsidies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subsidies for utility services are widespread in the water supply, sanitation, and electricity sectors. One motivation is to improve social welfare of the poor by facilitating their access to and use of such services, as well as by redistributing resources to augment their purchasing power. At the same time, such subsidies have often been seen as engendering resource use inefficiencies and financially weak utilities, which hobble efforts to expand and improve service. Those adverse consequences have often been used to argue against charging consumers less than the cost of service. The impact of subsidies on both counts has been the subject of much controversy. The debate has gained renewed vigor as governments seek to ensure that all citizens have ready access to minimal levels of such services while striving to recover a larger share of the costs of utility operations to generate the resources required to sustain service and to improve its quality. This book makes a substantive contribution to our thinking on a key facet of the debate: the distributional impact of consumer subsidies for urban water supply and electricity services. Drawing together empirical research across a wide range of countries, it documents the prevalence and variants of consumer subsidies found in the developing world and presents a number of indicators that are useful in assessing the degree to which such subsidies benefit the poor. The findings are placed in a broader social protection framework where comparisons are drawn with poverty focused programs in other sectors using a common metric. The book’s findings are sobering. It concludes that the most common subsidy instruments (quantity-targeted subsidies such as those delivered through increasing block tariffs) perform poorly in comparison with most other transfer mechanisms. Alternative consumption and connection subsidy mechanisms show more promise, especially when combined with complementary nonprice approaches to making utility services accessible and affordable to poor households. Throughout, the authors dissect the many factors contributing to those outcomes, identifying those that policy makers can control and use to improve performance.

The use of equivalence scales for the measurement of inequality and social welfare poses a difficult ethical and technical dilemma. If all individuals are weighted equally while individual welfare measures are based on income or consumption per equivalent adult, then standard properties assumed in welfare economics can easily be violated. For example, a transfer from a rich household to a poorer one may result in an increase in inequality. To avoid such problems, individuals could be weighted according to their needs when computing inequality and social welfare measures. Yet this leads to treating individuals differently, with more weight granted to some than other in social welfare maximization, so that not all individuals will have the same marginal utility of income at the optimum solution.

This note clarifies the relationship between beta-convergence and sigma-convergence in a univariate setting. In such a setting, sigma-convergence implies beta-convergence, but beta-convergence does not imply sigma-convergence. The results imply that caution should be used for the interpretation of the very concept of beta-convergence in empirical work.

Assessing whether distributional changes are pro-poor has become increasingly widespread in academic and policy circles. Starting from relatively general ethical axioms, this paper proposes simple graphical methods to test whether distributional changes are indeed pro-poor. Pro-poor standards are first defined. An important issue is whether these standards should be absolute or relative. Another issue is whether pro-poor judgements should put relatively more emphasis on the impact of growth upon the poorer of the poor. Having formalized the treatment of these issues, the paper describes various ways for checking whether broad classes of ethical judgements will declare a distributional change to be pro-poor.

This paper proposes graphical methods to determine whether commodity tax changes are socially improving, in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. It also derives estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency ratios which can be used to characterize socially improving tax reforms. The statistical properties of the various estimators are derived in order to make the method implementable using survey data. The methodology is illustrated using a recently proposed reform of the Mexican Valued Added Tax system.

In a relative deprivation framework, unless inequality is reduced, growth is associated with both higher satisfaction and higher deprivation. This may help explain the discontent with growth despite its benefits. Knowledge of the population's mean income and the Lorenz curve is all that is needed to assess the satisfaction and deprivation of each individual. This is because for both the population as a whole and each individual, satisfaction and deprivation add up to the mean income.

We propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty-reducing transfer program reforms. The methods are based on Program Dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps. These curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting dominance curves and allocation dominance ones, and can serve to verify whether the assessment of program reforms is sensitive to the choice of poverty lines and poverty measures as well as to differences in revenue sources and behavioral impacts across programs.

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household size and composition, temporal or spatial variation in price indices, and individual needs and "merits".

The variance of the logarithm, often used to test for s-convergence, does not respect the properties expected for an inequality measure and it has problematic implications for world growth. Empirical tests for b-convergence are so weak that b-convergence can be observed simultaneously when one moves forward or backward in time. Taking into account these weaknesses in past empirical work, this paper proposes an alternative framework in which to analyze the relationships between growth, inequality, mobility, and social welfare. An application of the framework to worldwide and regional data on per capita GDP suggests a lack of convergence at the world level, opposite trends in convergence in various regions of the world, and a fairly low level of mobility or reranking between countries over time.