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The COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh, associated public health measures, and people's reactions were projected to have caused job losses among women, a decline in women's empowerment and reduced women's diet diversity. Using a November 2020 telephone survey to re-interview adult female respondents of a November 2019 in-person survey, contrary to expectations we find that more women found than lost jobs, and women's diet diversity increased over the year partly marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. We did not find evidence of a decline in women's involvement in food purchase decisions, nor women's autonomy over use of household income. The change in women's outside employment is neither statistically related to changes in women's involvement in food purchase decisions, changes women's autonomy over use of household income, nor changes in women's diet diversity. Change in women's involvement in food purchase decisions is positively related with change in women's diet diversity and change in women's autonomy over income use is negatively related with change in women's diet diversity.

Schools are an attractive entry point to improve children’s diets, as their eating habits can be shaped during childhood and the information disseminated from school can reach adults through children. We implemented a cluster-randomized trial in 12 schools in peri-urban Viet Nam to assess if two school-based interventions increased knowledge of healthy diets among children and their parents, as well as children’s consumption of healthy foods. First, children were given lessons about food before school lunch and encouraged to share the lessons with their parents. Second, children were provided with healthy snacks to reinforce messages about healthy eating. We found that in the short term, the nutrition lessons raised the knowledge index score of the children by 0.35 standard deviation. After six months, this intervention lost its effectiveness, emphasizing the need for linkage between knowledge and practice. By itself, free access to fruit at school increased the children’s daily fruit consumption by half a portion, but not at the expense of home fruit consumption. Access to healthy foods at school can therefore be an effective measure to raise children’s healthy consumption. Child-parent communication was not a reliable channel for knowledge dissemination in our setting.

This study examines whether membership in a savings and credit society (SACP) reduces vulnerability to poverty, using a representative survey from the National Savings and Financial Services Bank. The sample of households includes those that are and are not members of a SACP during 2004−2007. This evidence indicates that membership improves income; furthermore, membership decreases the variance in annual household per capita income. Both effects reduce the probability that somebody becomes poor. Finally, the results offer support for the proposition that households that join a SACP have better abilities to smooth consumption in the face of adverse shocks, and thus are less susceptible to shocks, than do households that are not members.

The informal credit market remains an important source of finance for the poor in Vietnam. Yet, little if anything is known about the impact of informal loans on poverty and inequality, and the Vietnamese government has no policies towards the informal credit market. In the present study paper, we found that the effect of credit from friends and relatives on per capita expenditure is positive but not statistically significant. Meanwhile, the effect of credit from private moneylenders on per capita expenditure is positive and statistically significant. Borrowing from private moneylenders increases per capita expenditure of households by around 15%. Further, it reduced the poverty incidence of borrowers by around 8.5 percentage points in 2006 and significantly decreases the poverty gap index and the poverty-severity index. Borrowing from private moneylenders also reduces expenditure inequality, albeit at a very small magnitude.

By using stochastic frontier analysis, this article examines the technical efficiency of different types of microfinance institutions in Latin America. In particular, it tests whether differences in technical efficiency, both intra- and interfirm, can be explained by differences in ownership. With a focus on non-governmental organizations, cooperatives and credit unions, non-bank financial intermediaries, and banks, the data set contains 1681 observations from a panel of 315 institutions operating in 18 Latin American countries. The results show that non-governmental organizations and cooperatives have much lower interfirm and intrafirm technical efficiencies than non-bank financial intermediaries and banks, which indicates the importance of ownership type for technical efficiency. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This article uses two representative household budget surveys from the Kyrgyz Republic to analyze factors influencing participation and returns from different types of nonfarm activities in 2005 and 2006. We use the double hurdle and Heckman models, which allow us to demonstrate that a number of variables has different effects on participation and income from nonfarm activities. For example, residing in remote areas and lack of capital are found to stimulate participation in nonfarm activities, but decrease nonfarm income. Results are robust, but using the Heckman model seems to produce more accurate results for returns to education and gender under the presence of selection bias. Overall, nonfarm activities are found to be most important for the poor, who are pushed out of agriculture due to limited and poor land resources. This indicates that equipping poor households to enable them to move towards better remunerative nonfarm activities should be a priority for Kyrgyz rural policy makers.

In China, fuelwood and coal are the most important energy sources for rural households in poor areas. Along with population and economic growth, excessive fuelwood collection is a major cause of deforestation. Burning coal contributes to environmental problems such as air pollution, acid rain and greenhouse gas emissions. The purpose of this article is to analyze factors determining choice of energy source and labor input into fuelwood collection in poor, forest-rich regions, and to provide policy recommendations on ways to affect these choices. To this end, a nonseparable household model, reflecting choices in labor allocation and energy demand of rural households, is estimated from available data for three villages in a poor, forest-rich region in Jiangxi Province, Southeast China. Innovative aspects of this article are the analyses of factors driving household substitution between forest and non-forest fuels and of dissimilarities in household responses under different market access conditions.

This paper investigates the possibility of using public works to stimulate farmers' fertiliser use in India's SAT. Inadequate replenishment of removed nutrients and organic matter has reduced fertility and increased erosion rates. Fertiliser use, along with other complementary measures, can help reverse this process, which ultimately leads to poverty, hunger, and further environmental degradation. In a high-risk environment like India's SAT, there may be a strong relation between off-farm income and smallholder fertiliser use. Farmers can use the main source of off-farm income, wage income, to manage risk as well as to finance inputs. Consequently, the introduction of public works programmes in areas with high dry-season unemployment may affect fertiliser use. This study confirms the relevance of risk for decisions regarding fertiliser use in two Indian villages. Nevertheless, governments cannot use employment policies to stimulate fertiliser use. Public works even decrease fertiliser use in the survey setting.

We experimentally study aid distribution and cooperation in a field lab in rural Nicaragua. In the first stage of the experimental game, participants contribute to a collective effort that determines the amount of aid given to the group, which is distributed among the players in a second stage. We find that in a treatment where a group representative, selected as the highest contributor, distributes aid, contributions are higher compared to a treatment where aid is equally distributed. The higher amounts of aid attracted, however, benefit representatives only. At the same time, representatives do care about fairness. They give higher aid shares to players with low endowments and lower shares to low contributors. Moreover, representatives with lower relative wealth or who contribute relatively more, keep higher aid shares. With our experimental game simulating community-based development (CBD) schemes, we discuss the implications of our results for elite capture in such schemes.

This paper uses a unique representative household budget survey from the Asian Development Bank to analyze the impact of international migration and remittances on crop income of rural farmers in the Kyrgyz Republic. Unlike other studies we allow the impact of remittances to be different for farmers with different land size and test whether reduced labor availability is more relevant for permanent than for seasonal migrants. We find that losing family members has a significant negative effect on crop income, but only for permanent migrants. Remittances partially compensate for this, but their positive impact decreases with farm size.

This paper assesses the impact of hurricane Mitch on livelihood strategies of rural households in Nicaragua. Through destruction or distress sales of productive assets, a hurricane or another natural hazard could induce people with relatively remunerative livelihoods to choose more defensive strategies which allow them to survive, but at a permanently lower welfare level than before. Using panel data from before and after hurricane Mitch, we find that livelihood strategies can be grouped into three welfare categories. Annual farming and farm employment generate low incomes, whereas nonfarm wage employment and livestock farming result in relatively high incomes. Perennial farming, nonfarm self-employment and annual cropping with nonfarm employment take an intermediate position. High welfare strategies were associated with high levels of capital, and the number of people involved was very similar between different years, suggesting that households following low-welfare strategies were trapped in poverty. However, many households moved actively between strategies of different welfare levels. This indicates that there was no absolute poverty threshold, but also that being able to initiate a relatively profitable livelihood strategy was no guarantee that this strategy could be maintained. There is no evidence that hurricane Mitch affected livelihood strategy transitions: livelihood mobility was similar for households inside and outside Mitch-affected areas.

This article provides an in-depth regional analysis of the rural nonfarm economy in Kyrgyzstan based on three household budget surveys for 2003, 2005 and 2006. Regression analysis reveals that the share of time spent in the commercial rural nonfarm economy was larger in districts with low agricultural potential, indicating that the rural poor are pushed into accessible but not necessarily very profitable nonfarm activities. This ‘push’ scenario is probably strengthened by the low commercialisation and unfinished institutional reforms in the agricultural sector. Only in a few land-rich districts and in a district with a famous resort was labour ‘pulled’ into a profitable rural nonfarm economy stimulated by agricultural development and other local ‘motors’ of growth.

Earlier studies suggest that once population growth and market integration reach a certain critical level, traditional practices of work sharing tend to degenerate or disappear altogether. Work sharing has, however, survived to date in small-scale fisheries in Kerala, India. Artisanal fishermen strongly favor the system, for ethical reasons as well as for their personal benefit. Besides, boat owners appear not to be hindered by the system. Contrary to observations in crop production, work sharing has not inhibited the introduction of modern technologies like motorization.