The research projects described here are directed by World Bank staff and funded by the Bank's central Research Support Budget (RSB). Research proposals being prepared with RSB funding are listed on page 9. For information about the research projects described here, contact the researchers at the Bank's main address (see back page).
This study is part of a World Bank effort to help developing countries assess their interests and form their positions for the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations set to begin in 2000. Designed to fill gaps in current research, the study will focus on three areas: services trade, goods trade, and intellectual property rights.
The study will assess progress in developing the data needed to analyze proposals for liberalizing services, the effects of liberalization, and the likely implications of outsourcing and fragmentation of production for developing countries. It will look at patterns of protection in goods trade and examine progress in phasing out textile export quotas. And it will examine the economic issues in the debate on international rules to limit or ban
parallel imports.
RSB support: $40,000
Microcredit programs often target women, in part because they are less likely than men to have control over resources. But does microcredit alone empower women? This study will address that question by looking at the experience of women in Bangladesh who have participated in microcredit programs of the Grameen Bank, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and the Rural Development (RD-12) Project.
Definitions of economic, social, and political empowerment will be developed with the participation of local people. Researchers will then survey women in about 1,800 households that participated in earlier surveys on use of microcredit. The analysis of the results will control for the unobserved empowerment of women before
participation in microcredit programs and for the placement of the
programs.
RSB support: $39,500
Staff weeks: 16
Cross-country evidence shows that foreign aid has a strong positive effect on a country's economic performance if the country has undertaken certain policy and structural reforms—but that countries with good policies receive less aid than those with mediocre or poor policies.
This research project will use case studies of 10 Sub-Saharan African countries—with varying degrees of reform—to improve the understanding of the link between aid and reform. It will focus on what led up to reform, how aid influenced reform decisions, and whether aid has helped sustain the reforms.
The study will look at reform in four areas: macroeconomic management, structural policies, public
sector management, and public
expenditures.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff weeks: 70
This study proposes to contribute to the long-standing fight against malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa by examining the economics of malaria and malaria control. It will analyze the economic cost of malaria by assessing the willingness to pay to avert an episode or, its converse, the willingness to accept an episode of the disease. It will look at who malaria affects within a population, how malaria affects productivity and income, and what households are doing to cope. And it will investigate the effectiveness of different types of interventions delivered through different modes—public and private—focusing on how households and individuals respond to the interventions. The analysis will be set within a theoretical framework of the public economics of malaria control.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff weeks: 26
As part of a larger study on gender issues in development, this research project will look at how two areas of the law treat men and women: family law (relating to divorce, child custody, separation rights, domestic violence, and the like) and labor law (protection laws, minimum wage laws). The project will review the legal framework in these areas in different developing countries, the mechanisms for enforcing the laws, and the effect the laws have had on the welfare of men and women.
RSB support: $39,500
Staff weeks: 4
Water scarcity is a growing global concern. World Banksupported irrigation projects reflect this concern in their emphasis on regulating demand for water, primarily through appropriate pricing. But what exactly are łappropriate˛ water prices, and how should they be applied?
The answers to these questions are not straightforward, in part because water pricing methods are sensitive to the physical, social, institutional, and political setting. This study aims to develop guidelines on how to price irrigation water under different conditions, with efficiency, implementation costs, and equity the primary criteria for evaluating pricing methods. The study will base the guidelines on analysis of existing methods for pricing irrigation water in a range of countries.
RSB support: $147,000
Staff weeks: 12
After rapid growth in the past decade, China's township-village industrial enterprises (TVIEs) now account for about half the country's industrial output and a large share of its emissions of pollutants. Efforts to address the pollution problems of TVIEs have been only partly successful. This project is a collaborative effort with China's State Environmental Protection Agency to identify options for more effective regulation.
The study will assess pollution-related risks and the associated costs
of abatement—to find out which emissions from TVIEs cause significant damage and how much pollution control is socially desirable. It will use plant-level data to identify determinants of pollution by TVIEs. And it will look at local implementation of pollution regulation to see why it has succeeded or failed.
RSB support: $147,000
Staff weeks: 36
Recent research suggests that policymakers choosing among transport tax policies (congestion tolls, emissions charges) for reducing congestion, air pollution, and other transport-related externalities should take into account possible interactions with existing distortionary taxes. By driving up product prices, pollution taxes may reduce the real household wage and the labor supply—and thus exacerbate the deadweight loss from factor taxes. But a tax that reduces congestion can also reduce the overall costs of the tax system—by increasing the average household wage, raising labor force participation, and reducing the deadweight loss from income taxes.
This study will revisit the arguments for transport charges in the context of the recent work on distortionary taxes. The research will focus on the general equilibrium welfare effects of transport policies, particularly the spillover effects in other
markets affected by distortionary taxes.
RSB support: $39,000
The past decade has seen rapidly expanding interest in the role of institutions in economic growth and stability. But empirical research on this topic has been constrained by limited availability of political and institutional data across countries and over time. This project is aimed at reducing the obstacles by setting up a centralized archive of cross-national data on a Website based at Harvard University's Political Economy Center.
The project will bring together
dispersed data sets, convert them to a common format, archive them on the Website, and create a data gateway that will allow users to assemble panel data sets of variables. The archive will include data on social fragmentation and cohesion, political and judicial institutions, and standard economic variables.
RSB support: $33,166
To help in understanding why some antipoverty interventions succeed while others fail, this study will develop and apply a model of the role of information and incentives in programs to reduce poverty. The analysis will focus on institutional factors— the effects of beneficiary participation on information flows, the information intensity of interventions, and principal-agent problems associated with incomplete contracts and inappropriate incentives.
The study will draw on a data set on the design, organizational structure, outcomes, and participants of about 100 public works programs that have been implemented in the Western Cape province of
South Africa.
RSB support: $20,000
How can countries expand conservation beyond formally protected areas—often too small to ensure the viability of ecosystems? One strategy has been zoning—to direct development to areas of high agricultural potential and restrict land use in ecologically significant areas. But enforcement, typically based on a command-and-control approach, has been ineffective where zoning imposes high costs on private actors and political support is lacking.
This study will assess economic instruments aimed at reconciling
landholders' incentives with forest conservation—tradable development rights, purchase of land or easements, and purchase of carbon sequestration services—and different mechanisms for financing their use. It will quantify the effects of these instruments on ecosystem viability, opportunity costs of land uses, and government expenditure in the Atlantic forest of Brazil.
RSB support: $77,000
Staff weeks: 3
Developing country policymakers often try to spur adoption of foreign technologies through policies aimed at encouraging domestic firms to form joint ventures with foreign partners, import capital goods, license technologies, and export to developed markets. What policy is best depends on which of these activities are causally associated with improvements in firms' performance, how large the effects are, and whether the effects are internal or external to firms.
This study will analyze large panel data sets on firms in several developing countries to shed light on these issues. It will document the cross-country and sectoral patterns in the activities associated with technology transfer and, where possible, relate these
patterns to policies.
RSB support: $160,000
Staff weeks: 97
This study will investigate the effects of competition and innovation in an essential business service—road freight transport—on downstream business users. Although the focus is on regulatory reform and increased competition, the study will look beyond the direct effects on service prices and quantities. Instead, it will investigate how the removal of infrastructure bottlenecks following reform affects the growth and restructuring of firms, and the entry of new firms, in industries that use road freight transport intensively.
The study will focus on Hungary and Poland—among the first transition economies in Eastern Europe to adopt procompetition reforms—and Turkey, which has never regulated prices and entry in domestic road freight. The research will use a case study approach, surveying trucking firms, freight forwarders, and multimodal service providers, as well as businesses that use the services such firms provide.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff weeks: 15
This study, like the one described above, will investigate how innovations arising from regulatory reform and competition in an essential business service affect downstream business users. It will focus on telecommunications, where innovations can transform the way downstream users do business and competition can dramatically reduce costs.
The study will focus on Estonia, Hungary, and Poland, which have all introduced big shifts in their regulatory regime in the past decade. It will trace the chronology of reforms and try to link innovations in telecommunications with regulatory changes. It will identify the mechanisms through which such innovations could affect users' operations and measure the gains in their operating margins. The study will survey users in sectors in which telecommunications innovations can have a critical impact: finance, manufacturing, and information technology, publishing, and broadcasting.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff weeks: 15
This study aims to gauge the impact of policy in Brazil on persistent intergenerational poverty in Rio de Janeiro. The study will take advantage of data gathered 30 years ago on 750 residents and community leaders in three squatter settlements of Rio de Janeiro. By repeating interviews with a subsample of the original informants (in some cases, their descendants), the study will generate data with which to
evaluate the effects of public policies relating to land, shelter, and the
poor over several decades. The study will also explore the outcomes of household survival strategies and the effects of community and nongovernmental organizations as mediators of policy.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff weeks: 1.5
Indicators of child health almost always are national averages. Thus they reveal little about inequalities across income groups, hampering analysis of the distributional effects of health policies. This study aims to help overcome this problem by testing techniques for measuring child health inequalities.
The study will investigate child health inequalities in six countries using data from two widely used household surveys: the Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) and the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). Both surveys generate information on child health, but while the LSMS provides data on aggregate household consumption, the DHS lacks income and consumption data. Through rigorous comparison of the results, the study will determine whether analysis of child health inequalities can rely on both sources and compare results from them.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff week: 1
Despite the strong emphasis on markets today, little is known about the institutions that support market exchange and about how market structures evolve. This study aims to throw new light on these issues by looking at agricultural markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will address a simple question: Do markets for agricultural outputs and inputs minimize transactions costs and foster competition?
Through surveys in Benin and Malawi, the study will contrast the market organization of food and cash crops—cotton in Benin, tobacco in Malawi—and examine the institutional arrangements that make trade in agricultural inputs possible. The focus will be on issues of contract enforcement—relational contracting seems to be the norm in Africa—and credit constraints.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff weeks: 30
Economic reform in Latin America has led to a boom in nontraditional agricultural exports and in off-farm employment, especially among women. How have these changes affected rural communities and households?
This research will address that question using the cut flower industry in rural Ecuador as a case study. It will look at the effects of earnings from employment in the industry on the production decisions and earnings of small farmers, on women's influence in household decisions, and on poverty and inequality. The study will use a quasi-experimental survey to mitigate the problems of endogeneity that are characteristic of intrahousehold analyses.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff weeks: 13
Many urban analysts and social scientists have hypothesized that excessive urban primacy—concentration of national or regional resources in an excessively large metropolitan area—hinders national economic growth. This study will test that hypothesis. Using a panel data set covering about 100 countries since 1960, it will investigate whether there is any relationship—positive or negative—between urban primacy and economic growth. The study will also investigate the determinants of urban primacy.
If it is found that excessive primacy does hinder growth, the analysis of the determinants of primacy should reveal the forces that encourage excessive primacy and help in developing indicators that will signal when excessive primacy is beginning to hurt growth.
RSB support: $35,500
Staff weeks: 1.6
One of the biggest challenges China faces in moving to a market-based economy is transforming its social security system from a fragmented, urban-based, largely pay-as-you-go system to one that is unified, multipillar, and partially funded. A critical decision is how the public pillar should be financed, because the choice can have important implications for the economy and for household welfare.
This study will consider three primary sources of financing for the public pillar: general tax revenues, a payroll tax, and a social security tax paid by workers. Using a computable general equilibrium model encompassing 22 sectors, 12 income groups,
and 5 factors, the study will examine the effects of the three financing sources on GDP, inequality, aggregate demand, consumption, and
investment.
RSB support: $40,000
Staff weeks: 2
This project is aimed at strengthening the capacity of developing countries to formulate and pursue negotiating objectives in multilateral trade negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO), through an integrated program of research and dissemination.
Developing country scholars, in collaboration with international specialists, will prepare 25 papers detailing current policies of developing country governments, identifying policy options in the context of the WTO negotiations, and analyzing the costs and benefits of these options.
The research results will be incorporated into a set of thematic papers and reflected in recommendations on developing country interests in the negotiations. After the negotiations begin, the project's focus will shift to assisting policymakers through workshops and other activities. A key part of this will be a handbook for trade negotiators that will include software for evaluating market access conditions and negotiating options.
RSB support: $300,000
Staff weeks: 210
RSB support: $26,500