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Kees Kostermans. 1994 "Assessing the Quality of Anthropometric Data, Background and Illustrated Guidelines for Survey Managers." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 101, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
As a systematic and random errors in anthropometry can have a great impact on the prevalence estimates of malnutrition, strict quality control of the fieldwork of anthropometry in household surveys is very important. This paper defines and provides background information on sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value of indicators in general. The most frequently used anthropometric nutritional indicators -- weight-for-age, height-for-age, weight-for-height and body mass index - are discussed in detail. With many examples, using a data set from the Pakistan Integrated Household Survey 1991, the impact of errors in weight-, height-, or age measurement on the prevalence estimates of malnutrition among children uder finve years old are shown. Relatively small systematic errors in weight or age measurement can cause significant changes in the calculated rates of malnutrition. The presence of random errors are shown to increase the prevalence estimates in a less dramatic way. The classic quality control methods are summarized and new methods, made possible with the use of personal computers during the fieldwork of household surveys, are offered. These methods allow for an assessment of the quality of the gathered anthropometric data in general or for an assessment of the performance of a particular surveyor or survey team. With a personal computer one can readily detect end-digit preference, clumping in age or a high proportion of unlikely Z-scores in the results of a particular surveyor or survey team and one can take measures to correct the situation while survey is still going on. Computer based quality control tools alone can not guarantee data of good quality. One needs also a well motivated survey team. But the quality control of anthropometry in an LSMS household survey deserves special attention because anthropometric measurements are among the very few observational data in a survey full of interview data and because the rate of malnutrition in a developing country may be considered as a comprehensive indicator for its standards of living.
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Dominique val de Walle, Martin Ravallion and Madhur Gautam. 1994 "How Well Does the Social Safety Net Work? The Incidence of Cash Benefits in Hungary, 1987-89." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 102, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
The transition from a command to a market economy poses difficult problems for social policy, not least of which is the issue of how effective the existing social safety net is in preventing an increase in poverty during the transition. This is more than a concern about the safety net's performance in reaching the persistently poor; there is a fear that the safety net may be un-responsive to changing household circumstances, and thus relatively ineffective in protecting the vulnerable. Seemingly high levels of public spending on cash benefits to households in Hungary, and the heavy reliance on programs which do not explicitly restrict eligibility to the poor, has led to reforms aimed at improved "targeting'. The incidence of cash benefits is examined here using a new panel-data set for 1987-89, constructed for the purposes of this study from the Hungarian Household Budget Surveys for those years. Part 1 examines aspects of "static incidence", the relationship between levels of current benefits and current levels of living. Here we ask how well targeted are cash benefits relative to untargeted transfers, and we quantify the potential gains to the poor from improved targeting. Cash benefits as a whole are not found to be well-targeted, though some components are, notably family allowances. There appear to be potential gains to the poor from further reform. However, such static benefit-incidence analysis does not distinguish policy impacts on persistent poverty from transient poverty. In part 2, we offer a "dynamic incidence" approach based on actual and simulated joint distributions of consumption over time. The extent of "protection" against poverty achieved by the cash benefit system is distinguished from its effect on "promotion" out of poverty, and statistical tests of each are proposed. The approach is illustrated by an analysis of the distributional impact of changes in cash benefits introduced to compensate for many other policy reforms. We find that cash benefits protected many from poverty, but promoted few out of poverty. The safety net's impact on poverty was largely due to higher total outlays, not improved targeting. While a number of policy issues are addressed here, our aim is also to contribute applicable tools for analyzing the incidence of social incomes, particularly in transition economies where the dynamics of poverty is of concern. The use of panel data can help greatly, and such data can sometimes be constructed at modest cost from existing cross-sectional surveys in which some proportion of households in any round are re-surveyed next time. That is the case for Hungary, and an entirely new panel data set was constructed from that survey for the purposes of this research. A Statistical Addendum to this report discusses the new data set in greater detail.
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Kofi Darkwa Benefo and T. Paul Schultz. 1994 "Determinants of Fertility and Child Mortality in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 103, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This paper examines the relationship between child mortality and fertility in two neighboring West African countries: Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. We first explore separately the reduced form determinants of fertility and child mortality, as explained by individual, household and community characteristics. Fertility is somewhat higher in Côte d'Ivoire than in Ghana and appears not to have changed recently in either country. Child mortality is high, with about 16 percent of children dying before their fifth birthday. Women's education beyond the primary level is associated with substantially lower fertility in both countries. However, in Côte d'Ivoire, income assets and mother's height are positively related to fertility, while in Ghana they are associated with lower fertility. These results suggest that Ghana is fartehr along in its fertility transition than in Côte d'Ivoire. Female education has a smaller effect on child mortality in Côte d'Ivoire, where relatively fewer women are educated, than in Ghana. Community characteristics explained only a small fraction ofty is still an important predictor of the household's child mortality, suggesting that there remain unobserved community factors that lower child mortality in the two countries. Future research may uncover some of these factors and demonstrate how public policy interventions can moderate them. There was only weak statistical support for treating child mortality at the household level as endogenous to the process determining fertility. When child mortality is treated as an exogenous variable, our estimates indicate that a reduction of five child deaths would lead to a decrease in fertility of one birth. Further development of women's education in both countries is likely to play a significant role in bringing child mortality under control and slowing population growth.
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Jere R. Behrman and Victor Lavy. 1994 "Childrens Health and Achievement in School." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 104, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
Casual observations suggest that extremely poor child health is detrimental to education achievement. There also is a widespread perception that available systematic evidence supports a strong role of child health schooling success for variations in child health above extremely poor levels, which underlies in part strong advocacy for improving child health since such improvements are claimed to have strong fairly immediate effects on child education and, through this channel, important long-run effects on labor productivity. However, in fact evidence is quite limited about the impact on education of child health within the range of health usually observed among school children. Previous studies based on socioeconomic survey data that purport to support the important role of child health on child schooling success fail to incorporate into their analysis the probable endogenous nature of child health. Most such studies also are limited because of fairly limited measures of schooling achievement, such as schooling attendance, though some do use better indicators such as school grades or test performances. On a priori grounds it would seem that child health and child schooling are determined simultaneously by households given their observed and unobserved characteristics and those of the community in which they are. If so, failure to control for such household allocations in estimates of the impact of child health on child schooling is likely to lead to biased estimates of that effect in the standard estimates that do not control for such allocations. The direction of this bias, however, may be positive or negative depending on which of a number of household allocation behaviors dominate. This paper explores the a priori nature of the possible biases and then presents some illustrative empirical analysis of these effects using some rich data for this purpose from the Ghanaian Living Standard Measurement Study (LSMS). These explorations lead to four major conclusions for this data set. First, the failure to control for estimation problems as in previous studies leads to a considerable bias in the estimated impact of child health on child schooling success. Second, instrumental variable estimates based on observed family and community characteristics similar to those often used in other studies suggest that the direction of this bias in standard estimates without control for simultaneity is downward. Third, estimates with family and community fixed effects (to control for factors such as parental time and the general learning environment), however, suggest that the direction of the bias in standard estimates is upward and that the true effects of the range of observed child health on school success is nil despite the strong association that leads to the appearance of an effect in standard OLS estimates or with instrumented level estimates using family and community variables. Fourth, exploration of the possibility that child health may effect child cognitive achievement through schooling attainment also does not reveal a significant positive impact of child health on child schooling. Consideration of the relations that usually have been used to investigate such a possiblity, moreover, suggests that the coefficients that are estimated are not, in contrast to the usual claim, coefficients that represent the impact of child health on child schooling. Thus, despite the OLS and instrumented level estimates, this paper concludes that for this sample there is not evidence of an impact of the observed range of child health on child cognitive achievement. It also concludes that the striking difference between the instrumental variable instruments, using a set of instruments that are fairly typical for this type of study, and the family and community fixed effects estimates raises the question of whether other studies that have depended on similarly instrumented estimates may not be subject to similar problems.
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Victor Lavy and Jean-Marc Germain. 1994 "Quality and Cost in Health Care Choice in Developing Countries." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 105, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
The definition of health care quality and the impact of improved quality on the demand for health care have not been the subject of rigorous econometric studies. This study models theoretically and empirically the quality of health care in household decision making with respect to demand for health care and presents empirical evidence concerning the impact of various policy options on these decisions. Besides modeling quality explicitly, our model relaxes some of the restrictive assumptions that were common in recent studies of the demand for health care.
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Victor Lavy, John Strauss, Duncan Thomas, and Philippe De Vreyer "Quality of Health Care, Survival and Health Outcomes in Ghana." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 106, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
It is critical, especially during periods of budget restraint, to identify the beneficiaries of social sector investments and the extent to which these investments influence the develop- ment process. This paper analyzes the effect of quality and accessibility of health services and other public infrastructure on the health of children and adults in Ghana. We use objectively measured anthropometric outcomes, which reflect the nutritional status of an individual, as health indicators. We focus on child height (by age and sex) and weight (by height). We will also analyze the determinants of the probability of child survival, a measure considered to be an alternative indicator of health status. The results presented here suggest an important role for public health policy in eliminating the rural-urban disparities in health status and particularly in improving the health status of rural children and reducing their mortality rates. In urban areas we have been unable to precisely measure many of the effects of health infrastructure on child outcomes. This may reflect the difficulty in assigning a composite measure of infrastructure availability and quality given that numerous facilities are located in each urban area which are accessible to the whole area's population. However, in rural areas the findings suggest that increasing the provision of basic health services, such as adequate supplies of basic drugs, will yield high social returns in terms of improved child health and survival probabilities.
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Eric A. Hanushek and Victor Lavy "Do Students Care about School Quality? Dropout Behavior and Achievement Bias in Developing Countries." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 107, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
School quality and grade completion are shown to be directly linked, leading to very different perspectives on educational policy in developing countries. Unique panel data on primary school age children in Egypt permit estimation of behavioral school dropout models. Students perceive differences in school quality, measured as expected achievement improvements in a given school, and act on it. Specifically, holding constant the student's own ability, achievement and earnings prospects, a student is much less likely to remain in school if attending a low quality school rather than a higher quality school. This individually rationale behavior suggests that common arguments about a trade-off between quality and access to schools may misstate the real issue and lead to public investment in too little quality. Further, because of this behavioral linkage, there is an achievement bias such that common estimates of rates of return to years of school will be overstated. The paper demonstrates the analytical importance of employing output-based measures of school quality.
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Bamikale J. Feyisetan and Martha Ainsworth "Contraceptive Use and the Quality, Price, and Availability of Family Planning in Nigeria." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 108, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
Nigeria has experienced high fertility and rapid population growth for at least the past 30 years. The 1990 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) found a total fertility rate of about 6 children. The mean "desired" family size among the 40 percent of women who gave numerical answers was about 5.8, and the other 60 percent of women replied that the total was "up to God". Only recently have public authorities become interested in slowing rapid population growth, launching efforts to promote contraceptive use. In this paper, individual women are linked to the characteristics of the nearest health facility, pharmacy, and source of family planning to assess the relative importance of their socioeconomic background and characteristics of nearby services on contraceptive use. The source of data is the 1990 NDHS. The results suggest that the limited levels of female schooling (and probably other factors affecting women's opportunity cost of time) are constraining contraceptive use, especially in rural areas. Policies to raise female schooling will raise contraceptive use, holding constant the characteristics of services. A second major constraint to increased contraceptive use is the low availability of family planning services in Nigeria. Broader availability of the pill and other methods through pharmacy outlets and of the injection and IUD in fixed health facilities is likely to raise contraceptive use. Outpatient or consultation fees at nearby health facilities do not appear to be constraining demand for modern methods.
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Duncan Thomas and John Maluccio "Contraceptive Choice, Fertility, and Public Policy in Zimbabwe." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 109, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
The determinants of contraceptive use in Zimbabwe are examined using individual-level survey data in conjunction with two special community surveys. The spotlight is focused on the role of the availability and quality of community health and family planning services. The impact of the household resources and individual characteristics, in particular education and measures of income, are also taken into consideration. In order to evaluate the distributional impact of investments in health programs, special attention is paid to differences in the effects of the programs across educational groups. The study proceeds to investigate the determinants of fertility outcomes and then turns to the impact of contraceptive use on fertility, taking account of the fact that both reflect, at least in part, the outcome of choices by couples. The results indicate that the availability and quality of family planning and health services in the community are associated with higher rates of adoption of modern contraceptives. Public health policy has sought to bring community-based distributors to all communities in Zimbabwe; this is likely to be associated with increased adoption of modern methods. Mobile family planning clinics seem to have an even more powerful impact on adoption as does the presence of a general hospital in the area; the impact of these two investments in infrastructure is larger among women with little education. Higher fertility women are more likely to use modern contraceptive methods. However, after taking account of unobserved heterogeneity, there is no relationship between the use of modern methods and fertility, except among very young women for whom higher contraceptive use is associated with higher fertility. This suggests, perhaps, that these young women wish to demonstrate their fecundity before adopting modern methods or are being targeted for contraceptives after the birth of their first child.
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Martha Ainsworth, Kathleen Beegle, and Andrew Nyamete. 1995 "A Study of Fourteen Sub-Saharan Countries." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 110, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This paper examines the relationship between female schooling and two behaviors cumulative fertility and contraceptive use in fourteen Sub-Saharan African countries where Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) have been conducted since the mid-1980s. Using multivariate regression analysis, the paper compares the effect of female schooling across countries, in urban and rural areas, and across different cohorts of women. For the subsample of ever-married women, the effect of female and male schooling is compared. By controlling for other background variables, such as age, area of residence, wealth, and ethnic and religious affiliations, the paper explores more precisely the effect of female schooling than can be obtained through two-way comparisons of schooling and fertility or contraceptive use. The results show a negative correlation between female schooling and fertility in virtually all of the countries. However, the relationship is non-linear. Female primary schooling has a negative relation with fertility in about half of the countries and no relation in the other half. Secondary schooling is universally associated with lower fertility, and the strength of the effect increases with the years of schooling. No major differences between countries in different income groups is noted, but there is evidence of a positive relationship between income and fertility in Nigeria, and a negative relationship in Tanzania, Ghana, Togo and Botswana. Among ever-married women, husband's schooling has no significant relation with fertility in about one-third of the countries and, when both women's and men's schooling matter, women's schooling exerts a much larger negative effect on fertility than men's schooling. Even low levels of female schooling are found to have a positive relationship with contraceptive use, but higher levels of schooling have a greater effect. Among ever-married women, husband's schooling is associated with higher contraceptive use in only six of the data sets and when significant, it generally exerts a smaller effect than does female schooling. Both in the case of fertility and of contraceptive use, there are large differences across countries that have not been explained. Two factors that could not be controlled for in the analysis are the availability of contraceptive services and levels of child mortality. The "success stories" in lowering fertility and raising contraceptive use are Botswana, Kenya and Zimbabwe, with the highest levels of female schooling, the lowest child mortality rates and the most vigorous family planning programs.
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Raylynn Oliver. 1995 "THE EFFECT OF THE QUALITY, PRICE AND AVAILABILITY OF FAMILY PLANNING ON CONTRACEPTIVE USE IN GHANA." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 111, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
Ghana was among the first sub-Saharan African countries to adopt a population policy, in 1969. Today, the mean distance to a source of family planning is about 3 miles, including public and private health facilities and private pharmacies. These services also offer several modern contraceptive methods, for a fee. Secondary enrollment rates for girls have risen to 31 percent, among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. However, population is still growing rapidly (3.4 percent per year), fertility is high (total fertility rate of 6.4) and contraceptive use is low (5.7 percent for modern methods, 33 percent for traditional methods). In this paper, individual women are linked to the characteristics of the nearest pharmacy, health facility and source of family planning to assess the relative importance of socioeconomic background and the availability, price and quality of family planning services on contraceptive use and fertility. The source of data is the 1988-89 Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS). The results suggest that raising levels of female schooling will also raise contraceptive use and lower fertility, particularly in rural areas. Distance to services remains a binding constraint for contraceptive use among the entire sample and for the urban sample of women; the distance to services in rural areas is still high, while in urban areas where demand for smaller families is greater, distance is a binding constraint even though average distances are smaller. The number of methods offered at a health facility is associated with lower fertility but has no apparent relation with current contraceptive use. The presence of admission fees at the nearest health facilities has no relation with contraceptive use, while the availability of spermicides raises use. Service characteristics have little relation with fertility and sometimes in unexpected directions, leading to the suspicion that some of the services are placed according to patterns of demand. Measures of the quality of services show no consistent effect on the demand for contraception or on fertility. This may be because of low variation in quality, because the important quality aspects were not measured by the GLSS, or because other factors, such as distance and price, are the binding constraints to increased use of modern methods at present.
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Mark Montgomery, Aka Kouam‚ and Raylynn Oliver "The Tradeoff between Numbers of Children and Child Schooling: Evidence from Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 112, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This research explores the relationship in Côte d'Ivoire between fertility and the investments made by parents in the schooling of their children. One expects that families with many children will tend to invest less in each, and that families with fewer children will make greater human capital investments per child. The "tradeoff" of quantity for quality is vividly illustrated in the recent economic development of Southeast Asia and Latin America. In respect to Sub-Saharan Africa, however, the existence of a tradeoff has not yet been established. The few studies conducted to date either suggest no particular association between family size and schooling in Africa, or hint at a positive relationship wherein higher fertility is linked to greater schooling per child. This paper weighs the evidence concerning the quantity-quality tradeoff in Côte d'Ivoire, using data drawn from the three rounds of the Côte d'Ivoire Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) conducted from 1985 to 1987. The evidence suggests that two very different relationships link fertility and child schooling. In the rural areas of Côte d'Ivoire, there is no tradeoff: higher fertility is associated with higher child schooling. This finding is consistent with much of the early research on fertility and schooling in Africa. Urban areas, by contrast, are characterized by the tradeoff that appears in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the developing world. Female education, which lowers fertility and raises investments in child schooling, is an important factor producing the tradeoff in urban areas, and the results also imply that improved child survival may be important. One possible explanation for the absence of a tradeoff in rural areas is less access to family planning services, which are available from private sources in urban areas.
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Menno Pradhan "Sector Participation in Labor Supply Models: Preferences or rationing?." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 113, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This paper proposes a model that allows testing for labor market segmentation between the formal and informal sectors in a developing country on the basis of cross-sectional data. Tests of labor market segmentation are usually based on a comparison of observed wages in two sectors. Wage differences for identical workers in different sectors can be attributed to differences in preferences attached to participation in a sector and to restrictions in mobility between sectors. While the latter can be regarded as an indicator of "true" labor market segmentation, compensating wage differentials resulting from preferences also exist, even in the absence of rationing. So far, the applied tests have been unable to distinguish between these two effects. The proposed model overcomes this weakness by incorporating search information on how individuals (both employed and unemployed) search for new jobs and information about "discouraged" workers who have stopped searching for jobs. The proposed model accounts for all of the specific features of urban labor markets in developing countries, in particular the existence of a competitive informal sector. The model is estimated using data from the 1989 Bolivian Integrated Household Survey by means of a smooth simulated maximum likelihood estimator. The estimates show that the degree of labor market segmentation differs strongly between educational groups.
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"THE QUALITY AND AVAILABILITY OF FAMILY PLANNING SERVICES AND CONTRACEPTIVE USE IN TANZANIA." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 114, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
The total fertility rate in Tanzania has remained nearly constant over the last twenty years at 6.3 children per woman. This high level of fertility has led to rapid population growth and compromises efforts by the government to improve the well-being of Tanzanians. Despite efforts of the National Family Planning Program to increase modern contraceptive prevalence from less than 10 percent to 25 percent by 1993, data from the 1992 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) reveal that prevalence remains low at 5.9 percent. Improving the quality of and accessibility to family planning services is one potential means to raise prevalence rates and lower fertility. To what extent do quality and access impact the decision to use a modern method of contraception and ultimately lower fertility levels for women in Tanzania? Using the Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey data, this study analyzes the impact of health facility characteristics and pharmacies as determinants of contraceptive use and fertility. The analysis finds that higher levels of female schooling consistently raise the probability of use and lower cumulative fertility levels. Access to health facilities (measured in terms of distance) and type of nearest facility (hospital, health center, or dispensary) do appear to constrain use of family planning. Government facilities, which supply family planning for free, are not identified with higher levels of use. Availability of the pill and injections is associated with higher use, while other methods are not; there is room to expand the availability of both methods at health facilities, as many facilities do not offer either method. However, the health facility characteristics generally are not associated with lower fertility. Of the pharmacy characteristics, only reduced distance to the nearest pharmacy is associated with greater contraceptive use. This is not a surprising result, as less than half the women could be linked to a pharmacy and legal private pharmacies are relatively new establishments in Tanzania.
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Victor Lavy, Jennifer Spratt, and Nathalie Leboucher. 1995 "Changing Patterns of Illiteracy in Morocco: Assessment Methods Compared." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 115, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This study estimates the incidence, characteristics, and patterns of change over time of illiteracy in Morocco. The study compare the results from direct literacy assessment to the conventional methods of self-reported literacy. This effort has provided more detailed, objective information with which patterns of literacy skills in the country may be determined, and their relationship to other important social and economic behaviors and outcomes analyzed. It also provides an opportunity to examine more closely the reliability and validity of common proxy indicators used to estimate literacy rates and skill levels. The results have implications both for methods of measuring literacy and for formulating policy to increase literacy. Furthermore, these implications are relevant for any country attempting to measure and improve literacy.
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Victor Lavy, Michael Palumbo, and Steven Stern. 1995 "Health Care in Jamaica: Quality, Outcomes, and Labor Supply." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 116, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This paper investigates the relationships among labor force participation, health outcomes, and the availability and quality of health care in a developing country. We develop an econometric model that addresses the demand for health care in a choice model and then link it to health status outcomes and labor force participation decisions. The econometric model has two parts to it. First, we estimate a discrete choice model to determine how ill people choose among the various providers of health care. Using the parameter estimates from this model, we calculate the expected value of the best available medical facility which we then use as a measure of the quality of health care available to each individual. In the second stage, health is allowed to affect labor force participation in a simultaneous equations probit model where the potential endogeneity of reported health is controlled for with a set of instruments that includes the constructed health care quality measure. We report the results of simulating the impact on health outcomes and labor force participation of policy changes such as improving access to and quality of health care as well as reducing the price of health services. We use data from the 1989 Jamaican Survey of Living Conditions, the 1989 Jamaican Labour Force Survey, and a sample (also from 1989) of Jamaican health care facilities. We find that the quality of health facilities has a small improving effect on health but no significant effect on labor force participation.
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Paul Glewwe and Gillette Hall. 1995 "Who is Most Vulnerable to Macroeconomic Shocks? Hypotheses Tests Using Panel Data from Peru." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 117, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This paper attempts to answer the question: Who is most vulnerable to declines in welfare during a macroeconomic shock? After clarifying the difference between poverty and vulnerability, an analytical framework is presented and then applied to household panel data from Peru. Major findings are: (1) households with better educated heads are less vulnerable; (2) female headed households are not more vulnerable to declines than male headed households; (3) households with more children are more vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks; and (4) transfer networks that may assist the poor in relatively stable periods do not appear to protect them during a major shock, with the exception of transfers that originate from outside Peru.
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Margaret E. Grosh and Judy L. Baker. 1995 "Proxy Means Tests: Simulations and Speculation for Social Programs." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 118, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This paper examines how a proxy means test might work in targeting social programs. The term "proxy means test" is used to describe a situation where information on household or individual characteristics correlated with welfare levels is used in a formal algorithm to proxy household income, welfare or need. Given the administrative difficulties associated with sophisticated means tests and the inaccuracy of simple means tests, the idea of using other household characteristics as proxies for income is appealing. Chapter II carries out simulations on data sets from Jamaica, Bolivia and Peru to explore what kind of information can best be used in a proxy means test and how accurate such tests might be expected to be. The results show that household characteristics can serve as reasonable proxies for information on income in assessing eligibility for social programs. More information is generally better than less, though there are diminishing returns. The proxy systems all have significant errors of undercoverage, but they cut down leakage so much that the impact on poverty is better with imperfect targeting than with none. Some fine-tuning of the basic system, such as calibrating for the poorest half of the population, improves results considerably. In Jamaica, calibrating separately for rural and urban areas did not improve results. An assumed 25 percent level of distortion of information had no effect at all on targeting outcomes. Chapter III describes the practical experience with Chile's Ficha CAS system, one of the oldest and best-known proxy means tests in the developing world. Chapter IV discusses in qualitative terms some of the strategic choices and implications in setting up proxy means tests of different sorts. The amount of staff time, the amount of training required for staff at different levels, the number of computers, and the transport and communications links required will vary greatly depending on the decisions regarding how the system should be set up.
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Mark Pitt. 1995 "Women's Schooling, Selective Fertility, and Child Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 119, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This paper estimates the determinants of child mortality in the fourteen Sub-Saharan countries for which Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data are available. It differs radically from the usual approach of estimating reduced-form equations of child mortality from samples of children by allowing for the possibility that such samples are choice-based, reflecting prior selective fertility decisions. If parents care about the health outcomes of potential births, then any unobserved factors (heterogeneity) that affect those outcomes will influence fertility decisions. Changes in women's schooling thus affect the survival outcomes of those born by: (1) altering the population of women, classified by inherent healthiness, who bear a child in any time period, and (2) directly altering the survival probabilities of those selected to be born. Inattention to the first effect was shown to result in underestimation of the effect of women's schooling in reducing child mortality in eleven of the fourteen countries studied. Methods that disregard the potentially selective effects of fertility underestimate the importance of women's schooling by a factor of 3 in the case of Tanzania and by a factor of 2 in the case of Nigeria. The issue of identification of the empirical model complicates estimation that incorporates selective fertility. The discrete (binary) nature of mortality makes estimation particularly difficult. With these data, choice of a parametric distribution for the errors (normality) was insufficient to identify the determinants of mortality from the determinants of fertility. Identification was achieved by assuming that first births are exogenous in particular, that the lack of fertility in all periods prior to the first birth was not selective. The intuition is that in a high-fertility environment such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where almost all fecund women bear at least one child during their reproductive lives, a sample of one child per woman reflects the distribution of health heterogeneity of the full (uncensored) population of women. Selective fertility choice begins subsequent to the first birth. Although somewhat restrictive, this identification restriction is less onerous than assuming all choices in a woman's reproductive life are nonselective.
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Margaret E. Grosh and Paul Glewwe. 1995 "A Guide to Living Standards Measurement Study Surveys and Their Data Sets." Living Standards Measurement Study, Working Paper No. 120, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
This document serves two purposes. First, for analysts with a general notion that LSMS data may be of interest for their work, the document provides a brief summary of the data available from, and access agreements relevant to, each country, and of the services offered as part of the World Bank's ongoing data management activities. This should help interested researchers to assess whether and how to pursue the use of a specific data set. For further information, the researcher should follow the procedures explained in Chapter IV on "Data Access and Content" beginning on page 27 and in Box 2 on page 34. Second, the document serves as a brief introduction and history of the LSMS. For those unfamiliar with LSMS, it will provide a basic orientation. For those familiar with LSMS surveys in the context of one or two countries, it provides a broader picture. Since there is greater diversity in country experiences than widely recognized, this emphasis is important.
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