Public Disclosure Authorized Human Development Quarterly Update Q2 2010 Latest research findings Missing girls = missing brides. The implications for China’s New articles and books marriage ‘market’ Research in the news And on the blogs Fertility decline has fueled a sharp increase in the proportion Linking research and operations of 'missing girls' in China. As a result, an increasing share of References males will fail to marry, and will face old age without the Previous issues support normally provided by wives and children. In this paper, Monica Das Gupta, Avraham Ebenstein, and Ethan Jennings Sharygin [3] show that historically China has had nearly-universal marriage for women and a very competitive Latest research findings ‘market’ for men. Lower-educated men experience higher rates of bachelorhood while women favor men with better Public Disclosure Authorized How the global crisis has affected development thinking prospects, migrating if needed from poorer to wealthier areas. The authors examine the anticipated effects of this he global financial crisis has not only dealt a major combination of bride shortage and hypergamy, for different blow to the global economy, but also shaken regions of China. Their projections indicate that unmarried confidence in economic management in the developed males will likely be concentrated in poorer provinces with low T world and the economic models that guide it. The fiscal ability to provide social protection to their citizens. Such crisis has revealed major market failures, especially in the geographic concentration of unmarried males could be housing bubble and its transmission to the financial system, socially disruptive, and the paper’s findings suggest a need to but also glaring state failures that propagated and expand the coverage of social protection programs financed exacerbated the crisis. Will the events of the past two years substantially by the central government. lead to major shifts in thinking about development economics, and should they? In this paper, Halsey Rogers [1] How decentralization can lead to vote-buying, and how to assesses that question for several key domains of prevent it Public Disclosure Authorized development thinking, including the market-state balance, macroeconomic management, globalization, development A recent trend in decentralization in several large and diverse financing, and public spending. countries is the creation of local jurisdictions below the regional level—municipalities, towns, and villages—whose How donors differ in the quality of their aid spending is almost exclusively financed by grants from both regional and national governments. In her new paper, Stuti In this paper, Steve Knack, Halsey Rogers and Nicholas Khemani [4] paper argues that such grants-financed Eubank [2] present an overall aid-quality index and four decentralization enables politicians to target benefits to coherently defined sub-indexes on aid selectivity, alignment, pivotal voters and organized interest groups in exchange for harmonization, and specialization. Compared with earlier political support. Decentralization, in this model, is subject to indicators used in donor rankings, the indicator set developed political capture, facilitating vote-buying, patronage, or pork- is more comprehensive and representative of the range of barrel projects, at the expense of effective provision of broad donor practices addressed in the 2005 Paris Declaration on public goods. Khemani explores the theory's implications for Aid Effectiveness, thereby improving the validity, reliability, international development programs in support of decentralization. Public Disclosure Authorized and robustness of rankings. One of the authors’ innovations is to increase the validity of the aid-quality indicators by adjusting for recipient characteristics, donor aid volumes, and Health shocks are different other factors. A new paper by Adam Wagstaff and Magnus Lindelow [5] finds that in Laos, health shocks are more common than most HD Update Quarterly Q2 2010 June 2010 2 other shocks and more concentrated among the poor. They also tend to be more idiosyncratic than non-health shocks, New articles and books and are more costly, leading to high medical expenses and sizeable income losses. Health shocks also stand out from India shining and Bharat drowning: How two Indian states other shocks in the number of coping strategies they trigger, fare relative to the worldwide distribution of mathematics and in terms of households saying they were forced to cut achievement back consumption and saw their family's well-being affected "a lot." People experiencing a health shock did not recover vidence suggests that cognitive skills matter more for their former subjective health following the shock, losing, on economic development than schooling attainment, average, 0.6 points on a 5-point scale. and that income and skill inequality are inextricably E linked. Yet for most of the developing world no Does access to water affect women's work and child internationally comparable estimates of cognitive skills exist. outcomes? This paper by Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc [8] uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international Taking into account the nonrandom placement of water testing agency together with statistical methods from Item infrastructure, and using survey data from nine developing Response Theory to place secondary students from two countries, Gayatri Koolwal and Dominique van de Walle [6] Indian states—Orissa and Rajasthan—on a worldwide find that access to water does not lead to increased off-farm distribution of mathematics achievement. These two states work for women. However, they do find that in countries fall below 43 of the 51 countries for which data exist. The where substantial gender gaps in schooling exist, both boys' bottom 5% of children rank higher than the bottom 5% in and girls' enrollments improve with better access to water. only three countries—South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. They also find evidence of impacts on child health as But not all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-score measured by anthropometric z-scores. distribution for both states is next only to South Africa. The combination of India's size and large variance in achievement Why customary law needs to be more transparent give both the perceptions that India is shining even as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning. How India's In this paper Varun Gauri [7] sets out to see how far dispute- development unfolds will depend critically on how the skill resolvers in customary-law systems provide widely distribution evolves and how low- and high-skilled workers understandable justifications for their decisions. He first interact in the labor market. examines the liberal-democratic reasons for the importance of publicity (understood to be wide accessibility of legal The political economy of village sanitation in south India: justification), by reviewing the uses of publicity in Habermas’ Capture or poor information? and Rawls’ accounts of the rule of law. Taking examples from Sierra Leone, Gauri then argues that customary-law systems In this paper, Radu Ban, Monica Das Gupta and Vijayendra would benefit from making more accessible the reasons for Rao [9] find that despite efforts to mandate and finance local local dispute-resolution practices, such as "begging" from governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, elders, witchcraft, and openness of hearings. He concludes outcomes remain poor in the villages they survey in four that although legal pluralism is usually taken to be an South Indian states. Several key issues appear to hinder analytical concept, it may have a normative thrust as well, improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture and that publicity standards would also apply to formal sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, courts in developing countries, which are also typically but keep major village roads reasonably well-served. Their "defective" along this dimension. decisions suggest, however, that they understand neither the health benefits of sanitation nor the negative externalities to their own health if surrounding areas are poorly served. The authors’ findings suggest that improving sanitary outcomes requires disseminating information on the public goods nature of their health benefits, as well as on the local government's responsibilities. It also requires putting public health regulations in place, along with measures to enable accountability in service provision. HD Update Quarterly Q2 2010 June 2010 3 Improving immunization coverage in rural India: Incentives commonplace, and that while SHI can cover the formal sector help, but not nearly enough and the poor relatively easily, it fares badly in terms of covering the non-poor informal sector workers until the In an editorial in the British Medical Journal, Jishnu Das [10] economy has reached a high level of economic development. cautions against an optimistic interpretation of the recent Wagstaff also argues that SHI can have negative labor market BMJ paper by Banerjee et al. [11]. Banerjee and his effects. colleagues explored the impact of small financial incentives on immunization rates in India by means of a randomized The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Six, one, or none? control trial where regular India’s regular immunization approach was compared with two alternatives: one where Aggregate indexes of the quality of governance, covering