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An analysis of factors affecting household willingness to participate in the REDD+ programme in Tanzania
No full textTanzania has high rates of deforestation and forest degradation. Reducing deforestation and forest degradation is an important strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, asking households to reduce deforestation means asking them to sacrifice direct benefits from forests, such as energy resources. The REDD+ programme provides a way to compensate households. This study estimates households’ willingness to accept forest-use restrictions governing participation in the REDD+ programme and its determinants. The results show that households would participate in REDD+ if the programme were to compensate them with an average of USD 2072 per year. The determinants of willingness to participate are analysed using the Heckman sample selection model. The results reveal that awareness about REDD+ economic incentives, and that deforestation and forest degradation is not good for the environment, and the increased time spent collecting the most important forest products increased probability of household participation. Households that earned more from forest products demanded greater compensation to participate. The results further revealed that, once a household is aware of the programme and its incentives and decides to participate, it tended to demand less compensation. The Government of Tanzania is advised to (i) collect baseline data in order to differentiate incentives for households depending on their forest reliance, (ii) educate people about the relationship between REDD+ and climate change to increase the cooperation of the communities
Household responses to the cessation of grant income: The case of South Africa’s Old Age Pension
No full textHow do poor households respond to the cessation of cash transfers in developing countries? South Africa’s generous social pension system results in most of the poor elderly being the primary ‘breadwinner’ in the household. We extract a longitudinal dataset using the rotating panel component of the nationally representative Quarterly Labour Force Surveys, and use fixed effects regression models to estimate the magnitude of changes in household composition and employment that coincide with the departure of a pensioner from the household. We find statistically significant changes in both of these outcome measures. Compositional changes include a decrease in the number of school going aged children, the number of teenagers, and the number of young adults; while the number of older adults increases. We also find significant increases in the number of employed prime aged adults and older adults. The combination of compositional changes and employment changes results in an increase in the mean proportion employed in all of the working age adult groups that we investigate. Overall, households respond by decreasing the number of dependents, increasing the number of potential caregivers, and increasing the proportion of adults engaged in income generating activities.Ranchhod acknowledges funding from the REDI3x3 project for this paper, and from the NRF RCA
Fellowship more generally. Ranchhod greatly appreciates the assistance provided by Monet Durieux from
StatsSA in providing him with the link files required to extract the panel from the repeated cross-sections.
The financial assistance of the Research Project on Employment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth
(REDI3x3) is acknowledged. Findings, opinions and conclusions are those of the author and are not to be
attributed to said research Project, its affiliated institutions or its sponsors.
This research report was first published in September 2017 as Working Paper 40 of the Research Project on Employment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth (REDI3x3), funded by the South African National Treasury and based at SALDRU, University of Cape Town: www.redi3x3.or
The Value of Reference Letters
No full textWe show that reference letters from former employers alleviate information asymmetries about workers’ skills and improve both match quality and equity in the labor market. A resume audit study finds that using a reference letter in the application increases callbacks by 61%. Women disproportionately benefit. Letters are effective
because they provide valuable information about workers’ skills that employers use to
select applicants of higher ability. A second experiment, which encourages job seekers to obtain and use a reference letter, finds consistent results. In particular, employment rates for women who obtain letters double, fully closing the gender gap in our sample.This paper greatly benefited from discussions with and comments by David Autor, Emmanuel Bakirdjian, Willa Brown, Eliana Carranza, Bruno Crepon, Robert Garlick, Rachel Glennerster, Rema Hanna, Lawrence Katz, Asim Khwaja, Michael Kremer, Amanda Pallais, Gareth Roberts, Volker Schoer, and participants at the CSAE and NEUDC conferences. Emma Lambert-Porter, Velenkosini Matsebula,
Samantha Ndiwalana and Svetlana Pimkina provided superb research assistance. We thank the South
African Department of Labour and J-PAL Africa, especially Laura Poswell, for assistance in the implementation of this project. This study was prepared as part of a collaboration with the World Bank Gender Innovation Lab. We thank EuropeAid for financial support. The experiment was registered under registry number AEARCTR-0000819. All errors and omissions are our own
Mobile money and household consumption patterns in Uganda
No full textFinancial services in low income countries are often not well developed, thus, individuals rely heavily on informal means of financial services to send, receive and save money, with a large number of the population unbanked. Mobile money, a type of financial innovation, enables individuals to transfer, deposit and save money using cell phone technology. It not only has the potential to improve access to financial services but could also have an effect on household consumer behaviour and improve individuals' livelihoods. This paper investigates the difference in consumption patterns between mobile money users and non-users in Uganda, one of the countries that have seen significant increases in mobile money usage, since its introduction in 2009. It is based on the Financial Inclusion Tracker Surveys (FITS) household level data that was conducted in 2012. Using ordinary least squares and seemingly unrelated regression estimation techniques, the results suggests that mobile money users are less likely to spend on food, a necessity, and more likely to spend on luxury goods, than non-users. In addition, mobile money users are more likely to receive more remittances and, as a result, they are able to spend more efficiently on particular commodities than non-users. This suggests that mobile money could indeed potentially improve individuals' livelihoods.Classification-JEL: 033, D1
Public pensions and elderly informal employment: Evidence from a change in retirement age in South Africa
No full textWe investigate the impact of a reform of the public, non-contributory pension system in South Africa, which lowered the age of retirement from 65 to 60 for men only. Despite no explicit requirement to stop working when the public pension is received, we provide clear evidence that this reform triggered a large drop in old-age male employment. We show that this drop comes entirely from informal employment, while formal jobs, even if not covered by private pension schemes, are not affected. These results are consistent with the view that a significant portion of informal employment occurs out of “necessity”, and that, in particular at an old-age, workers choose not to work informally when they receive other income support. Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that the public pension alone can explain up to 10% less informal employment at the national level.This paper is funded under the grant “Policy Design and Evaluation Research in Developing Countries”
Initial Training Network (PODER), which is funded under the Marie Curie Actions of the EU’s Seventh
Framework Programme (Contract Number: 608109)
Measurement of earnings: Comparing South African tax and survey data
No full textComparing earnings in the tax assessment data to those in the QLFS, it appears that earnings of employees in the QLFS are underreported by perhaps 40%, with bigger gaps near the top of the distribution. Benefits and annual bonuses contribute substantially to the gap. In the case of self-employment incomes it is also the case that high earnings are missing or underreported in the QLFS, but the tax data seems to miss many mid- and low-income self-employed earners. These differences make sense when one considers the incentives for reporting accurately to SARS versus to Statistics South Africa. These errors mean that earnings inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient is probably underestimated in the surveys by three percentage points.I would like to thank REDI3x3 for funding this research and for giving me access to the data. Many thanks
to Elizabeth Gavin for talking me through some of the intricacies of the data. I would also like to thank an
anonymous referee for helpful comments. Ingrid Woolard, Kezia Lilenstein and Andrew Kerr provided useful feedback on some parts of this work. None of them are responsible for any errors in the analysis.
The financial assistance of the Research Project on Employment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth (REDI3x3) is acknowledged. Findings, opinions and conclusions are those of the author and are not to be attributed to said research Project, its affiliated institutions or its sponsors.
This research report was first published in October 2017 as Working Paper 41 of the Research Project on Employment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth (REDI3x3), funded by the South African National Treasury and based at SALDRU, University of Cape Town: www.redi3x3.or
Improved life expectancy of people living with HIV: who is left behind?
No full textThe introduction of combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been one of the great public health success stories of the past 40 years. ART has led to increased survival in people living with HIV, and subsequently to individual and societal gains worldwide, because of the marked improvements in its potency, side-effect profile, and simplicity of use.1 Results from the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) 052 study have clearly proven the efficacy of ART for prevention of transmission,2 while the TEMPRANO and START studies have shown that early ART initiation reduces the risk of serious clinical conditions, the development of AIDS, and death
Public disclosure for carbon abatement: African decision-makers in a PROPER public good experiment
No full textA linear public good experiment adopted from Holt and Laury [1997. Classroom games: Voluntary provision of a public good. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11(4), 209–215.] has been employed to investigate strategic behaviour in pollution abatement among African climate decision-makers. The experiment consisted of three groups, of which groups 2 and 3 received one and two treatments, respectively. The first treatment entailed publicly disclosing the pollution of each member of a group by placing a corresponding colour-coded card in front of each subject, while the second involved the withdrawal of the public disclosure. Group 2 received the first treatment; Group 3 received both the first and second treatments in succession. We found that the untreated group (baseline) polluted more than the two treated groups, and there was no statistically significant difference between the pollution abatement of the two treated groups. These results suggest that public disclosure potentially drives
pollution abatement and that its eventual withdrawal does not obliterate abatement behaviour. We did not observe conditional cooperation but average pollution declined over time. Furthermore, individuals who thought it was unfair for Africa to reduce emissions polluted more. We also found that pollution levels differ significantly between males and females
Securing benefits for local communities from international visitors to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park
No full textThis article estimates the visitation demand function for Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (KTP) in order to determine the scope for raising fees charged to international tourists in order to fund
revenue-sharing schemes for local communities. International and Southern African Development Community tourists account for approximately 25% and 2% of the total number of visitors to South African national parks, with domestic visitors making up the remaining portion. Although small, the South African international tourism market is mature and accounts for a disproportionately
large share (around 42%) of net revenue. To estimate visitation demand at the KTP and three other national parks, random effects Tobit Model was used. Using the estimated elasticities, the revenue-maximizing daily conservation fee was computed to be R1 131.94 (US22.93) currently charged. Furthermore, the study also demonstrated that there is a possibility of raising fees at the other three parks. Sharing conservation revenue with communities surrounding parks could demonstrate the link between ecotourism and local communities’ economic development and promote a positive view of land restitution involving national parks
Connecting with home, keeping in touch : physical and virtual mobility across stretched families in sub-Saharan Africa.
No full textThere is a long history of migration among low-income families in sub-Saharan Africa, in which (usually young, often male) members leave home to seek their fortune in what are perceived to be more favourable locations. While the physical and virtual mobility practices of such stretched families are often complex and contingent, maintaining contact with distantly located close kin is frequently of crucial importance for the maintenance of emotional (and possibly material) well-being, both for those who have left home and for those who remain. This article explores the ways in which these connections are being reshaped by increasing access to mobile phones in three sub-Saharan countries – Ghana, Malawi and South Africa – drawing on interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research from twenty-four sites, ranging from poor urban neighbourhoods to remote rural hamlets. Stories collected from both ends of stretched families present a world in which the connectivities now offered by the mobile phone bring a different kind of closeness and knowing, as instant sociality introduces a potential substitute for letters, cassettes and face-to-face visits, while the rapid resource mobilization opportunities identified by those still at home impose increasing pressures on migrant kin