1,720,968 research outputs found
Global Momentum and Survey Research Priorities
No full textRural economies are in transition around
the world; in many countries, improved technology and
linkages across sectors have expanded access to markets and
accelerated production for some farmers. At the same time,
rural areas globally are facing a growing base of landless
and smallholder farmers, out-migration to urban areas, and
persistence of low-skilled, informal, and seasonal jobs
where women are often heavily concentrated. Recent global
initiatives are examining programs that can effectively
raise rural incomes, including how addressing shortfalls in
wome's hours worked and earnings can raise rural
productivity and growth. But well-designed policies to
address these issues require improved counting of
individuals' employment, accounting for the complexity
of measuring rural women's labor force participation,
as well as data on social, economic, and institutional
constraints that women face in seeking better economic
opportunities. Using recent rounds of the Ethiopia, Malawi,
Nigeria, and Uganda Living Standards and Measurement
Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture, as well as findings
from recent country pilots conducted by the International
Labour Organization, this paper discusses best practices and
issues to consider when examining rural women's
employment in socioeconomic surveys, as well as a survey
research agenda to improve measurement
Estimating the long-term impacts of rural roads : a dynamic panel approach
Full text linkInfrastructure investments are typically long-term. As a result, observed benefits to households and communities may vary considerably over time as short-term outcomes generate or are subsumed by longer-term impacts. This paper uses a new round of household survey as part of a local government engineering department's rural road improvement project financed by the World Bank in Bangladesh to compare the short-term and long-term effects of rural roads over eight years. A dynamic panel model, estimated by generalized method of moments, is applied to estimate the varying returns to public road investment accounting for time-varying unobserved characteristics. The results show that the substantial effects of roads on such outcomes as per capita expenditure, schooling, and prices as observed in the short run attenuate over time. But the declining returns are not common for all outcomes of interest or all households. Employment in the rural non-farm sector, for example, has risen more rapidly over time, indicating increasing returns to investment. The very poor have failed to sustain the short-term benefits of roads, and yet the gains accrued to the middle-income groups are strengthened over time because of changing sectors of employment, away from agriculture toward non-farm activity. The results also show that initial state dependence -- or initial community and household characteristics as well as road quality -- matters in estimating the trajectory of road impacts.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Housing&Human Habitats,Economic Theory&Research,Rural Poverty Reduction,Rural Roads&Transport
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Journal of Development Studies
No full textThe mechanisms by which the poor benefit from economic growth remain a topic of debate in development literature. We address this issue in the context of rural Bangladesh, using a pooled dataset of three household panels between 1991-2001. Expansion of irrigation, paved roads, electricity, and access to formal and informal credit have (through different veins) led to higher rural farm and non-farm incomes, accounting for exogenous local agroclimatic endowments that explain a large part of the variation in the growth of infrastructure and credit programmes. However, this has not translated into substantial reductions in poverty for the poorest households
Does Institutional Finance Matter for Agriculture? Evidence Using Panel Data from Uganda
No full textSmallholder agriculture in many
developing countries has remained largely self-financed.
However, improved productivity for attaining greater food
security requires better access to institutional credit.
Past efforts to extend institutional credit to smaller
farmers has failed for several reasons, including subsidized
operation of government-aided credit schemes. Thus, recent
efforts to expand credit for smallholder agriculture that
rely on innovative credit delivery schemes at market prices
have received much policy interest. However, thus far the
impacts of these efforts are not fully understood. This
study examines credit for smallholder agriculture in the
context of Uganda, where agriculture is about 35 percent of
gross domestic product, most farmers are smallholders, and
the country has introduced policies since 2005 to extend
credit access to the sector. The analysis uses newly
available household panel data from Uganda for 2005-2006 and
2009-2010 to examine (a) whether credit effectively targets
agriculture, by examining determinants of borrowing across
different sources; (b) agricultural and nonagricultural
determinants of supply and demand credit constraints among
non-borrowers; and (c) the effects of borrowing and credit
constraints on household income, consumption, and
agricultural outcomes. The analysis finds that although not
many households report borrowing specifically for
agriculture, credit is fungible and agricultural outcomes do
substantially improve with institutional borrowing,
particularly microcredit. Among non-borrowers, supply and
demand credit constraints have fallen considerably over the
period, particularly in rural areas. Access to institutions
and infrastructure play a strong role in alleviating the
negative effect of credit constraints on welfare outcomes,
as well as determining the source of lending among borrowing households
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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