Abstract
The paper provides evidence on the evolving socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic among households in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. The data allow estimating the immediate economic impacts of the pandemic, beginning in April 2020, and tracking how the situation evolved through September 2020. Although households have started to see recovery in income, business revenues, and food security, the gains have been relatively modest. Additionally, households have received very little outside assistance and their ability to cope with shocks remains limited. School closures have created a vacuum in education delivery and school-aged children have struggled to receive education services remotely.
Link: https://voxeu.org/content/shaping-africa-s-post-covid-recovery
Abstract
Economists have recently adopted pre-analysis plans in response to concerns about robustness and transparency in research. The increased use of registered pre-analysis plans has raised competing concerns that detailed plans are costly to create, overly restrictive, and limit the type of inspiration that stems from exploratory analysis. We consider these competing views of pre-analysis plans, and make a careful distinction between the roles of pre-analysis plans and registries, which provide a record of all planned research. We propose a flexible “packraft” pre-analysis plan approach that offers benefits for a wide variety of experimental and nonexperimental applications in applied economics.
Abstract
The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and attempts to limit its spread have resulted in a contraction of the global economy. Here we document the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic among households, adults and children in low-income countries. To do so, we rely on longitudinal household survey data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda, originating from pre-COVID-19 face-to-face household surveys plus phone surveys implemented during the pandemic. We estimate that 256 million individuals—77% of the population—live in households that have lost income during the pandemic. Attempts to cope with this loss are exacerbated by food insecurity and an inability to access medicine and staple foods. Finally, we find that student–teacher contact has dropped from a pre-COVID-19 rate of 96% to just 17% among households with school-aged children. These findings can inform decisions by governments and international organizations on measures to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Abstract
The ethical conduct of research requires the informed consent and voluntary participation of research participants. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) work to ensure that these ethical standards are met. However, incongruities in perspective and practice exist across regions. In this article, we focus on informed consent as practiced by agricultural and applied economists, with emphasis on research conducted in low income and/or developing countries. IRB regulations are clear but heterogeneous, emphasizing process rather than outcome. The lack of IRBs and institutional reviews in some contexts and the particulars of the principles employed in others may fail to adequately protect research participants.
Abstract
Principles for ethical behavior in the context of research are codified into rules that may change over time to meet peoples’ needs in specific institutions, including universities and professional associations. This paper aims to spark discussion about a set of ethical choices beyond those addressed by an IRB or recent association policy statements. Our specific focus is topic selection and the role of researchers’ interests and incentives in determining the kinds of research that we do. Using the principle of induced innovation, we show how changing incentives can influence the direction of research effort and thereby affect the kinds of policies or technologies that are supported by available evidence. With this paper, we hope to generate discussion among applied economists about selection bias in research and how we can use insights from economics itself to guide topic selection.
Abstract
Despite the growing attention to technology adoption in the economics literature, knowledge gaps remain regarding why some valuable technologies are rapidly adopted, while others are not. This paper contributes to our understanding of agricultural technology adoption by showing that a focus on yield gains may, in some contexts, be misguided. We study a technology in Ethiopia that has no impact on yields, but that has nonetheless been widely adopted. Using three waves of panel data, we estimate a correlated random coefficient model and calculate the returns to improved chickpea in terms of yields, costs, and profits. We find that farmers’ comparative advantage does not play a significant role in their adoption decisions and hypothesize that this is due to the overall high economic returns to adoption, despite the limited yield impacts of the technology. Our results suggest economic measures of returns may be more relevant than increases in yields in explaining technology adoption decisions.
Abstract
Ongoing changes to research practices and recent media attention to agricultural and applied economics have raised new ethical problems, but also created opportunities for new solutions. In this paper, we discuss ethical issues facing the profession and propose potential ways in which the field can address these issues. We divide our discussion into two topics. First are ethical issues that arise during the collection, management and analysis of data. Second are ethical issues faced by researchers as they formulate, fund, and disseminate their research. We pay special attention to issues of data dredging or p-hacking and potential ethical issues arising from interaction with the media.
Abstract
Recent agricultural development policies have begun to shift focus from the promotion of a few staple crops toward encouraging crop diversity. The belief is that crop diversification is an effective strategy for dealing with a variety of issues, including poverty alleviation. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence to justify these positions. We contribute to filling this research gap by providing quantitative evidence on the impact of diversity in crop cultivation on household poverty. Using household panel data from Ethiopia we develop a diversity index to measure the effect of crop diversity on poverty status. To control for endogeneity and selection bias resulting from unobserved heterogeneity we utilize a recently developed parametric method for estimating dynamic binary response models with endogenous contemporaneous regressors. Our results provide evidence that households which grow a diverse set of crops are less likely to be poor than households that specialize in their crop production. Additionally, crop diversity reduces the probability that a non-poor household will fall into poverty and the probability that a poor household will remain in poverty. We conclude that crop diversification is a viable way to deal with the exigencies of being poor.