Fighting poverty : company interests and foreign aid policy, and an impact analysis of natural disasters
Year: 2003
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: This paper evaluates the impact of disasters on income mobility ofrural households in Pakistan drawing on several natural experiments. We find that not only do the poor have a much higher probability of remaining poor when entering a crisis compared to normal times, but there is also a substantial negative effect in the following year. The more privileged households seem to be not much affected by the crisis. We propose a simple bootstrap method .to. facilitate statistical inferencebased oa mobility matrices, and construct confidence intervals for the probability estimates. We illustrate the -potential magnitude of measurement error on absolute transition matrices and find that relatively small errors may induce a substantial downward bias of the probability of remaining poor. However, comparisons across states are found to be quite robust against this error, which is promising for impact analysis. * Thanks to Kjell Gunnar Sal vanes for valuable comments, and in particular to Erik Sorensen for helping me with several of the technicalities. I am also grateful to IFPRI for giving me access to the Pakistani data and for their hospitality during my stay, and to Gary Fields for letting me participate in his research group on income mobility.
Author: Espen Villanger
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2474027904