Abstract

Measures of social difference such as the Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization Index (ELF) and Polarization are commonly used proxies for community heterogeneity. They are used to “explain” collective outcomes ranging from voluntary contributions in elementary schools to civil wars. This essay reviews this literature in the face of new research on identity and collective outcomes. I argue that methods of social classification often seriously mis-measure identity and difference and that poverty rather than heterogeneity is often the source of community failures.

In contrast with global trends, India has witnessed a secular decline in women’s employment rates over the past few decades. We investigate this decline in rural areas, where the majority of Indian women reside. Using parametric and semi-parametric decomposition techniques, we show that changes in individual and household attributes fully account for the fall in women’s labor force participation in 1987–1999 and account for more than half of the decline in 1999–2011.

This special issue on gender comprises articles from four different country settings: Sierra Leone, Senegal, Bangladesh, and Albania. Each uses large secondary data sets to explore how changing market and institutional environments affect gender attitudes and outcomes. In spite of the many historical and contemporary differences in these four economies, we see common difficulties in achieving gender equality.

We study how information to parents and schools on the performance of primary school children can improve learning outcomes in an environment where public and private schools co-exist. Contiguous village councils in the Indian state of Rajasthan are randomly assigned to either a control or one of four treatment groups in which student report cards on curriculum-based tests are provided to schools, parents or both. We find no changes in academic performance in public schools.

In this paper we show that local redistribution of educational resources via teacher transfers between neighboring public schools can improve equity in access to teachers. Transfers from teacher surplus schools to deficit schools within a 10 km radius in Haryana, a state of India for which we have geo-coded location of schools in 2013, enables 19 percent of deficit schools to meet the minimum requirement. We use the mandated norms in the Right to Education Act in India, to define deficit and surplus schools.

This paper investigates if there are gender differences in health expenditures and treatment seeking behavior among cancer patients and finds that the results are consistent with gender discrimination. Using a survey on rural patients suffering from cancer in a public tertiary health center in an Indian state Odisha, the study finds that expenditures on female patients are significantly lesser than those on males. Even after controlling for other covariates, in particular the type of cancer, demographic and socio-economic variables, 73% of the difference persists.

Since 1930, areas of state-managed forest in the central Himalayas of India have increasingly been devolved to management by local communities. This article studies the long-run effects of the devolution on the cost of forest management and on forest conservation. Village council-management costs an order of magnitude less per unit area and does no worse, and possibly better, at conservation than state management. Geographic proximity and historical and ecological information are used to separate the effects of management from those of possible confounding factors.

How does information on environmental risks obtained by individuals in developing countries affect environmental quality? The literature reveals that for issues like water quality and pesticides, information affects individual behavior and risks are reduced through individual action. However, even if information were to become widely available in developing countries, unless regulation is also strengthened, environmental risks will remain at high levels relative to developed countries.

Whether embankments should be used to control floods is a question of great importance in the eastern Gangetic plain, where embankment breaches cause severe flood damage every year and huge damage due to major breaches every few years. Critics of the embankment policy have called for a strategy of living with floods by building dispersed infrastructure to cope with floods. However, no cost–benefit analysis of alternative strategies is available. This paper makes a first pass at evaluating embankments.