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SAGA PUBLICATIONS Included here are Working Papers and Conference Papers. Publications on this page are organized by author: RETURN TO MAIN AUTHORS PAGE Yeboah, Godfred Challenges Facing Potential Investors in the Pineapple Industry in Ghana February 2004 Yeboah, Godfred The project involved studying the economics of pineapple production and marketing in Ghana. This was undertaken as part of two studies: “The Farmapine Model: A Cooperative Marketing Strategy and Market Based Development Approach.” and “Profitability and Risk Analysis: The Case of Ghana’s Pineapple Exports.” The project falls under SAGA’s general objectives and in particular under thematic area of ‘risks, vulnerability and poverty dynamics’. The study also has policy implications especially in terms of poverty alleviation and sustainable economic development. Final Report for SAGA Competitive Research Grants Program Yeh, Ethan Sex Work as a Response to Risk in Western Kenya March 2007 Robinson, Jonathan and Ethan Yeh Formal and informal commercial sex work is a way of life for many poor women in developing countries. Though sex workers have long been identified as crucial in affecting the spread of HIV/AIDS, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the nature of sex-for-money transactions remains poorly understood. This paper investigates sex worker behavior using daily self-reported data on sexual behavior, income shocks, expenditures, and labor supply for a sample of 237 women in Western Kenya. We find significant day-to-day fluctuations in sex worker decisions, and that women engage in sex-for-money transactions in part to deal with unexpected non-labor income shocks. Riskier sex is better compensated in Western Kenya, and we find that women increase their supply of riskier, better compensated sex on days in which a household member falls ill. In particular, women are 23.6% more likely to have unprotected sex, 16.8% more likely to have anal sex, and increase the number of unprotected sexual acts by 21.7% on such days. These increases in risky sexual behavior have important health consequences for these women and on the spread of HIV/AIDS. While not denying the need for interventions that encourage women to leave the commercial sex industry, our research suggests that important opportunities exist to reduce the health risks of sex work within sex work beyond HIV education and condom distribution. Prepared for the AERC-Cornell Conference on “Bottom-Up Interventions and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa,” May 31-June 1, 2007, Nairobi, Kenya Yilma, Tsegaye Prospects and Challenges of Agricultural Technology Market Linkage under Liberalization in Ghana: Evidence from a micro-data October 2004 Tsegaye Yilma, Ernst Berg and Thomas Berger There is a general consensus that bad economic policies, among other factors, are to blame for the poor performance of economies in sub Saharan African (SSA). However, there is no similar consensus on the effect of economic reforms on poverty alleviation, a primary goal of any economy in the region. This paper looked into the effect of macro-economic reforms, particularly the removal of subsidized agricultural credit for irrigator farmers in Ghana, a pioneering reform country in SSA. A theoretical model of this scenario is constructed in which it is shown that, under multiple market imperfection, farmers resort to alternative financial sources to finance irrigation. Particularly in the presence of off-farm alternative, farmers divide their labor resource between irrigation farming and off-farm employment. The long term implication of a predominant dependence on off-farm income for financing irrigation farming will be an induced increase in family size. This model is subsequently tested and validated with a household data collected from northern Ghana. Household labor endowment and off-farm participation have a positive and significant effect on household irrigation decisions. This implies that, irrigation and off-farm employment are complimentary activities, which indicates a possible induced family size increase. Presented at the DPRU-TIPS-Cornell University Forum on "African Development and Poverty Reduction: The Macro-Micro Linkage," October 13-15, 2004, Cape Town, South Africa Youngblood, Curtis E. Persistent Public Sector Deficits and Macroeconomic Instability in Ghana September 2004 Curtis E. Youngblood and David L. Franklin Over the decade of the 1990s Ghana was considered an example among African countries regarding the pace and extent of its economic reforms affecting its trade regime, its financial sector, and the conduct of its fiscal and monetary policy (Kapur et al., 1991). This reputation was earned in the latter half of the 1980s when Ghana’s government instituted a series of policy measures to rescue its economy from the depths of its most severe crisis in the post-colonial period. This program, the Economic Recovery Program (ERP), placed Ghana on a path of modest economic growth: from a per capita GDP of $309 in 1983, per capita income grew at an average rate of 1.8% per year to $371 in 1993. In spite of this early promise and the good reputation it achieved with the international financial institutions, international donors and its own private enterprise sector, Ghana’s economic growth has continued to be moderate. Per capita GDP in 2000 was $411, so that per capita incomes grew at only 1.5% per year from 1993 through 2000. At this rate, incomes will double in 50 years. This is a far cry from the ambitious growth rates envisioned in official growth plans such as Vision 2020, which was predicated on per capita growth rates of 5%-7% per annum. Yet, it is perplexing to most observers that in March 2001 the recently elected government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) sought relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, as it dealt with the aftermath of a massive currency crisis. In Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur (editors), The Economy of Ghana: Analytical Perspectives on Stability, Growth and Poverty, James Currey, 2008. Presented at the ISSER-University of Ghana-Cornell University International Conference on "Ghana at the Half Century," July 18-20, 2004, Accra, Ghana Younger, Stephen D. Measuring Intra-Household Inequality: Explorations Using the Body Mass Index April 2009 Sahn, David E. and Stephen D. Younger This paper examines the relationship between level of well-being and inequality at inter-country and intra-household levels, using individuals’ body mass index (BMI) rather than income as the indicator of well-being. BMI is useful for these purposes because (1) it is measured at the individual rather than household level; (2) it reflects command over food, but also non-food resources that affect health status like sanitary conditions and labour-saving technologies; (3) it accounts for caloric consumption relative to needs; (4) it is easily measured; and (5) any measurement error is likely to be random. We do not find any evidence to support the idea of an intra-household or inter-country Kuznets curve. We study the correlations between average household well-being, still measured by BMI, and differences in the BMIs of males and females, parents and children. Here, we find a tendency to protect the BMI of young children when living standards are very low. We find no clear patterns by gender. Perhaps the most striking finding in the paper is that about half of total BMI inequality at the country level is within households. Thus, standard measures of inequality that use household-level data may drastically understate true inequality. Presented at the WIDER Conference on Advancing Health Equity, Helsinki, Finland, September 29-30, 2006, and the CIRPÉE Conference on Health Economics, Université Laval, March 30, 2007 In Health Economics 18(S1): S13-S36, April, 2009 (UNU-WIDER Special Issue on Health and Development) Inequality and Poverty in Africa in an Era of Globalization: Looking Beyond Income to Health and Education August 2007 Sahn, David E. and Stephen D. Younger This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of well- being – education and health – in Africa. We expected to find, as we did in Latin America, that progress in the provision of public services and the focus of public spending in the social sector would contribute to declining poverty and inequality in health and education, even in an environment of stagnant or worsening levels of income poverty. Unfortunately, our results indicate that in the area of health, little progress is being made in terms of reducing pre-school age stunting, a clear manifestation of poor overall health. Likewise, our health inequality measure showed that while there were a few instances of reduced inequality along this dimension, there was, on balance, little evidence of success in improving equality of outcomes. Similar results were found in our examination of underweight women as an indicator of general current health status of adults. With regard to education, the story is somewhat more positive. However, the overall picture gives little cause for complacency or optimism that Africa has, or will soon reap the potential benefits of the process of globalization. Presented at the UNU-WIDER Conference on “The Impact of Globalization on the Poor in Africa,” Johannesburg, South Africa, 1-2 December, 2005 Decomposing World Education Inequality August 2007 Sahn, David E. and Stephen D. Younger We decompose global inequality in educational achievement into within- and between- country components. We find that the former is significantly larger. This is different than results for international income inequality, but similar to results for international health inequality. Living Standards in Africa August 2007 Sahn, David E. and Stephen D. Younger This paper substantiates two claims — that Africa is poor compared to the rest of the world and that poverty in Africa is not declining consistently or significantly, in contrast to other regions of the world. We consider poverty in the dimensions of health and education, in addition to income, stressing the inherent conceptual and measurement issues that commend such a broader perspective. We note a lack of consistency in the movement of the poverty measures. During similar periods, we often find them moving in opposite directions. We therefore discuss the need go beyond examining each poverty measure individually, and present an approach to evaluating poverty reduction in multiple dimensions jointly. The results of the multidimensional poverty comparisons reinforce the importance of considering deprivation beyond the material standard of living and provide insight into how to reconcile differing stories that arise from examining each indicator separately. Forthcoming in Sudhir Anand, Paul Segal, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Debates in the Measurement of Global Inequality, Oxford University Press, 2008. Labor Market Activities and Fertility December 2006 Younger, Stephen D. “This paper focuses on one aspect of the demographic transition, women’s labor market activity, and how it relates to the basic variables of fertility and poverty. Just as there are differences in fertility and mortality in rich and poor countries, there are differences in women’s time use. In rich countries, women tend to work outside the home, usually in wage employment on a fixed hourly schedule. In poor countries, women tend to work at home or, especially in Africa, on their family’s farm or at own- account activities where time use is more flexible. Understanding the relationship between the demographic transition and these differences in time use is our main theme...” Presented at the AERC/Hewlett Foundation Workshop, “Poverty and Economic Growth: The Impact of Population Dynamics and Reproductive Health Outcomes in Africa” in Brussels, Belgium, November 5-6, 2006 An Assessment of Changes in Infant and under-Five Mortality in Demographic and Health Survey Data for Madagascar September 2006 Glick, Peter, Stephen D. Younger, and David E. Sahn Repeated rounds of nationally representative surveys are an important source of information on changes in the welfare of the population. In particular, policymakers and donors in many developing countries rely heavily on the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to provide information on levels and trends in indicators of the health status of the population, including child survival. The reliability of observed trends, however, depends strongly on the comparability across survey rounds of the sampling strategy and of the format of questions and how interviews ask them. In Madagascar, the most recent (2003/4) DHS indicated very sharp declines in rates of infant and under-five mortality compared with the previous survey from 1997. However, retrospective under-one and under-five mortality data in 1997 and 2003/4 for the same calendar years also show large differences, suggesting that this trend may be spurious. We employ a range of descriptive and multivariate approaches to investigate the issue. Despite evidence of significant interviewer recording errors (with respect to date of birth and age at death) in 2003/4, the most likely source of problems is that the two samples differ: comparisons of time-invariant characteristics of households and of women suggests that the later DHS sampled a somewhat wealthier (hence lower mortality) population. Corrections to the data using hazard survival model estimates are discussed. These suggest a much more modest reduction in infant and under-five mortality than indicated by the raw data for the two surveys. Robust Multidimensional Spatial Poverty Comparisons in Ghana, Madagascar, and Uganda April 2006 Duclos, Jean-Yves, David E. Sahn, and Stephen D. Younger We investigate spatial poverty comparisons in three African countries using multidimensional indicators of well-being. The work is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature in that we seek poverty orderings that are robust to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines and indices. In addition, we wish to ensure that our comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures for multiple welfare variables. In contrast to earlier work, our methodology applies equally well to what can be defined as "union", "intersection," or "intermediate" approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being. Further, unlike much of the stochastic dominance literature, we compute the sampling distributions of our poverty estimators in order to perform statistical tests of the difference in poverty measures. We apply our methods to two measures of well-being, the log of household expenditures per capita and children’s height-for-age z-scores, using data from the 1988 Ghana Living Standards Survey, the 1993 Enquête Permanente auprès des Ménages in Madagascar, and the 1999 National Household Survey in Uganda. Bivariate poverty comparisons are at odds with univariate comparisons in several interesting ways. Most importantly, we cannot always conclude that poverty is lower in urban areas from one region compared to rural areas in another, even though univariate comparisons based on household expenditures per capita almost always lead to that conclusion. In World Bank Economic Review 20(1):91-113 Improvements in Children’s Health: Does Inequality Matter? August 2005 Sahn, David E. and Stephen D. Younger The literature on the contributions to poverty reduction of average improvements in living standards vs. distributional changes uses only one measure of well-being – income or expenditure. Given that poverty is defined by deprivation over different dimensions, we explore the role of average improvements and distributional changes in children’s health and nutrition using the height of young children as our measure of well-being. Similar to the income literature, we find that shifts in the mean level of heights, not changes in distribution, account for most improvements in heights. Unlike the literature on income inequality, however, there is a positive association between improvements in average heights and reduced dispersion of those heights. In The Journal of Economic Inequality 3(2):125-143, 2005. Children’s Health Status in Uganda July 2005 Bahiigwa, Godfrey and Stephen D. Younger This paper studies trends and determinants of children's standardized heights, a good overall measure of children's health status, in Uganda over the 1990s. During this period, Uganda made impressive strides in economic growth and poverty reduction (Appleton, 2001). However, there is concern that improvements in other dimensions of well-being, especially health, has been much weaker. We find that several policy variables are important determinants of children's heights. Most importantly, a broad package of basic health care services has a large statistically significant effect. Provision of some of these services, especially vaccinations, appears to have faltered in the late 1990s, which may help to explain the lackluster performance on stunting during that period. We also find that civil conflict, a persistent problem in some areas of the country, has an important (negative) impact on children's heights. Better educated mothers have taller children, but the only substantial impact is for children of mothers who have completed secondary school. Finally, we find that households that rely more on own-production sources of income tend to have more malnourished children, even after controlling for their overall level of income and a host of other factors. This latter conclusion is supportive of the Plan for Modernization of Agriculture, which aims to shift farmers from subsistence to commercial agriculture or other more productive activities. Infant Mortality in Uganda: Determinants, Trends, and the Millennium Development Goals January 2005 Ssewanyana, Sarah and Stephen D. Younger Unusually for an African economy, Uganda’s growth has been rapid and sustained for an extended period of time. Further, this growth has clearly translated into substantial declines in poverty for all socio-economic groups and in all regions of the country. Despite this, there is concern in the country that other indicators of well-being are not improving at the same rate as incomes. This paper studies one such indicator, infant mortality. We use three rounds of the Uganda Demographic and Health Surveys to construct a national time series for infant mortality over a long period of time, 1974-1999. We also use these survey data to model the determinants of infant mortality and, based on those results, to examine the likelihood that Uganda will meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving infant mortality by 2015. Presented at the DPRU-TIPS-Cornell University Forum on "African Development and Poverty Reduction: The Macro-Micro Linkage," October 13-15, 2004, Cape Town, South Africa Alternate version in Journal of African Economies 17(1):34-61, 2008 Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa: Macroeconomic Adjustment and Beyond May 2004 Sahn, David E. and Stephen D. Younger We begin this paper by taking a look back at the adjustment, growth, and poverty debate. Our analysis suggests that while the poor do not bear the disproportionate costs of adjustment policies, it is also the case that policy reforms have largely failed to contribute to the alleviation of poverty. We therefore explore the microeconomic, structural, and institutional constraints to growth and poverty reduction. The three areas that we concentrate on in terms of removing the structural and fundamentally microeconomic constraints that impede growth and poverty alleviation are human resource development, vulnerability and risk management, and fiscal management through decentralization. In Journal of African Economies 13(90001):i66-i95 Growth and Poverty Reduction in Uganda, 1992-1999: A Multidimensional Analysis of Changes in Living Standards October 2003 Younger, Stephen D. This paper examines Uganda’s progress on poverty reduction when poverty is measured in multiple dimensions. In particular, I consider poverty measures that are defined across household expenditures per capita or household assets, children’s health status, and in some cases, mother’s literacy. The comparisons are robust to the choice of poverty line, poverty measure, and sampling error. In general, I find that multidimensional poverty declined significantly in Uganda during the 1990s, although results for the latter half of the decade are more ambiguous. While there was clear progress in the dimension of expenditures and assets, improvement in children’s height-for-age z-scores is less certain for the 1995-2000 period. I also make poverty comparisons for individual regions and urban and rural areas in the country. Rather surprisingly, progress on multivariate poverty reduction is less clear in Central region and in urban areas. Yu, Derek Geography as Destiny: Considering the spatial dimensions of poverty and deprivation in South Africa October 2004 Ronelle Burger, Servaas van der Berg, Sarel van der Walt and Derek Yu This paper’s main contribution to the discussion about the geographical dimensions of poverty traps is a careful description of how the nature and depth of poverty and deprivation differ by geography. Conventionally, much of the analysis of poverty has focused on money-metric poverty lines. However, as Amartya Sen and others have shown, welfare is a rich and complex concept that cannot be adequately captured by income and expenditure. To avoid the arbitrariness of a poverty line and the one-dimensionality of money-metric poverty measure, the paper opts for Totally Fuzzy and Relative indices of poverty – as pioneered by Cheli and Lemmi (1995). It provides a multi-dimensional account of poverty and deprivation without assigning arbitrary weights to the different poverty dimensions. Rather, the method weighs poverty dimensions according to the frequency of deprivation in this dimension among members of the population: the more common deprivation is in a specific dimension, the less weight the specific dimension will receive in the calculation of the index. Instead of a sharp line dividing the rich from the poor, the variable’s bottom category is defined as marking extreme poverty and the top category as representing affluence, with everything in-between assigned a score to indicate the degree to which these individuals or households can be regarded as poor. Presented at the DPRU-TIPS-Cornell University Forum on "African Development and Poverty Reduction: The Macro-Micro Linkage," October 13-15, 2004, Cape Town, South Africa Return to MAIN AUTHORS PAGE

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