We organise a field experiment with smallholder farmers in Rwanda to measure the impact of financial literacy training on financial knowledge and behaviour. The training increased financial literacy ...of participants, changed their savings and borrowing behaviour and had a positive effect on the new business start-up. However, it failed to have a significant (short-term) impact on income. Using a two-stage regression framework, we identify enhanced financial literacy as one of the important factors explaining behavioural changes. We also test whether financial knowledge spillovers from trained farmers to their peers in local village banks but find no evidence for that.
•The absence of a vibrant and job-rich non-farm rural economy limits livelihood options, particularly for low-capability households.•Secondary school completion is beyond the reach of most poor rural ...children, leaving them with few high-return livelihood options.•Land scarcity, low capabilities and the sluggish non-farm economy lock together to form a nexus limiting sustained escapes from poverty in rural Rwanda.•A high-risk environment, coupled with an as yet ineffective enabling environment, constrains diversification and investment in rural enterprise.
Acute land scarcity in Rwanda limits poor people’s ability to accumulate and move out of poverty. Options for livelihood diversification are restricted by the absence of a vibrant and job-rich non-farm rural economy, and by high rural–urban inequality which makes the urban economy somewhat inaccessible, particularly given the regulated nature of the urban informal sector, limiting opportunities for migration. Competition for employment is made more challenging by low capabilities, which place high-return jobs beyond reach for many poor people. This paper relies on mixed methods research to explore a land-education-jobs nexus and identify the linked human capital and livelihood determinants of poverty escapes to understand the factors slowing poverty reduction in Rwanda. The quantitative analysis uses three waves of nationally representative panel data between 2010/11 and 2016/17 to investigate correlates of poverty trajectories. The qualitative analysis uses content analysis to explore life histories, focus group discussions and key informant interviews from 14 study sites to explore factors driving change in livelihoods and well-being.
Our findings show that the triple challenges of acute land scarcity, low capabilities and a sluggish non-farm economy lock together to form a nexus which limits sustained poverty escapes. In the regression analysis, households headed by primary school graduates are half as likely to be poor as those headed by a primary school dropouts while secondary completion or higher virtually eliminates the risk of poverty. Despite demand, secondary school completion in the fieldwork is beyond the reach of most children from poor households, limiting their later options for livelihood diversification. Near landlessness constrains accumulation and Rwanda’s thin rural non-farm economy provides few jobs or opportunities for self-employment.
Rebooting poverty reduction in Rwanda particularly following the Covid-19 pandemic will require finding ways to sustain poverty escapes through fuelling job-rich ‘growth from below’ by generating additional demand in the rural economy, continuing to boost agricultural productivity and including even the poorest peasant farmers in that, creating a more conducive business environment for small enterprises and continuing to stimulate investment in job-rich enterprise. Underpinning these strategies should be strengthened efforts to enhance capabilities, education quality, and progression into secondary education.
De acuerdo con nuestro Código Penal, España, los delitos de genocidio y de lesa humanidad son aquellos crímenes que atentan contra la Comunidad Internacional. Es por este motivo que la importancia de ...tales acciones va más allá del estrictamente contexto nacional. Así, en 1948 se redactó la Convención para la Prevención y la Sanción del delito de genocidio, en la que se trataban los principales actos encaminados a la destrucción de determinados colectivos nacionales, étnicos, raciales o religiosos. Por otro lado, en 1968 se aprobó la Convención sobre la imprescriptibilidad de los crímenes de guerra y de los crímenes de lesa humanidad, entre los cuales, se englobaban los actos genocidas. Así, debido a la especial gravedad de las acciones cometidas con estos crímenes, se crean los tribunales ad hoc, los cuales son constituidos con una finalidad específica y se caracterizan por su temporalidad. En este artículo se realiza un análisis de lo ocurrido en Ruanda, debido a la gravedad de los crímenes ocurridos. Con independencia del crimen de que se trate, está claro que ante unos delitos cuya naturaleza y fundamento se centran en el odio hacia otras personas que presentan características contrarias al grupo agresor, lo que se traduce en un intento de erradicación, total o parcial, de dicho colectivo.
Off-grid solar systems have a number of advantages in developing countries, but they rely on the capacity of private entrepreneurs to develop a reliable customer base and methods for recruiting these ...customers. This study uses data from 68,600 customers of BBOXX, a London-based off-grid solar power company, to classify customers and explore the demographic and recruitment factors associated with customer behavior. We compare a non-parametric clustering method for customer segmentation with linear models of customer behavior. The results show a number of important demographic and geographic factors that influence recruitment of the company's core customers, and demonstrates how linear models can be misleading. For example, women and those recruited by agent advertising or word-of-mouth are more likely in the company's core clientele, even though the linear models suggest that they may be less profitable customers.
•A database of 68,600 solar home system customers over 562 days is analyzed.•Customers are segmented into profile groups using clustering.•The core customer is low-demand, and problematic for grid extension.•Segmentation reveals effective mechanisms for recruiting core customers.•Off-grid solar is likely to be important for expansion of electricity access.
This study develops a macro-econometric model for a typical supply constrained African economy aimed at developing a theoretical and empirical template for such policy tools that are increasingly ...being demanded by African ministries of finance and central banks. We concretised it by building a macro-econometric model for Rwanda. The model is designed to capture the structural characteristics of such an African economy. The Rwanda macro-econometric model has 107 equations of which 72 are endogenous. In addition, we also build a supplementary ARIMA based model with 33 equations for the exogenous variables to make the model useful for forecasting. We disaggregate the fiscal, balance of payments and money supply blocks of the model to offer an adequate picture of the macro-economy. We also do an econometric estimation of the core behavioural equations of the model using the error correction modelling approach for the period 1960-2009. The model can be easily extended further to support the budgeting, forecasting and macroeconomic policy analyses in the relevant ministries and central banks in Africa. We successfully solve the model and reproduce historical values from 1999 to 2009 and forecast major macro-variables for 2010 to 2015. We also use the model to conduct policy and external shock simulation exercise that are important for policymakers.
"This article examines the characteristics of the Africanist ideology in the novel Afrique, afrique (Marchal, 1983). In the first part, it addresses how this ideology understood Central Africa, ...namely by reducing the complexity of reality to a few general characteristics. Then it examines how the post-independence expressions of the Africanist Text rely on metonymy and overgeneralization as a way of describing the main ethnicities of Rwanda and Burundi. This is ultimately to highlight that regardless of their institutional status, symbolic goods written after independence reproduce colonial knowledge without questioning it, like in de Villiers’s SAS broie du noir (1967) and Hatzfeld’s La Stratégie des antilopes (2007)."
Active Ghosts: Nil-filing in Rwanda Mascagni, Giulia; Santoro, Fabrizio; Mukama, Denis ...
World development,
04/2022, Letnik:
152
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
•Nil filing refers to taxpayers reporting zero in all fields of their declaration: zero income, zero expenses, and zero tax. It is a puzzling but widespread phenomenon in many countries.•We show that ...nil-filers in Rwanda account for half of all corporate tax declarations and about a quarter of personal income tax declarations. Nil filers are more likely to be small and young firms, often they are not yet operating.•Evasion is only a small part of the explanation behind nil-filing. A major reason lies at the interaction between aggressive recruitment campaigns by the RRA and taxpayers’ response to a complex and confusing tax system.•Our results challenge the idea that expanding the tax base to the informal sector, usually intended as micro and yet unregistered firms, would generate substantial gains in revenue collection. Such strategy can instead have important unintended consequences.
Nil-filing refers to taxpayers reporting zero in all fields of their tax declaration. It is a largely ignored phenomenon in the public finance literature, despite being well known to tax administrators and widespread: half of all registered corporations in Rwanda file nil. This paper sheds light on this issue, using descriptive analysis of administrative data, a randomised controlled trial (RCT), and qualitative interviews with taxpayers and tax officials. We argue that a major reason for nil-filing lies at the intersection between aggressive recruitment campaigns by the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) and taxpayers’ response to a complex and often confusing tax system. Through the lens of nil-filing, we also shed some light on the practical challenges of public administration in low-income countries more generally. By doing this, we challenge the prevailing narrative that governments should always expand the tax base to small and yet unregistered firms, showing some previously undocumented – and unintended – consequences of such a strategy.
We analyze the inclusiveness and effectiveness of agricultural cooperatives in Rwanda. We estimate mean income and poverty effects of cooperative membership using propensity score matching ...techniques. We analyze heterogeneous treatment effects across farmers by analyzing how estimated treatment effects vary over farm and farmer characteristics and over the estimated propensity score. We find that cooperative membership in general increases income and reduces poverty and that these effects are largest for larger farms and in more remote areas. We find evidence of a negative selection because impact is largest for farmers with the lowest propensity to be a cooperative member.
Agricultural policies in Rwanda focus on agricultural intensification and increased market orientation of the smallholder farm sector. Cooperatives are seen as key vehicles in this, but little is ...known about their effectiveness to achieve these goals. In this article, we analyze the impact of cooperative membership on the agricultural performance of rural households in Rwanda. We use cross‐sectional survey data, collected in 2012, to analyze the impact of cooperative membership on different agricultural performance indicators, including indicators on agricultural intensification, market orientation, farm revenue, and income. We use several econometric techniques to deal with potential selection bias in estimating the impact of cooperative membership, including a proxy variable method based on a willingness to pay measure and propensity score matching methods. We find that cooperative membership in general has a positive impact on farm performance but these effects are driven by specific types of cooperatives.
Whether the negative relationship between farm size and crop productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. Plot-level data from ...Rwanda point toward constant returns to scale and a strong negative relationship between farm size and crop output per hectare that is robust across specifications and emerges also if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used but disappears if family labor is valued at market rates. In Rwanda, labor market imperfections, rather than other unobserved factors, seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship.
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