A rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to employ labor and capital more efficiently. Significant ...knowledge gaps persist, however, as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into household outcomes as well as distributional consequences. This study examines the impacts of two rural road-paving projects in Bangladesh using a new quasi-experimental household panel data set surveying project and control villages before and after program implementation. A household panel fixed-effects methodology controlling for initial area conditions is used to estimate the impact of paved roads on household and individual outcomes and account for potential bias in program placement at the village level. Rural road investments are found to reduce poverty significantly through higher agricultural production, lower input and transportation costs, and higher agricultural output prices at local village markets. Rural road development has also led to higher secondary schooling enrollment for boys and girls, as compared to primary school enrollment. We find that road investments have also benefited the poor, meaning the gains are significant for the poor and in some cases disproportionately higher than for the nonpoor.
Improving agricultural productivity has received a greater attention in recent years amid concerns about rising food insecurity, population pressures, and climate change. Many believe that better ...access to institutional credit, spanning microcredit as well as commercial and agricultural banks, can help rural households smooth risks, and access inputs and other technology to modernize agriculture and improve farm/nonfarm linkages. We use recently augmented household panel data spanning over 20 years in Bangladesh to examine the effects of rural credit expansion (both microcredit and formal bank channels) on outcomes for agricultural households. We find that microcredit has benefited households with lower landownings, raising agricultural income from activities such as livestock rearing that require less land, as well as nonfarm income diversification for all households, but with the strongest effect for landless or near‐landless households. We do not find effects of microcredit on crop income, but do, however, find that reported supply‐side credit constraints significantly lower crop income. Borrowing by both men and women has contributed to nonfarm income growth for marginal farmers, but only men's borrowing has contributed to nonfarm income growth among higher landowning groups.
•This paper discusses a survey research agenda to improve measurement of rural women’s employment in national surveys.•Stylized facts are presented from country surveys that are addressing recent ...guidance on measuring work and employment.•Follow-up questions in agriculture and contributing work improve accuracy in measuring of rural women’s employment.•Improved data on time use and desire to work, and earnings, can improve targeting and design of rural employment programs.•Data related to rural economic transitions, including migration, skills, and barriers to economic mobility, are also needed.
This paper sets out a survey research agenda on the collection of data on rural women’s employment, to inform gender-sensitive design and targeting of rural employment policies and programs. Stylized facts are presented from nationally representative surveys across countries, including labor force surveys and multi-topic household surveys with a focus on employment. The first set of recommendations in the paper cover topics that can currently be incorporated in national surveys, based on recent international guidance and survey data initiatives. This includes improving the counting of rural women’s work and employment in agriculture and contributing work, comparing self-reporting as opposed to proxy response; adding questions related to labor underutilization; and modifying and adding questions on constraints to seeking better economic opportunities. The second set of recommendations cover survey methods that still need to be explored through research and testing. This includes how to better elicit unpaid work burdens in surveys and the links with time in employment; how community survey data can complement individual data on complex topics like wages and access to childcare; and developing a survey research agenda around measuring work amid rural economic transitions, including individual-level data on work-related migration across surveys, skills development and access to technology. Contextual factors associated with work and employment also need to be considered in survey design.
This paper presents evidence that increased earnings opportunities for girls can lower household preference for sons, as measured by the household’s average reported ideal number of sons relative to ...ideal number of children. Using the 1995–96 Nepal Living Standards Survey, I find that reported preference for sons decreases by about one boy if expected wages for girls increase to about Rs. 20–25 per day. Anthropometric outcomes for girls, measured using weight-for-height
z-scores, also improve significantly in households where there is a lower reported son preference, while there is no corresponding change in sons’ health.
The mechanisms by which the poor benefit from economic growth remain a topic of debate in development literature. We address this issue in the context of rural Bangladesh, using a pooled dataset of ...three household panels between 1991-2001. Expansion of irrigation, paved roads, electricity, and access to formal and informal credit have (through different veins) led to higher rural farm and non-farm incomes, accounting for exogenous local agroclimatic endowments that explain a large part of the variation in the growth of infrastructure and credit programmes. However, this has not translated into substantial reductions in poverty for the poorest households.
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