The paper is devoted to identifying the level of social safety of society, taking into account the indicators of shadow economy, and developing its strategic scenarios as a component of sustainable ...development of Ukraine by 2030. The authors used the modern methods of normalisation, threshold vector determination, and dynamic weight coefficients in order to identify the level of social safety of society. The authors developed the structure and a list of indicators considering three components of social safety: The standard of living, the demographic component, and the quality of life. This method allows determining the list and severity of threats, comparing the dynamics of integral indices with integral thresholds in one scale, identifying the state of security, and defining strategic goals and strategies. The suggested approach is universal and can be used by any country, region, economic activity, or business to develop evidence-based medium-to-long-term sustainable development scenarios.
The Causes and Costs of Misallocation Restuccia, Diego; Rogerson, Richard
The Journal of economic perspectives,
07/2017, Letnik:
31, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Why do living standards differ so much across countries? A consensus in the development literature is that differences in productivity are a dominant source of these differences. But what accounts ...for productivity differences across countries? One explanation is that frontier technologies and best practice methods are slow to diffuse to low-income countries. The recent literature on misallocation offers a distinct but complementary explanation: low-income countries are not as effective in allocating their factors of production to their most efficient use. We provide our perspective on three key questions. First, how important is misallocation? Second, what are the causes of misallocation? And third, beyond the direct cost of lower contemporaneous output, are there additional costs associated with misallocation? A summary of our answers is as follows: Misallocation appears to be a substantial channel in accounting for productivity differences across countries, but the measured magnitude of the effects depends on the approach and context. Researchers have not yet found a dominant source of misallocation; instead, many specific factors seem to contribute a small part of the overall effect. Beyond the static cost of misallocation, we believe that the dynamic effects of misallocation on productivity growth are significant and deserve much more attention going forward.
Barriers to healthcare access for women have a substantial influence on maternal and child health. By removing barriers to accessing healthcare, several sustainable development goals can be achieved. ...The goal of this study, based on the dominance analysis, was to examine how living standards and spousal education play role in removing barriers to healthcare access for women in Bangladesh.
The study used the nationally representative Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS), 2017-18 data. A binary logistic regression model was applied for analyzing different types of health access barriers in the study. Additionally, a dominance analysis was conducted to identify the most responsible factors for removing barriers.
In Bangladesh, 66% of women faced at least one barrier in accessing healthcare. The results obtained from logistic regression and dominance analysis revealed that women's standard of living and spousal education explained the highest variation of having at least one barrier in accessing healthcare. Specifically, a high standard of living explained 24% of the total explained variation (OR 0.56, 95% CI 0.52-0.62), while both spousal education accounted for 27% (OR 0.49, 95% CI 0.45-0.54) of the total explained variation. The regression results also showed that women with higher standards of living as well as educated women having educated partners had lower odds of facing barriers in getting permission (OR 0.87, 95% CI 0.76-1.00 and OR 0.66, 95% CI 0.58-0.75) to go for advice/treatment, obtaining money (OR 0.43, 95% CI 0.39-0.47 and OR 0.37, 95% CI 0.34-0.40), distance to a health facility (OR 0.60, 95% CI 0.55-0.66 and OR 0.70, 95% CI 0.65-0.76), and not wanting to go alone (OR 0.72, 95% CI 0.66-0.89 and OR 0.75, 95% CI 0.69-0.81) for getting medical advice/treatment.
The findings of the study suggest paying extra attention to the spousal education and living standard of women to strengthen and reform the existing strategies and develop beneficial interventions to enhance unhindered accessibility to healthcare facilities for women.
This study examines the effect of financial inclusion on poverty and vulnerability to poverty of Ghanaian households. Using data extracted from the seventh round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey ...in 2016/17, a multiple correspondence analysis is employed to generate a financial inclusion index, and three-stage feasible least squares is used to estimate households’ vulnerability to poverty. Endogeneity associated with financial inclusion is resolved using distance to the nearest bank as an instrument in an instrumental variables probit technique. Results showed that while 23.4% of Ghanaians are considered poor, about 51% are vulnerable to poverty. We found that an increase in financial inclusion has two effects on household poverty. First, it is associated with a decline in a household’s likelihood of being poor by 27%. Second, it prevents a household’s exposure to future poverty by 28%. Female-headed households have a greater chance of experiencing a larger reduction in poverty and vulnerability to poverty through enhanced financial inclusion than do male-headed households. Furthermore, financial inclusion reduces poverty and vulnerability to poverty more in rural than in urban areas. Governments are encouraged to design or enhance policies that provide an enabling environment for the private sector to innovate and expand financial services to more distant places. Government investment in, and regulation of, the mobile money industry will be a necessary step to enhancing financial inclusion in developing countries.
Inference on poverty indicators for Ghana Jakperik, Dioggban; Romanus Otieno Odhiambo; George Otieno Orwa
Journal of Statistical and Econometric Methods,
01/2019, Letnik:
8, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
Poverty indicators are the fundamental statistics used to optimally determine the standards of living of people in any country. These are used for policy planing and analysis. Poverty indicators were ...estimated using linearization techniques with a fourth-order multiplicative semiparametric bias reduction density estimator based on the Ghana Living Standards Survey Round 6 data. The study revealed that the Western Region has the highest At-Risk-of-Poverty Threshold (GHC3; 935:67) with the Upper East having the least value of GHC1; 003:79. Poverty levels were high among the three Northern Regions. The highest percentage of persons living below the poverty threshold was found in the Upper West Region whilst the lowest percent was found in the Western Region. Poverty levels were observed to be high in the rural areas compared to the urban centers. Therefore, to combat poverty in Ghana requires a multifaceted approach with good political will and much concentration on the youth since they are the major source of labour to feed the largely agrarian economy. There is the need to intensify education among the youth on capacity building in all endeavors to enhance productivity, hence improving their standards of living. Mathematics Subject Classification: 62G07, 62G08
ASPIRATIONS AND INEQUALITY Genicot, Garance; Ray, Debraj
Econometrica,
March 2017, Letnik:
85, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper develops a theory of socially determined aspirations, and the interaction of those aspirations with growth and inequality. The interaction is bidirectional: economy-wide outcomes determine ...individual aspirations, which in turn determine investment incentives and social outcomes. Thus aspirations, income, and the distribution of income evolve jointly. When capital stocks lie in some compact set, steady state distributions must exhibit inequality and are typically clustered around local poles. When sustained growth is possible, initial histories matter. Either there is convergence to an equal distribution (with growth) or there is perennial relative divergence across clusters, with within-cluster convergence. A central feature that drives these results is that aspirations that are moderately above an individual's current standard of living tend to encourage investment, while still higher aspirations may lead to frustration.
More than 330 million people are still living in extreme poverty in Africa. Timely, accurate, and spatially fine-grained baseline data are essential to determining policy in favor of reducing ...poverty. The potential of “Big Data” to estimate socioeconomic factors in Africa has been proven. However, most current studies are limited to using a single data source. We propose a computational framework to accurately predict the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) at a finest spatial granularity and coverage of 552 communes in Senegal using environmental data (related to food security, economic activity, and accessibility to facilities) and call data records (capturing individualistic, spatial, and temporal aspects of people). Our framework is based on Gaussian Process regression, a Bayesian learning technique, providing uncertainty associated with predictions. We perform model selection using elastic net regularization to prevent overfitting. Our results empirically prove the superior accuracy when using disparate data (Pearson correlation of 0.91). Our approach is used to accurately predict important dimensions of poverty: health, education, and standard of living (Pearson correlation of 0.84–0.86). All predictions are validated using deprivations calculated from census. Our approach can be used to generate poverty maps frequently, and its diagnostic nature is, likely, to assist policy makers in designing better interventions for poverty eradication.
This paper analyses the effect of income inequality on Europeans' quality of life, specifically on their overall well-being (happiness, life satisfaction), on their financial quality of life ...(satisfaction with standard of living, affordability of goods and services, subjective poverty), and on their health (self-rated health, satisfaction with health). The simple bivariate correlations of inequality with overall well-being, financial quality of life, and health are negative. But this is misleading because of the confounding effect of a key omitted variable, national economic development (GDP per capita): Unequal societies are on average much poorer (r = 0.46) and so disadvantaged because of that. We analyse the multi-level European Quality of Life survey conducted in 2003 including national-level data on inequality (Gini coefficient) and economic development (GDP) and individual-level data on overall well-being, financial quality of life, and health. The individual cases are from representative samples of 28 European countries. Our variance-components multi-level models controlling for known individual-level predictors show that national per capita GDP increases subjective well-being, financial quality of life, and health. Net of that, the national level of inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, has no statistically significant effect, suggesting that income inequality does not reduce well-being, financial quality of life, or health in advanced societies. These result all imply that directing policies and resources towards inequality reduction is unlikely to benefit the general public in advanced societies.
PDF
