The purpose of many social programs is to facilitate sustainable change in the lives of individuals and communities. Unfortunately, the techniques used to evaluate social programs often ignore some of the most important changes which take place in the life of a participant and focus more on the activities that have been performed. The purpose of this research is to explore the practical benefits of Social Return on Investment (SROI); an innovative framework for program evaluation. A case study of the Circle of Friends, in Kitchener, Ontario, illustrates some of the qualities of SROI. Beyond the fiscal benefits associated with preventing homelessness, such as decreased use of emergency medical services and decreased housing costs, beneficiaries report increased feelings of community safety and greater mental stability. The final report ensures that all stakeholders have a more complete picture of both the costs and the ‘real’ returns to investing in social programs.

Habilitationsschrift--Cologne. / Bibliography: [243]-267.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Psychology, Committee on Human Development, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The mainstream investment climate literature often fails to take account the methods that firms in developing countries adopt in order to mitigate the effects of a poor investment climate. A better understanding of these informal “coping strategies” may add to the body of knowledge on what is important, and what isn’t, when it comes to prioritising investment climate reforms in developing and transitional economies. Original research from Vietnam, a country which is growing rapidly and in the midst of its transition from plan to market, shows how firms have been able to adapt their business operations given an unstable and partially reformed institutional enabling environment. By comparing the behaviour of manufacturing enterprises across a number of differing local jurisdictions, we are able to discern just how firm level coping strategies adapt. We find evidence that entrepreneurs are able to use a variety of informal institutional mechanisms to invest and operate in an inhospitable business environment where private property rights are not well protected and develop “second best” response mechanisms. These mechanisms include establishing formal and informal networks and linkages, seeking patronage and protection, and by sharing ownership with potential expropriators. We also find evidence that in the face of weak property rights protection, firms adopt approaches to reduce the costs to the original investors if third party expropriation is attempted and are less likely to reinvest retained earnings. Where they do invest, it is principally in dissolvable and/or movable assets, and adopting a higher discount rate or risk adjusted time value of money for capital investments. Similarly, we find evidence of linkages between measures of firm confidence in the local investment climate, and the extent to which firms are willing to employ outside salaried management. Thus, the thesis provides a contribution to the growing literature reviewing the development of formal and informal investment climate institutions in transitional and developing economies. The principle research finding, namely that the establishment and use of informal or second best institutional arrangements can offset some of the costs and risks associated with an otherwise weak and unstable business environment, has important implications for policymakers when it comes to the prioritization of investment climate reforms in developing countries.

This dissertation consists of three chapters studying topics in development economics and political economy. The first two chapters explore the political economy of drought relief in India and potential consequences for local economies. The third chapter focuses on the effect of the residential segregation of the South Asian community on the political views of natives in England and Wales. In the first chapter, I study the allocation of drought relief in three states of southern India between 2008 and 2019. I compare the observed allocation against the national government’s guidelines for drought relief and show that state governments systematically deviate from these guidelines. To assess the potential role of political motives in this mistargeting, I develop a dynamic probabilistic voting model. The model provides testable implications relating electoral incentives to the allocation of relief, which I show hold empirically. In the second chapter, I consider the potential impacts of receiving drought relief on agricultural output at the local level. Using a satellite-based vegetation index as a proxy for agricultural production, I find that drought relief is associated with increased agricultural output. However, I also show that this positive correlation is strongest when relief is appropriately allocated to drought-affected areas. I consider a number of alternative explanations for these results, but conclude that the results are consistent with drought relief being more effective in drought-affected areas. In the third chapter (joint with Sergio Villar Vallenas), we study how the size and spatial distribution of South Asians influences the sentiments of natives towards the group in England and Wales. We use voting for the British National Party (BNP), an extreme right political party, to measure natives’ sentiment. One obstacle to causally identifying the effect of segregation on the voting for the BNP is that the antipathy for South Asians reflected in BNP support might lead to segregation. To address this concern, we isolate variation in the settlement patterns of South Asians using historical immigration patterns. We find that a rise in the residential segregation of South Asians increases voting for the BNP in both a European Parliament and UK general election.

The study explores the fundamental causes of poverty persistence, which remains a central challenge of the modern world. In theory, rising political participation operationalises checks on state predation and cultivates development-enabling state capacity. This did not materialise in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. The theoretical foundation of this premise is further brought into question by the development achievements of strong, capable non-democracies. The study uses a dynamic, panel-data model to explore a probabilistic development hypothesis that fuses broad institutionalism with modernisation and human empowerment. The model relies on regime-independent state capacity to trigger the transformational impetus of rising existential security, autonomy and individual agency. Ensuing shifts in societal value orientations towards emancipative mindsets then drive the progression towards prosperity. The results show that the poor-country deficit in human empowerment, represented by mind-broadening education and emancipative values, dwarfs the shortfalls in all other drivers of prosperity, including exports and investment. The findings rule against geography and democracy as direct drivers of prosperity. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / National Research Foundation (NRF) / Economics / PhD / Unrestricted

Moroccan manufacturing firms generally choose to incorporate under one of two legal forms: ‘Société Anonyme’ (SA) and ‘Société À Responsibilité Limitée’ (SARL). This thesis is about that choice and its consequence for firms’ access to bank overdraft facilities. In 2001, Morocco made a radical change to its company law regime: it replaced a company law dating from 19th-century France with modern standards of corporate governance and accountability. In Chapter One, I use the two-period FACS/ICA panel to analyse that reform and to evaluate its impact upon manufacturing firms’ access to bank credit. I find that the reform induced a substantial share of SA firms to switch to SARL, and that — relative to firms remaining in the SA status — this caused a significant and substantial withdrawal of bank overdraft facilities. In Chapter Two, I develop a theoretical model in which an agent signals its continuous type by using a variable that may take one of only two values (a ‘binary signal’); this is intended to represent a firm’s choice of legal status. I show that this binary signal provides only ‘coarse information’, and I consider the consequences of this coarseness; I solve for equilibrium conditions and I consider both the role of a principal’s risk aversion and the role of other observable agent characteristics (‘indices’). Chapter Three uses the results of Chapter Two to develop a new structural methodology for the separate identification of information and incentive effects. I apply the method to the data used in Chapter One, on the subset of firms having an overdraft facility in both survey periods (approximately two-thirds of the total sample). I find that, among that limited sample, there is no relevant information asymmetry. I estimate the potential welfare loss and conclude that, in the 95% confidence region of potential information effects and incentive effects, the maximum median welfare loss from information asymmetry is equivalent to approximately only 3% of the median bank overdraft limit. For the sample of firms having an overdraft facility in both survey periods, this challenges the common narrative that information asymmetry is an important reason for bank credit market failure.

This is a dissertation about the organisational structure of the World Bank, the professional practice of evaluation, and the meaning of the concept of aid effectiveness in practice. In international development, evaluation is a professional activity that determines and then reports on the impacts of aid projects and programmes to the clients of such efforts and to the public. 'Aid effectiveness' is a concept that refers to a standard of how aid projects and organisations should operate and the results, such as economic growth and poverty alleviation, which these efforts should deliver in order to work. The concept of 'aid effectiveness' has also been used in the debate about international development as a system and its reform. Given that aid policymakers and academic researchers often use the data contained in development organisations evaluations to determine the extent to which aid projects and programmes are 'effective', it is critical to analyse what these evaluations measure and what influences their ratings and judgments. Based on a case study of the World Bank, the analysis is primarily qualitative and draws on both interviews with evaluation professionals in the World Bank and content analyses of the logical framework, indicators, and language in the World Bank's evaluations at the project- and country-level. Building on the previous theoretical work in post-structuralism that considers how international development organisations 'produce' their work through certain terms and processes (Escobar, 1995; Crush, 1995), I assess how the professional practice of evaluation in the Bank 'produces' the results of aid at the project- and country-level, specifically in the evaluation reports that it makes publically available. The World Banks data and evaluation reports are a window through which to understand the impact of aid, and several factors that influence this 'window' are assessed, including the institutional role of evaluation, the professional practice of evaluation, and the required evaluation processes within the World Bank. The study has important implications for practitioners of international development, academic researchers, and evaluation professionals who endeavour to improve the aid system and often rely on the results of the World Bank's evaluations to inform their understanding of the impact of particular development efforts. By reshaping the discussion from one which considers if aid 'works' to one about the data and the process of making a judgment about the success of aid projects and programmes, I articulate what the role of evaluation is in practice and what the World Bank's resulting evaluative data do and do not reflect about the World Bank's work. The relationship between the 'scales' of aid is also analysed by comparing and contrasting the evaluation processes at the project-level and the country-level. I challenge the notion of a 'micro-macro paradox' (Mosley, 1986) between the successful results of the World Banks projects and the economic development in its client countries by articulating the actual meaning of this data in context, the unseen institutional forces that shape this data, and the difficulty of asserting a linear relationship between the results of projects and programmes on different scales of aid.

This thesis tackles issues related to regional integration, trade costs and aid, with empirical work related to the East African Community (EAC). The common thread is the impact of various types of trade costs on the structure and functioning of the economies of EAC member states. The first chapter introduces the literature and chapters 2, 3 and 4 constitute the core of the thesis. Chapter 2 develops a three-good, two-country duality-based general equilibrium model to investigate the effects of different types of aid and preferential trade on welfare and relative prices. The model is innovative in two ways: (i) a regionally tradable good is introduced, the price of which is determined endogenously, (ii) a regional infrastructure good, bought with aid monies, is brought in which lowers trade costs within the region. Using comparative statics, the properties of the model are explored in terms of the effects of tariff and aid shocks on welfare and relative prices. Chapter 3 develops a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model calibrated on Uganda and Kenya to gauge the importance of chapter 2’s results. The regional spill-over is now modeled as regional public capital serving as an input in both countries’ production functions. The simulations show how Kenya effectively exports some of the standard aid-induced real exchange rate appreciation to Uganda through a regional trade channel. Distributionally, Kenya’s urban and Uganda’s rural households win—which corresponds to regional comparative advantage patterns. Abolishing the intra-regional tariff increases welfare in Uganda and reduces it in Kenya, showing the ambiguous welfare results of Customs Unions known since Viner. Chapter 4 gauges the importance of border effects in Eastern Africa by testing the law-ofone- price (LOP) hypothesis on a consumer price data-set covering 24 goods in 39 cities in 4 countries. Using level regressions a significant border effect is found, whilst distance also plays a big role, both between and within countries. Neither the nominal exchange rate, nor non-tariff barriers (NTBs) reduce the border effect very much, even though both variables are significant. Looking at specific goods, markets for staple foods are the most integrated. As for the impact of the Customs Union between Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya (since 2005), there is a positive integration effect for the Kenya-Uganda border. Finally, Kenya’s political crisis at the end of 2007 can be linked to higher departures from the LOP throughout the region and can thus be said to have had clear knock-on effects for the landlocked EAC countries that depend on it as a transit country.

This thesis explores learning and formation of cognitive and non-cognitive skills within formal and non-formal environments, as well as the impact of migration on fertility behaviour in three separate empirical studies. In two of the papers (Chapters 2 and 4) I utilise a 13 year individual-level panel data-set from rural Tanzania, while the third one (Chapter 3) is based on cross-sectional data that I collected in urban Bombay slums in 2007. I consider skill acquisition and learning in a number of spheres. First, I adopt the conventional notion of school-based learning and examine the role of income shocks in evolution of schooling inequalities, in rural Tanzania. I find evidence of shock-induced permanent changes in the schooling of those affected by the shocks in later childhood (age 7-13), 10-13 years later. Further, I find suggestive evidence that the household short-term labour response may to be one of the mechanisms for these long-term effects. Next, I broaden the definition of learning to include acquisition of non-cognitive skills. Although there is growing recognition of the importance of these, there is no evidence, within a developing country context, on effectiveness of interventions targeting them. The second paper is an evaluation of a long-term non-formal schooling intervention in Bombay slums, which works on raising non-cognitive skills, including self-esteem, a sense of agency, and aspirations of children. It shows that, like cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills can be effectively raised through sustained intervention, offering evidence of substantial positive programme effects. The final paper turns to examining the impact of migration among young women on fertility behaviour. Econometric panel data methods are combined with an instrumenting strategy to offer evidence of a causal positive impact of migration on the age at which women start having children, which is shown to be likely to have permanent effects on total fertility. The findings are most consistent with the presence of temporary post migration disruption effects.