This thesis analyses issues related to aid in Ethiopia and provision of elder care in the US. The first essay assesses the targeting of two major aid interventions, public works and food aid. Both types of aid are primarily allocated through community-based targeting. The few studies that have analysed the accuracy of aid targeting in Ethiopia have shown biases along demography, geography and political affiliations lines. With the introduction in 2005 of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), a major social protection programme, several administrative guidelines were introduced aimed at improving targeting. This paper uses the last two rounds of the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey to investigate whether there were changes in both targeting determinants, and amount received for PSNP public works and food aid components from 2004 to 2009. Overall, the PSNP appears to be allocated on the basis of observable-poverty-related characteristics, and food aid on household demographics. In addition, results suggest for both PSNP and food aid beneficiaries, political connections are significant in determining receipt of the program in 2004, but no longer in 2009, indicating an improvement towards means-based targeting. The second essay investigates the long-term effectiveness of emergency aid in Ethiopia in pro- tecting child health from the negative effects of a severe drought that hit the country in 2011. Child malnutrition remains a critical issue in Ethiopia and the literature has shown that shocks can have long lasting effects on physical and cognitive development. Using the two rounds of the Ethiopian Rural Socioeconomic Survey (ERSS) collected in 2011 and 2013, I explore the impact of emergency aid on child height-for-age aged 0-36 months two years after the drought had occurred. Because aid was not randomly allocated, I use a matching estimator to account for selection into the programme. The results show that emergency aid was effective in protecting children that experienced the drought. In the last essay, I research the effects of kindergarten eligibility on the provision of elder care in the US. I am able to identify the trade-off between child care and elder care by exploiting age eligibility criterion for public kindergarten, in combination with state-level variation, in the provision of full-time kindergarten. Through a reduced form approach, I estimate the Intention to Treat (ITT) for the effect of eligibility to kindergarten on provision of elder care. The results show that having the youngest child aged 5 in states that offer full-time kindergarten increases the probability of providing elder care by around 9 percentage points, which corresponds to 63 percentage increase to the baseline. The effect is higher for females (9.2) than for males (8.1).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:720410 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Valli, Elsa |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/69365/ |
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