The development therapy aims to share the state of the art in academic research related to Development Economics, but also share field work experiences and advise, as well as anecdotes, reflections and anguishes... at the end, this is a therapy!
This is a small but very specialized and well organized
conference, which rotates every year between Madison and Minnesota.Gordon Hanson gave a thought
provoking keynote talk about dynamic
comparative advantages.
I presented one of the papers using the Gambia networks
data. Many papers called my attention, among them some deserve special mention:
We are currently finishing the data cleaning of the second round of networks data collected in the Gambia in 2014, and we expect soon to have the first results. We will have a unique census panel dataset of several social and economic exchange networks in 56 villages and a large village-level RCT between the two waves... looking forward to show the results!
But many researchers, some outside the project's group, have used the baseline Gambia Networks Data 2009, creating a small literature around the data. Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to put all these papers together. This is the list so far:
As the end of the year is approaching, a little summary of my research work during 2014. This year I spent a lot of time in the field collecting the data for the follow-up survey of the Gambia Networks Project. We are currently cleaning the new data and looking forward to have a panel data of economic networks of our beloved villages. In the meantime, I kept working on the papers that use the baseline data. In a new working paper, joint with my Maestro Jean-Louis Arcand, we present evidence that ethnic diversity does not reduce economic interaction in rural Gambian villages:
Using a unique dataset collected in 59 rural Gambian villages, we study how ethnic heterogeneity is related to the structure of four economic exchange networks: land, labor, inputs and credit. We find that different measures of village-level ethnic fragmentation are mostly uncorrelated with network structure. At a more disaggregated level, household heads belonging to ethnic minorities are not less central than those from the predominant ethnicity in any of the networks and, at the dyadic level, the fact that two households share ethnicity is not an economically significant predictor of link formation. Our results indicate that, in the particular setting of our study, the structure of the exchange networks is better defined by other variables than ethnicity, and that ethnic heterogeneity is unlikely to be a driver for sub-optimal economic exchanges. We argue that our findings can be interpreted in a causal way as the current distribution of ethnic groups in rural Gambia is largely influenced by specific historical features of the British colonial administration. Moreover, the network structure of our data allow us to include fixed effects at different levels as well as to precisely measure kinship ties, a confounding variable often omitted in previous studies
As the end of the year is approaching, a little summary of my research work of 2014.
After more than four years of work, I am very proud that eventually "missing links, missing markets", one of the papers from the Gambia Networks Project, will be published in 2015 at World Development:
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the empirical analysis of the transformation process in traditional rural societies using a network perspective. A unique database collected in 60 villages in rural Gambia is used to study the ways in which households with links outside the village (a proxy for market connections) behave in the locally available exchange networks for land, labor, inputs, and credit. The econometric results at different levels of disaggregation provide suggestive evidence of substitutability between internal and external economic interactions, particularly in the case of reciprocal exchanges.
Here the original post about the paper, here Marc Bellemare's review.
The idea that some features of the multilateral trading system create incentives for countries to join preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is among the first and most influential explanations for the wave of regionalism in the last decades. Until recently, only a few empirical studies have explored this hypothesis and their results have been accepted by many researchers and policy-makers to be a fact. In this study we revisit the question of whether multilateral events are important determinants of regionalism. We use an extended dataset and implement several empirical specifications in the analysis. Unlike previous work, our results provide little support for the relevance of variables such as the number of GATT/WTO members, ongoing trade negotiation rounds, and trade disputes as predictors of PTA formation.
In the last 3 weeks I have been conducting fieldwork in The Gambia and Senegal in the framework of the project AFRASO, an initiative of University of Frankfurt to understand Asia-Africa interactions in a multidisciplinary perspective. My focus is on development cooperation in the agricultural sector. And in the case of The Gambia, the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan) is one of the most important bilateral donors, particularly after 2005. When then president of Senegal Abdoulaye Wade decided to switch diplomatic recognition from ROC to Mainland China, the Taiwanese technical mission was forced to leave the country and reallocated part of their staff to the "smiling coast".
Some local cultural aspects have become a big headache for the Taiwanese efforts to promote development cooperation as a way to keep on their side one of the few diplomatic allies they still have in Africa. Since British colonial times, one of the problems for agricultural endeavours in The Gambia has been the deeply ingrained gender division of labor in Mandinka culture, the predominant ethnicity, which has also been adopted by other groups, like the Fulani. While men cultivate groundnut, millet, and fruits, rice and horticulture are the exclusive domain of women.
The main elements of the Taiwanese agricultural technical cooperation in The Gambia are rice production (which I will describe in detail in future posts) and "women gardens". Previous research has shown that indeed one of the main problems for the sustainability of the production in the gardens is the lack of men's involvement in any of the tasks. But this seems to be changing...
As can be seen in the video below, captured during our visit to the most famous of the gardens (Bajulunding, close the the capital city and the airport), now there are many men involved in the production. It seems like in recent years the Taiwanese have convinced some guys to work there by directly hiring them for a portion of the garden dedicated to the consumption of the embassy staff and for some concrete tasks as operating the machines.
But this is not the only change. In the video it is possible to see boys working side-by-side with their mothers in the gardens! This is unthinkable in rural villages and was in this same garden some years ago. Maybe it is too early to say, but this can be part of an Asian-driven cultural change in The Gambia.
This weekend will start the CSAE conference 2013 in Oxford, the largest gathering of experts on Africa related economic topics and one of the most important conferences about economic development in general.
My co-author Asha Abdel Rahim (University of Juba) will be presenting our work (also joint with Aleksi Ylonen) about households returning to their communities of origin in the Nuba Mountains after the signature of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Sudan's civil war in 2005.
The session will be available in live web broadcast here.
Asha collected this data in 2008, when expectations of a long lasting peace were high and the coexistence between former enemies was not utopical. Unfortunately, shortly after the data was collected the situation deteriorated and the war resumed in the area in 2011, the same period when the former Nuba allies in the south were preparing to secede and create South Sudan. Therefore the Nuba area was transformed in the southern border of Sudan instead of being the (still always isolated) center of the country.
The inherent problems of data collection in post conflict areas implied that some important information (like place of displacement or ethnicity) was not registered, and the restart of the conflict impeded any follow-up. Given these shortcomings, it is difficult to attempt a causal analysis of the effects of displacement but the uniqueness of the data make it worthy to be described in detail.
In particular, we are interested in compare returnee households with those who stayed in the villages during the war. Around 300,000 persons returned to Nuba communities after the CPA, and in the 8 villages of our sample (344 households), around 40% of the households are returnees.
We actually find many differences:
- Returnees tend to own less assets than stayers. (This is not surprising, and in line with previous findings by Ibanez and Moya, 2010; Fiala, 2012, among others).
- Returnee households cultivate more agricultural varieties, but mainly staples. Stayers are more likely to cultivate cash crops. (Previous studies had shown differences in production structure, but I am not aware of previous findings mentioning this staple/cash crop differences)
- Returnees have better health outcomes, in the sense of household members having a lower probability of contracting serious diseases. (This is somehow in contradiction to Verwimp, 2012, but in line with the findings of Hynes et al. 2002)
- We actually relate the last finding to two possible explanations (apart from self selection into displacement): The fact that returnees tend to have better hygiene habits (in terms of washing their hands and other attitudes, potentially learned during displaced) and the targeted support of NGOs in the post conflict period.
We hope that our contribution can help to the post conflict efforts when the current devastating, and largely unknown and neglected, conflict in the Nuba Mountains comes to and end. Hopefully soon.
A good source of information of the current events in the Nuba Mountains is NubaReports:
It is actually a "block seminar", meaning students pick up a topic and I will be guiding them to write a term-paper during the semester.
This is first time I will be responsible for this course, so I am sharing the syllabus, with the hope to receive some feedback about relevant topics and papers I may be missing. My students (maybe) and I (for sure) will be very grateful to any suggestions!
Topics: Conflicts and Economic Development (MIIEP-Goethe University, Summer 2013)
I am preparing a first draft of a joint paper with Asha Abdel Rahim and Aleksi Ylonen. We analyze data that Asha collected in the Nuba Mountains in 2008, when a short interwar period made possible for international institutions to enter the area.
Given I am not expert in the topic (but Asha and Aleksi are), I am trying to understand the situation from different sources. Nuba Mountains is one of the most isolated places on earth, so there is no so much information. One of the first things you find on the web is the fantastic photographic work of the (in)famous Leni Riefenstahl.
She was prized worldwide from her work in Nuba, and for some it was her redemption after a dark past... but then I found this really amazing documentary made in 1998 by the Slovenian writer, documentary film maker, human rights activist, journalist and worldwide traveler Tomo Kriznar, some of the few that was in the area during the civil war in the 90s. He went back to the village in which Leni did most of her work, and discovered something really disturbing. There were no more naked painted people dancing and wresting. Instead, they were dressed and reading the Koran... what had happened? One of the elders told him: "IT WAS THE BOOK". Which book??? After Khartoum discovered Riefenstahl's book , decided to increase the Arabization and military control in Kau village and the rest of Nuba... her camera was a deadly weapon, again.
La transición desde actividades económicas primitivas a intercambios más complejos que eventualmente han dado origen a economías de mercado y otros sistemas económicos modernos fue un elemento importante en la estructura de las teorías de los economistas clásicos y una punto fundamental para los primeros sociólogos económicos como Thorsten Veblen, Max Weber y, en particular, Karl Polanyi. En la "Gran transformación" de Polanyi, las economías modernas son formadas a partir de una red de intercambios recíprocos de comunidades aisladas que evoluciona hasta un sistema que institucionaliza el mercado. El concepto de economías primitivas como intercambios recíprocos se basa principalmente en la influyente descripción de Malinowski del sistema de producción de los habitantes de las islas Trobriand, la que a su vez es la base para el análisis de Mauss sobre la economía del don.
El proceso de transformación fue formalizado por Rachel Kranton (AER, 1996). En su modelo los agentes deciden entre intercambios recíprocos (economía del don) con "agentes conocidos" (en términos de preferencias, costos de producción y otras características relevantes), o transacciones de mercado con agentes anónimos, utilizando dinero como medio de intercambio. Si el costo de búsqueda de agentes anónimos es mayor que el beneficio que se obtiene por la diversificación de consumo que ofrecen los mercados, los agentes preferirán intercambios recíprocos. Uno de los principales resultados es que la reciprocidad se puede mantener incluso si existe la alternativa de usar el mercado para las transacciones.
El objetivo de mi investigación es contribuir al estudio empírico del proceso de transformación de las sociedades rurales tradicionales utilizando una perspectiva de análisis de redes. Para esto he tenido la fortuna de recolectar, luego de de 3 meses de trabajo de campo, una base de datos única sobre redes económicas (tierra, trabajo, insumos y crédito) en 60 comunidades rurales de Gambia. En estas aldeas predominan los intercambios económicos tradicionales no monetarios, pero unos pocos hogares participan en transacciones de mercado (en torno al 10%). El objetivo es explorar si estos hogares tienen un comportamiento distinto dentro de la economía de la comunidad.
La red de intercambios económicos en una de las aldeas
Como se puede ver en la figura anterior, la mayoría de los hogares de la aldea están conectados con al menos un enlace en uno o más intercambios económicos. Además, muchos de estos intercambios son recíprocos (el enlace es bidireccional). Si el proceso de transformación es cierto, los hogares con conexiones de mercado debiesen tender a abandonar las transacciones dentro de la aldea y en particular aquellas que implican reciprocidad.
En el análisis empírico los datos son estudiados tanto a nivel de hogares y como nivel de cada enlace (link-level), utilizando técnicas de propensity score matching, MCO en modelos lineales y regresiones diádicas. En todas las especificaciones econométricas se encuentra evidencia para las dos hipótesis principales: (i) Sustituibilidad entre intercambios internos y externos, es decir, hogares con relaciones económicas externas son menos propensos a estar involucrados en interacciones económicas dentro de la aldea, y (ii) reciprocidad versus mercado, o sea que hogares con relaciones económicas externas son menos propensos a estar involucrados en intercambios recíprocos con otros miembros de la comunidad.
Si bien los resultados muestran una relación negativa entre participación en transacciones de mercado y en la economía de la aldea, no es evidente interpretar ésta en forma causal. Para eso se deben cumplir ciertos supuestos especificados en el paper. Básicamente, se debe esperar que las características no observables que determinan la creación de enlaces internos afecten a la formación de los enlaces externos en una misma dirección. Yo sostengo que esto es probable, pero un potencial sesgo en la estimación sigue siendo un problema no resuelto totalmente, y que permanece como desafío a tratar en futuras investigaciones.
Incluso si los resultados se consideran como correlaciones parciales, se pueden deducir importantes implicaciones para políticas públicas y de cooperación internacional. Muchos programas de desarrollo rural tienen como objetivo aumentar la integración de aldeas remotas al mercado. Estos programas podrían tener efectos secundarios no deseados, tales como la reducción de interacciones dentro de la comunidad y la destrucción del sistema de intercambio en que se basa la economía del don. Por lo tanto, es necesario tener en cuenta la complejidad de los intercambios de éstas comunidades para poder comprender los efectos de intervenciones orientadas al mercado. Por ejemplo, Von Braun and Webb (1989) y Carney and Watts (1990) han mostrado como en Gambia programas que intentaron aumentar la productividad agrícola y la producción de cultivos comerciales fallaron porque el sistema económico tradicional no fue considerado en el diseño.
Reunión de aldea en que los datos de redes de intercambio económico fueron recolectados
