Labor Markets and Poverty in Village Economies

By Imran Rasul. 2015

376 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study how women's choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty. To do this we conduct a large-scale randomized control trial, covering over 21,000 households in 1,309 villages surveyed four times over a seven year period, to evaluate a nationwide program in Bangladesh that transfers livestock assets and skills to the poorest women. At baseline, the poorest women mostly engage in low return and seasonal casual wage labor while wealthier women solely engage in livestock rearing. The program enables poor women to start engaging in livestock rearing, increasing their aggregate labor supply and earnings. This leads to asset accumulation (livestock, land and business assets) and poverty reduction, both sustained after four and seven years. These gains do not crowd out the livestock businesses of noneligible households while the wages these receive for casual jobs increase as the poor reduce their labor supply. Our results show that: (i) the poor are able to take on the work activities of the non-poor but face barriers to doing so, and, (ii) one-off interventions that remove these barriers lead to sustainable poverty reduction.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a7b9e4ef7b164d96b6c6cebf3aaecbdaddc5269c

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Citations in the corpus

Universal Basic Income in the Developing World (2019, positive): “Bandiera et al. (2017) evaluate the same program in Bangladesh and find that the treated are richer and own more assets both after”
Why do people stay poor? (2020, methodology): “The emerging evidence suggests that though the the evidence on cash transfers is mixed, large asset transfer programs like the one we study seem to have persistent effects (Blattman, Fiala, and Martinez, 2013; Banerjee et al., 2015b; Araujo, Bosch, and Schady, 2017; Bandiera et al., 2017; Blattman, ”
Can Microfinance Unlock a Poverty Trap for Some Entrepreneurs? (2019, background): “Balboni et al. (2018) find evidence consistent with poverty traps among the ultra-poor in Bangladesh, following up on the evaluation of a large productive asset transfer analyzed in Bandiera et al. (2017).”
Household Matters: Revisiting the Returns to Capital among Female Microentrepreneurs (2019, background): “…and find that gender of the recipient is irrelevant for household outcomes ( see Haushofer and Shapiro 2016, Fiala 2018, Benhassine et al. 2015, and Bandiera et al. 2017 for examples from the cash-transfer literature, and see Augsburg et al. 2015 and Kevane and Wydick 2001 for examples from the…”
Cash transfers and labor supply: Evidence from a large-scale program in Iran (2018, positive): “There is also a smaller but expanding literature that examines the impact of cash transfers, conditional or unconditional, on labor supply (Bandiera et al. 2017; Banerjee et al. 2015; Bosch and Manacorda 2012; Mena and Hernani-Limarino 2015).”
Microfinance and economic development (2017, background): “…profits (de Mel et al. 2008, McKenzie and Woodruff 2008, McKenzie 2016, and Fafchanps et al. 2013), while asset grant programs to the ultra-poor have generally led to substantial increases in assets, income, and consumption (see Bandiera et al. 2016; Bauchet et al. 2015 give a counter-example).”