Journal of Development Economics 2025年 1月刊 目录与摘要
刊发卷期：Volume 172
刊发时间：January 2025
期刊等级：ABS 3
出版厂商：Elsevier
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目录
1.Better together? Group incentives and the demand for prevention
Mylène Lagarde, Carlos Riumallo Herl
2.Do entrepreneurial skills unlock opportunities for online freelancing? Experimental evidence from El Salvador
Maria Victoria Fazio, Richard Freund, Rafael Novella
3.Growing apart: Declining within- and across-locality insurance in rural China
Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Corina Mommaerts, Yu Zheng
4.Aid allocation with optimal monitoring: Theory and policy
François Bourguignon, Jean-Philippe Platteau
5.Are students really biased against female professors? — Experimental evidence from India
Puneet Arora, Moumita Roy
6.The quiet revolution: Send-down movement and female empowerment in China
Chong Liu, Wenyi Lu, Ye Yuan
8.Poverty mapping in the age of machine learning
Paul Corral, Heath Henderson, Sandra Segovia
9.Robots as guardians: Industrial automation and workplace safety in China
Wei Luo, Lixin Tang, Yaxin Yang, Xianqiang Zou
10.Young women in cities: Urbanization and gender-biased migration
Yumi Koh, Jing Li, Yifan Wu, Junjian Yi, Hanzhe Zhang
11.Riders on the storm: How do firms navigate production and market conditions amid El Niño?
Maria Bas, Caroline Paunov
12.The transition to direct mayoral elections in clientelistic environments: Causal public spending and service delivery effects
Blane D. Lewis, Sarah Dong
13.Combining survey and census data for improved poverty prediction using semi-supervised deep learning
Damien Echevin, Guy Fotso, Yacine Bouroubi, Harold Coulombe, Qing Li
14.The persistence of trade relocation from civil conflict
Tobias Korn, Henry Stemmler
15.Electricity and female employment: Evidence from Tajikistan’s winter energy crisis
Adrian Poignant
16.Discretion, talent allocation, and governance performance: Evidence from China’s imperial bureaucracy
Kevin Zhengcheng Liu, Xiaoming Zhang
17.The effects of expanding worker rights to children
Leah K. Lakdawala, Diana Martínez Heredia, Diego Vera-Cossio
18.A policy for the jobless youth in South Africa
Amina Ebrahim, Jukka Pirttilä
19.What you do (not) get when expanding the net - Evidence from forced taxpayer registrations in South Africa
Collen Lediga, Nadine Riedel, Kristina Strohmaier
20.How to improve education outcomes most efficiently? A review of the evidence using a unified metric
Noam Angrist, David K. Evans, Deon Filmer, Rachel Glennerster, Halsey Rogers, Shwetlena Sabarwal
21.Ethnic diversity and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from refugee-hosting areas
Luisito Bertinelli, Rana Cömertpay, Jean-François Maystadt
22.Does social capital positively influence loan performance even during a crisis?
Sumit Agarwal, Prasanna Tantri, Nitin Vishen
23.How does progressivity impact tax morale? Experimental evidence across developing countries
Christopher Hoy
24.Estimating poverty for India after 2011 using private-sector survey data
Sutirtha Sinha Roy, Roy van der Weide
25.Public pensions and family dynamics: Eldercare, child investment, and son preference in rural China
Naijia Guo, Wei Huang, Ruixin Wang
26.Blaming the wind? The impact of wind turbine on bird biodiversity
Lina Meng, Pengfei Liu, Yinggang Zhou, Yingdan Mei
27.A tale of framing and screening: How health messaging and house screening affect malaria transmission in Ethiopia
Solomon Balew, Erwin Bulte, Zewdu Abro, Abebe Asale, Clifford Mutero, Menale Kassie
28.Shooting a moving target: Evaluating targeting tools for social programs when income fluctuates
Diether W. Beuermann, Bridget Hoffmann, Marco Stampini, David L. Vargas, Diego Vera-Cossio
29.Vehicle exhaust standards and urban air quality in China
Li Shu, Chunhua Wang, Wei Wang
30.E-invoicing, tax audits and VAT compliance
Christos Kotsogiannis, Luca Salvadori, John Karangwa, Innocente Murasi
31.Cover more for less: Targeted drug coverage, chronic disease management, and medical spending
Julie Shi, Wanyu Yang, Ye Yuan
摘要
1.Better together? Group incentives and the demand for prevention
Mylène Lagarde, Carlos Riumallo Herl
In a field experiment with 400 groups of informal entrepreneurs in El Salvador, we compare the impact of group incentives (linked to compliance of all members) to equivalent individual ones to encourage cardiovascular check-ups. We test two incentive designs: small rewards and lotteries. Group incentives are as effective as individual ones at increasing demand for prevention, but, unlike individual incentives, they fail to target those with potentially higher health risks. The equal effectiveness of group incentives is linked to more communication, coordination between members and, to some extent, peer pressure. These social dynamics contribute to reduce uncertainty about other group members’ decisions and enhance the perceived net benefit of prevention. Although the preventive check-ups do not induce short-term lifestyle changes, they substantially increase the detection of new risk factors, making all incentives highly cost-effective interventions in this population.
2.Do entrepreneurial skills unlock opportunities for online freelancing? Experimental evidence from El Salvador
Maria Victoria Fazio, Richard Freund, Rafael Novella
This paper reports on a randomized experiment in El Salvador that aimed to improve online labor market outcomes by teaching the entrepreneurial skills required to engage with online marketplaces. Despite low completion rates, we find that assignment to the training significantly increases online freelancing outcomes, such as the probability of having an online freelancing profile, the number of proposals sent, receiving at least one job offer, and securing at least one online freelancing contract. We also observe improved socioemotional skills. However, we find no significant effects of the program on the number of job offers, contracts, or any broader labor market outcomes. Further analysis suggests that poor initial job ratings may have hindered sustained success in online freelancing. Overall, despite some initial success, the program failed to have a lasting impact on the livelihoods of the participants.
3.Growing apart: Declining within- and across-locality insurance in rural China
Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Corina Mommaerts, Yu Zheng
We consider risk sharing in rural China during its rapid economic transformation from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. We document an erosion of consumption insurance against both household-level idiosyncratic and village-level aggregate income shocks, and show that this decline is related to observable economic changes: the shift out of agriculture, the decline of publicly owned Township-and-Village Enterprises, and increased migrant work. Further evidence suggests that as these changes took place at the village level, higher levels of government failed to offset these effects through the tax-and-transfer system, leaving households more exposed to both idiosyncratic and village-aggregate risk.
4.Aid allocation with optimal monitoring: Theory and policy
François Bourguignon, Jean-Philippe Platteau
We explore the implications of allowing a poverty-averse donor to monitor aid use within the familiar context of the needs vs. aid effectiveness tradeoff. The paper focuses on the optimal aid allocation between two countries when the donor simultaneously decides about aid shares and country-specific monitoring effort aimed at increasing the amount reaching the poor. Endogenizing aid effectiveness is shown to raise the poor’s income in the worse-governed country, yet not necessarily in the better-governed one, whereas the effect on country aid shares is essentially ambiguous. Those results still hold when the basic model is extended in various directions. Conventional aid allocation rules should be re-examined in their light.
5.Are students really biased against female professors? — Experimental evidence from India
Puneet Arora, Moumita Roy
We investigate the presence of gender bias in student evaluations of teaching (SETs) in India using a natural field experiment. In the first two treatments, we randomly assigned 504 students to attend an identical audio–visual lecture, manipulating the perceived gender of the professor. In two subsequent treatments, we provide additional information about the professors’ credentials to signal their competence. When we vary the perceived gender, on average, we do not find any significant differences in SETs received by female and male professors. However, the perceived-female professor receives higher SETs on average in treatments with additional information. Further, we find that in-group bias can be a potential channel to explain our results. Our findings highlight the context-dependent nature of gender bias in SETs and provide evidence of the differential impact of information by gender.
6.The quiet revolution: Send-down movement and female empowerment in China
Chong Liu, Wenyi Lu, Ye Yuan
What promotes female empowerment and gender equality? We investigate how internal population mobility and social interaction foster the advancement of female empowerment and gender equality across diverse subpopulations. Using the urban-to-rural youth resettlement program in China during the 1970s — the Send-down Movement — as our empirical context, we find that rural females with greater exposure to urban youths have achieved higher levels of education, increased labor force participation, greater financial independence, enhanced autonomy in marital and fertility decisions, increased political engagement, heightened self-confidence, reduced risk aversion, and a stronger belief in gender-equal ideologies and social values. Our findings underscore the role of population mobility in disseminating gender-equal ideologies and practices, both through human capital formation and social interactions, leading to lasting impacts on female empowerment in traditional societies.
8.Poverty mapping in the age of machine learning
Paul Corral, Heath Henderson, Sandra Segovia
Recent years have witnessed considerable methodological advances in poverty mapping, much of which has focused on the application of modern machine-learning approaches to remotely-sensed data. Poverty maps produced with these methods generally share a common validation procedure, which assesses model performance by comparing sub-national poverty estimates with survey-based, direct estimates. While unbiased, direct estimates can be imprecise measures of true poverty rates, meaning that it is unclear whether these validation procedures are informative of actual model performance. In this paper, we use a rich dataset from Mexico to provide a more rigorous assessment of the modern approach to poverty mapping by evaluating its performance against a credible ground truth. We find that the modern method under-performs relative to benchmark traditional methods, largely because of the limited predictive capacity of remotely-sensed covariates. For a given covariate set, we also find that machine learning produces more biased poverty estimates than the traditional procedures, particularly for the poorest geographic areas.
9.Robots as guardians: Industrial automation and workplace safety in China
Wei Luo, Lixin Tang, Yaxin Yang, Xianqiang Zou
Industrial robots can improve workplace safety by performing hazardous tasks on behalf of workers. This paper examines the impact of industrial robots on workplace safety in China. We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in robot exposure reduces annual workplace accidents and fatalities by 0.100 and 0.0133 cases per thousand population, compared to sample averages of 0.122 accidents and 0.0351 fatalities. These findings are robust to an instrumental variable strategy and various robustness checks. Our analysis of injuries in household surveys and Baidu search activities reinforces these results. Using an accounting framework, we show that the safety improvement is not driven by the mechanical effects of robot-induced employment reduction. Instead, within-occupation improvement in workplace safety plays a more crucial role.
10.Young women in cities: Urbanization and gender-biased migration
Yumi Koh, Jing Li, Yifan Wu, Junjian Yi, Hanzhe Zhang
Young women outnumber young men in cities in many countries during periods of economic growth and urbanization. This gender imbalance among young urbanites is more pronounced in larger cities. We use the gradual rollout of Special Economic Zones across China as a quasi-experiment to establish the causal impact of urbanization on gender-differentiated incentives to migrate. We highlight the role of the marriage market in increasing rural women’s chance of marrying and marrying up in urban areas during rapid urbanization.
11.Riders on the storm: How do firms navigate production and market conditions amid El Niño?
Maria Bas, Caroline Paunov
This paper investigates how heavy rainfalls resulting from the 2002–03 El Niño climate pattern affect Ecuadorian firms' production and market conditions. We show that affected firms' revenue productivity (TFP-R) and markups decrease. This is due to production efficiency losses (TFP-Q) and higher marginal costs of initially less efficient firms. Decreased product output prices in response to lower product demand explain the impact on initially more efficient firms. However, the shock neither affects market shares nor survival rates of initially less efficient firms. Consequently, the productivity distribution of Ecuador's industry is not affected by the shock. We also show a swift recovery of production and market demand in the immediate aftermath of the shock. Impacts in 2002–03 are like those of the 1997–98 rainfall shock. Differentiating firms by their TFP-R rather than their production efficiency indicates firms with better (worse) market positions can mitigate the negative impacts of the shock more (less).
12.The transition to direct mayoral elections in clientelistic environments: Causal public spending and service delivery effects
Blane D. Lewis, Sarah Dong
We examine the impact of the transition to direct mayoral elections on district spending and household public service access in Indonesia during a period of momentous national democratic reform. We leverage the arguably exogenous timing of direct local elections to specify a staggered difference-in-differences model, which we estimate using the latest methods to plausibly identify causal effects. We find that the transition to direct elections led to a consistent and large decline in capital spending in both pre- and post-election years. We also determine that the transition resulted in a moderate decrease in household service access in the post-election period. Pre-election capital spending impacts are a function of both general disruptions associated with the transition and emerging clientelism. Service access effects are completely explained by the relative extent of clientelism across districts. We conclude that the local democratic transition in Indonesia had a mostly negative impact on key spending and service outcomes, at least in the short-run and for those districts in which clientelistic practices were especially pronounced.
13.Combining survey and census data for improved poverty prediction using semi-supervised deep learning
Damien Echevin, Guy Fotso, Yacine Bouroubi, Harold Coulombe, Qing Li
This paper presents a methodology for predicting poverty using semi-supervised learning techniques, specifically pseudo-labeling, and deep learning algorithms. Standard poverty prediction models rely on limited household survey data, whereas our approach exploits large amounts of unlabeled census data to improve prediction accuracy. By applying pseudo-labeling, we improve key performance metrics across various African regions, where our models outperform conventional approaches to identifying poor individuals. Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on pseudo-labeled data exhibited area under the curve (AUC) scores ranging from 0.8 to over 0.9, a notable improvement over previous machine learning survey-based methods. Furthermore, random undersampling was key to refining model performance, balancing higher coverage with some reduction in precision. These findings have significant implications for poverty targeting, enabling more accurate identification of poor individuals and supporting better resource allocation.
14.The persistence of trade relocation from civil conflict
Tobias Korn, Henry Stemmler
This paper examines the lasting impact of civil conflicts on bilateral trade flows and the subsequent implications for economic recovery. Utilizing a novel estimation approach based on the structural gravity model of international trade, we demonstrate that importers shift their trade preferences away from exporters involved in civil conflicts. This effect persists even after the conflict has been resolved, as countries solidify their relocation decisions by reducing bilateral trade costs with alternative trading partners through Preferential Trade Agreements. Notably, the persistent trade relocation is more pronounced in the manufacturing sector, while it does not occur in the fuels sector. Our findings underscore the significance of supportive trade policies as effective tools for assisting nations in recovering from episodes of political violence. Furthermore, our estimation approach can be adapted to investigate the impacts of other unilateral shocks, such as natural disasters, or to analyze various bilateral dependent variables, including migration.
15.Electricity and female employment: Evidence from Tajikistan’s winter energy crisis
Adrian Poignant
This paper studies the impact of electricity rationing on female employment during Tajikistan’s winter energy crisis, 2009–2015. Reduced access to electricity led to a decline in female employment as women left the workforce to become homemakers. The negative employment effect is specific to women and does not appear to be driven by changes in labor demand, involuntary unemployment, labor migration or fertility patterns. However, the decline in female employment is accompanied by a lower adoption of labor-saving electrical appliances. These findings suggest that electricity provision releases women from unpaid domestic work. Furthermore, they suggest that the quality of the electricity supply is vital for realizing the full benefits of electrification in developing countries.
16.Discretion, talent allocation, and governance performance: Evidence from China’s imperial bureaucracy
Kevin Zhengcheng Liu, Xiaoming Zhang
Public organizations are often characterized by rigid rules and procedures. Can discretion in personnel decisions improve governance performance? This paper investigates how discretion in internal appointments affects the functioning of public organizations. We study an organizational reform in China’s imperial bureaucracy that modified the appointments of certain governorships from a rule-based process to a more discretionary method. We find that discretionary appointments improved public goods provision and led to greater state responsiveness. We provide evidence consistent with better selection: (1) discretion increased observable officer quality measured by experiences and civil exam qualifications; (2) exploiting the quasi-random rotations of governors to prefectures, we show that governors having previously been selected by discretion performed better. Evidence also suggests that the incentive effect is another mechanism. Finally, we provide evidence suggesting that the benefit of discretion depends on the incentive alignment of decision-makers with the organization.
17.The effects of expanding worker rights to children
Leah K. Lakdawala, Diana Martínez Heredia, Diego Vera-Cossio
One out of two working children worldwide works in hazardous conditions. We study the effects of a law that introduced benefits and protections for child workers and temporarily lowered the de facto legal working age from 14 to 10 in Bolivia. We employ a difference-in-discontinuity approach that exploits the variation in the law’s application to different age groups. Work decreased for children under 14, whose work was newly legalized and regulated under the law, particularly in areas with a higher threat of inspections. The effects disappear after the law is reversed. We do not find evidence of improvements in work safety. Thus, the effects do not appear to be driven by increased hiring costs to ensure worker safety. Instead, the effects appear to be driven by a reduction in the most visible forms of child work, suggesting that firms and parents (households) may have reduced employment of young children to minimize the risk of being subject to legal and social sanctions.
18.A policy for the jobless youth in South Africa
Amina Ebrahim, Jukka Pirttilä
This paper uses survey and tax administrative data to analyse the effects of a sizeable employer-borne payroll tax credit for young, low-wage workers in South Africa. We find fairly limited impacts of the wage subsidy on the employment of young, low-wage workers relative to two comparison groups: slightly older, low-wage workers and slightly higher-paid, young workers. We find evidence of increases in low-wage youth entry into employment, but these are too small to affect overall employment. However, the female employment rate has increased, and unemployment among women has dropped because of the policy. We find evidence to suggest that the policy has led to a rise in earnings, particularly for men and those earning around the maximum subsidy value.
19.What you do (not) get when expanding the net - Evidence from forced taxpayer registrations in South Africa
Collen Lediga, Nadine Riedel, Kristina Strohmaier
A significant share of firms in developing countries is not registered for income taxation. Expanding the tax net is a priority for many governments, but most formalization policies proved relatively ineffective in bringing firms into the tax net. Drawing on rich tax administrative data, we document that snapshot-synchronizations of the business tax and the commercial registry in South Africa led to a large-scale expansion of the South African business taxpayer net. While the targeted firms are a valuable segment within the non-formal sector, we show that their post-registration tax compliance is weak and few of them pay taxes. Owing to the large scope of the tax net expansion, the aggregate revenue gains are, nevertheless, non-negligible and the interventions are fiscally cost-effective. In additional analyses, we provide evidence for enforcement spillovers: In areas where many firms were drawn into the tax net, tax registration timing compliance significantly improved after the snapshot synchronizations. We find no indication of a drop in registration numbers at the commercial registry.
20.How to improve education outcomes most efficiently? A review of the evidence using a unified metric
Noam Angrist, David K. Evans, Deon Filmer, Rachel Glennerster, Halsey Rogers, Shwetlena Sabarwal
Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education with limited resources. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. This paper provides the most recent and comprehensive review of the literature on effective education programs, with a novel emphasis on cost-effectiveness. We analyze the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions from over 200 impact evaluations across 52 countries. We use a unified measure — learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) — that combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard. The results identify programs and policies that can be up to an order of magnitude more cost-effective than business-as-usual approaches. Examples of some of the most cost-effective approaches include targeting instruction to students’ learning level rather than grade as well as structured pedagogy approaches. These results can enable policymakers to improve education outcomes substantially more efficiently.
21.Ethnic diversity and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from refugee-hosting areas
Luisito Bertinelli, Rana Cömertpay, Jean-François Maystadt
This study explores how forced migration affects ethnic diversity and conflict in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2005 to 2016. Using UNHCR data on refugee camp locations, we predict changes in local ethnic diversity. By integrating Afrobarometer and Ethnic Power Relations-Ethnicity of Refugees datasets, we analyse the link between refugee-induced diversity and conflict occurrence. Findings indicate that refugee-induced polarization increases the risk of local violence, while fractionalization has a mitigating effect. Notably, the number of refugees does not impact the likelihood of conflict; instead, alterations in ethnic diversity, especially polarization, emerge as the primary driver of conflict.
22.Does social capital positively influence loan performance even during a crisis?
Sumit Agarwal, Prasanna Tantri, Nitin Vishen
Theoretically, it is unclear whether group loans outperform individual loans in terms of delinquency, especially during a crisis. It is difficult to test the hypothesis due to differences in the types of borrowers of the group and individual loans and likely differences in their behavior between crises and normal times. We overcome the challenge by comparing simultaneous group and individual loans of the same individual before and during the Covid-19 crisis in India. We find that the delinquency rate of group loans is significantly lower. Further tests suggestively indicate that the outperformance is due to the “peer pressure” channel.
23.How does progressivity impact tax morale? Experimental evidence across developing countries
Christopher Hoy
This paper examines how the progressivity of taxes and government transfers impacts tax morale through a randomized survey experiment with over 30,000 respondents across eight developing countries. Respondents increased (decreased) their tax morale when they received accurate information that taxes in their country are progressive (not progressive). These effects were predominantly driven by respondents in cases where the information they received was counter to their prior beliefs and/or consistent with their preferences. These results suggest changes in policies that increase (decrease) the progressivity of tax systems may also lead to increases (decreases) in tax compliance.
24.Estimating poverty for India after 2011 using private-sector survey data
Sutirtha Sinha Roy, Roy van der Weide
The last expenditure survey released by India’s National Sample Survey organization dates back to 2011, which underpins the last official estimates of poverty and inequality. This paper adopts a new approach to estimate India’s poverty and inequality trajectory since 2011 using a newly available household panel survey conducted by the private sector. The results suggest that (1) extreme poverty is estimated to be lower in 2019 than in 2011, with greater poverty reductions likely in rural areas, and (2) coinciding with the demonetization event, urban poverty likely rose in 2016. The results should not be interpreted as definite proof. While the estimated trends in poverty sit well with a range of corroborative evidence, significant uncertainty remains stemming from sampling and non-sampling errors associated with the private-sector survey.
25.Public pensions and family dynamics: Eldercare, child investment, and son preference in rural China
Naijia Guo, Wei Huang, Ruixin Wang
Using variations in the timing of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) across rural Chinese counties, we examine its effects on eldercare mode, child investment, and son preference. Our findings are three-fold: (1) After the introduction of NRPS, married sons are less likely to live with and provide care for their parents, while married daughters show no significant change in their caregiving behavior; (2) Parents reduce the brideprice for their sons but not the dowry for their daughters; (3) The sex ratio at birth becomes more balanced, indicating a reduction in son preference. These results suggest that public pension programs can significantly influence traditional family dynamics, including eldercare modes and cultural norms around gender preference.
26.Blaming the wind? The impact of wind turbine on bird biodiversity
Lina Meng, Pengfei Liu, Yinggang Zhou, Yingdan Mei
We quantitatively assess the impacts of onshore wind turbines on bird diversity using citizen science data in China. Results show that a one-standard-deviation increase in wind turbines reduces bird abundance by 9.75% and leads to a 12.2% reduction in bird species richness at the county level. The negative impacts are more significant in migrant birds, birds in forests, urban and farmlands than others. Biodiversity protection helps to safeguard bird abundance against wind turbines. We also find that habitat loss rather than food chain change after the wind turbine installations contributes to biodiversity loss. The net impact of wind turbines on the environment is positive when considering the carbon reduction effects.
27.A tale of framing and screening: How health messaging and house screening affect malaria transmission in Ethiopia
Solomon Balew, Erwin Bulte, Zewdu Abro, Abebe Asale, Clifford Mutero, Menale Kassie
Malaria is a major public health problem in Africa. Traditional methods of controlling malaria no longer provide adequate protection against transmission, and future approaches likely require a combination of technical solutions and behavioral change. We use a cluster randomized controlled trial to study the impacts of an intervention that combines house screening with a behavioral intervention based on health messaging. While house screening provides modest positive benefits, these benefits can be leveraged if it is combined with health messaging. We provide tentative evidence that the impact of messaging varies with the design of the choice architecture: loss-framed health messages seem to do better than gain-based messages––our data suggest they may have larger and more durable effects on behavior and health outcomes.
28.Shooting a moving target: Evaluating targeting tools for social programs when income fluctuates
Diether W. Beuermann, Bridget Hoffmann, Marco Stampini, David L. Vargas, Diego Vera-Cossio
A key challenge for policymakers in low- and middle-income countries is to design a method to select beneficiaries of social programs when income is unobservable and volatile. We use a unique panel dataset of a random sample of households in Colombia’s social registry that contains information before, during, and after the 2020 economic crisis to evaluate a traditional static proxy-means test (PMT) and three policy-relevant alternatives. We consider targeting metrics and social welfare under different curvatures of governments’ social welfare function, aggregate economic environments, and budgetary and political constraints. Updating the PMT data does not improve social welfare relative to the static PMT. Relaxing the eligibility threshold reduces the exclusion error, increases the inclusion error, and increases social welfare. A dynamic method that uses data on shocks to estimate a variable component of income reduces exclusion errors and limits the expansion in coverage, increasing social welfare during the economic crisis.
29.Vehicle exhaust standards and urban air quality in China
Li Shu, Chunhua Wang, Wei Wang
This study quantifies the effects of increasing the share of low-emission passenger vehicles on urban air quality in China. We estimate a two-stage least squares model, using the phased implementation of National Vehicle Emission Standards VI in 2019 as an instrumental variable for fleet composition. Our findings indicate that a 1% increase in the share of vehicles compliant with the stricter vehicle exhaust standards leads to a 0.083% reduction in the average pollutant concentration across three measures of air pollution. Furthermore, our calculation suggests that the monetized health benefits from reductions in particulate matter outweigh the costs of adhering to stricter exhaust standards by a factor of two.
30.E-invoicing, tax audits and VAT compliance
Christos Kotsogiannis, Luca Salvadori, John Karangwa, Innocente Murasi
Difficult to find another policy shift that has promised as much for tax compliance in developing countries as digitalization. Yet the evidence on its impact is scant. Using the universe of tax filings in Rwanda over the period 2012–2019, this paper investigates the extent to which digitalization (in the form of e-invoicing) has impacted on VAT compliance and in particular the effectiveness of tax audits. The evidence suggests that on the aggregate e-invoicing adoption has increased firms’ net VAT payments and has improved the efficiency of VAT audits. It is also shown that e-invoicing has a sizeable impact on VAT liabilities reported by audited firms, with this impact being attributed to tax audits being more efficient rather than to VAT registered firms becoming more compliant following their adoption of e-invoicing.
31.Cover more for less: Targeted drug coverage, chronic disease management, and medical spending
Julie Shi, Wanyu Yang, Ye Yuan
A key challenge in expanding public health insurance programs is how to deliver these programs cost-effectively with limited budget. This paper studies a value-based insurance design that introduced prescription drug coverage for two chronic diseases—hypertension and diabetes. This targeted drug coverage scheme increased the use of primary care and sharply reduced hospitalizations, leading to substantial net savings in total medical expenditure. Three operating channels were in play. First, a hospitalization offset was achieved by stimulating regular use of primary care and improving disease management. Second, the offset occurred more notably for nontargeted chronic diseases, suggesting a strong positive cross-disease spillover effect. Third, learning contributed to more efficient management of both targeted and nontargeted diseases. Our findings highlight a viable value-based insurance design, especially for developing countries with limited funding.
