Weather Shocks

Background Multidimensional poverty, encompassing deprivations in education, health, and living standards, is a significant challenge in rural Ethiopia. Despite various development initiatives, poverty remains pervasive in the West Gojjam Zone of northern Ethiopia. This study aims to assess the extent of multidimensional poverty in this region and identify key factors contributing to the likelihood of households experiencing it. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted in the West Gojjam Zone, involving 628 rural households selected through a multi-stage sampling approach. Descriptive statistics were used to calculate the multidimensional poverty index (MPI), focusing on poverty incidence, gap, and severity. A binary logistic regression model was applied to examine the relationship between household characteristics and the likelihood of being multidimensionally poor. Results The study revealed that 93.95% of households in the West Gojjam Zone experience multidimensional poverty, with an intensity of 61.17% and an adjusted multidimensional headcount ratio of 57.47%. Key factors associated with a lower likelihood of multidimensional poverty include land ownership, off-farm income, year-round road access, the frequency of agricultural extension services, and access to loans. Conversely, the age of household heads is positively associated with an increased likelihood of poverty, with older household heads being more vulnerable. Conclusions The findings highlight that multidimensional poverty in the West Gojjam Zone is primarily driven by limited access to land, financial services, infrastructure, and agricultural support. Furthermore, older household heads are particularly at risk. To address these challenges, the study recommends policies that focus on enhancing agricultural productivity, expanding access to financial services, improving road infrastructure, and fostering nonfarm income-generating activities. Strengthening agricultural extension services is essential to enhancing household resilience and reducing poverty.

Multidimensional child poverty is a deprivation experienced by children. To the level of the authors no study has undertaken using primary data as well as at the study area and studies on the assessments of multidimensional child poverty in Ethiopia is very limited. Available literatures have focused on the comparison of urban and rural child poverty and have used traditional or one-dimension approach which leads to a partial understanding of child poverty and ineffective policies of poverty reduction. The purpose of this study was to assessmultidimensional child poverty inDambiDollo town using the AF approach of 2011 with primary data sources and child as unit of analysis. The finding of the study revealed that a school aged child of Dambi Dollo town was being deprived in housing, health, information, care, sanitation, and education dimensions respectively with the incidence of poverty (H0 = 0.87) and the intensity (A=0.58) and the multidimensional child poverty adjusted head count ratio(M0) is 0.502 at the poverty cutoff , k=2. Based on this, provision of aid programs and support, improving access to education and health for all as the short run and directing economic resources to affected children and their families, implementation of anti-natal policy, reduction of early age marriage, promotion of gender equity, and mainstreaming child-targeted programs in to macroeconomic and socialsectors development policies are the long run major forwarded recommendations.

The study of household resilience is a key issue in development economics. This paper adds to the literature by exploring the role of resilience in mediating the relationship between food consumption growth and temperature shocks. To make up for the lack of long micro panels, we generate a synthetic panel for rural Tanzania covering the time span 2000 -2013. Our main contribution is the identification of resilience thresholds below which households are unable to absorb the negative effects of temperature shocks. These thresholds have important implications for adaptation to climate change in developing countries and, more generally, significant consequences for policy-makers and intervention design.

The study of household resilience is a key issue in development economics. This paper adds to the literature by exploring the role of resilience in mediating the relationship between food consumption growth and temperature shocks. To make up for the lack of long micro panels, we generate a synthetic panel for rural Tanzania covering the time span 2000 – 2013. Our main contribution is the identification of resilience thresholds below which households are unable to absorb the negative effects of temperature shocks. These thresholds have important implications for adaptation to climate change in developing countries and, more generally, significant consequences for policy-makers and intervention design.

We examine how exogenous demand shocks overcome ecosystem bottlenecks in the commercialization of an emergent technology. We argue that demand shocks that spur new technology adoption by niche users pull "hub" firms into country technology markets, despite ecosystem bottlenecks, thereby serving to "jumpstart" the process of ecosystem development and technology commercialization. By analyzing global electric vehicle markets over the period 2008-2017, we find that extreme weather events such as abnormal heat-related events spur adoption of electric vehicles by end users, thereby propelling automotive or hub firms' entry into country technology markets, and the subsequent shift of their electric vehicle product portfolios toward the more radical version of the technology. Notably, such demand shocks propel firms' commercialization strategy, despite ecosystem bottlenecks such as the lack of regulatory and economic inducements for adoption, relative absence of complements, and product market differences. After entry, entrant firms' electric vehicle product portfolios transition from hybrids toward radical technology products and investments in complements, albeit contingent on their competitive market position in the legacy technology. We discuss the implications of these findings concerning the uptake of demand shocks, and their robustness to modeling choices, technological generations across extended timeframes, potential mediating forces, and boundary conditions owing to firm and country-market heterogeneity.

The availability and access to safe and clean water is critical for human flourishing. Nonetheless, rural communities continue to experience water poverty. Using a case study of Deve, a rural community in Ghana's North Tongu District, this dissertation assessed the impact of rural water poverty on livelihoods. The study employed the DFID Sustainable Livelihood
Framework and analysed qualitative semi-structured in-depth interview responses from 36 participants sampled purposively. This includes 29 households (170 people) group interviews sampled in Deve and 7 secondary stakeholders, who are people in local governments in charge of designing programmes and policies and promoting well-being for the overall development of the district.
The findings showed that 86 per cent of the households used water from two small earth dams for drinking and domestic purposes, although it is unprotected. The study provides evidence that rural water poverty has a detrimental impact on livelihoods through increasing vulnerability as water-related illnesses alone account for 85 per cent of households' health conditions. Similarly, children and women must walk for nearly 90 minutes or more to collect water, especially during dry seasons. Overall, although all livelihood assets were affected, 100 per cent of the respondents said that financial capital was the most affected. Furthermore, the study provided additional evidence of differently weighted impact along several social axes of difference, such as disability. Considering this finding, the current situation in Deve necessitates immediate efforts not only on the part of the local district assembly and NGOs to adhere to water policies and prioritise expenditure to provide sustainable access to safe water but also on the part of Deve to leverage local resource mobilisation to initiate water projects that will necessitate support from other philanthropies.

Keywords: Water poverty; safe and clean water; livelihoods; Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF); households; accessible; access.

The effect of weather shocks on children's anthropometrics is investigated using the two most recent rounds of the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). For this purpose, climate data for each DHS cluster are interpolated using daily weather station records from the national network. The findings reveal that rainfall shocks have a statistically significant and robust impact on child health in the short-run for both weight-for-height and height-forage , and the incidence of diarrhoea. The impacts of weather shocks on health are of considerable magnitude; however, children seem to catch-up with their cohort rapidly after experiencing a shock. Finally, it appears that the impact of these shocks is the same for young boys and girls, which suggests that there is no gender-based discrimination in the allocation of resources within households.

Due to limited resources and the realization that the poor are not getting the help they need, targeted anti-poverty policies are now being widely adopted to address poverty. However, targeting has been the least effective in reducing poverty in SSA where most of the world's poor live. The YESSO program in Nigeria uses a combination of Geographic and communitybased identification (CBI) and the PMT to identify the poor and vulnerable to create the social register of the poor and vulnerable. Very few studies have been carried out to examine how effective such robust combinations of targeting mechanisms have performed in identifying the poor. Using the Polychoric PCA and descriptive statistics, the wealth status of respondents in the YESSO data was compared with the those in an independent survey (2016-17 MICS). The results reveal that most of the YESSO beneficiaries did not have both the skills and resources required to generate income. Those in the richest wealth classes in the YESSO data had similar characteristics with those with the least wealth in the MICS data. The study concludes that the robust identification mode adopted by YESSO in generating the Single Register is efficient in identifying the core poor in the country.

To estimate the effects of weather conditions on welfare globally, crosscountry comparisons need to rely on international poverty lines and comparable data sources at the micro-level. To this end, nationally representative household surveys can offer a useful instrument, also at the sub-national level. This study seeks to expand the existing knowledge on the determinants of poverty in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA), examining how long-term climatic conditions and year-specific weather shocks affect expenditure per capita. We take advantage of a novel and unique dataset combining consumption-based household surveys for 24 SSA countries-representative of more than half of the African population and two thirds of SSA-and geospatial information on agro-climatic conditions, market access and other spatial covariates of poverty. To our knowledge, it is the first time that a welfare-based, multidisciplinary, microlevel dataset with such wide spatial coverage has been assembled and examined. Our analysis relies on a linear and spatial model at the household-and district-level, respectively, both controlling for socioeconomic , demographic, and geographic confounding factors. Results are consistent across econometric approaches, showing that living in more humid areas is positively associated with welfare, while the opposite occurs living in hotter areas, as existing literature shows. Flood shocks-defined as annual rainfall higher than one standard deviation from the 50-year average-are associated to a 35% decrease in total and food per-capita consumption and 17 percentage point increase in extreme poverty. On the other hand, extreme shortages of rain and heat shocks show an uncertain effect, even when estimates control for spatial correlation between welfare and weather conditions using the spatial error correction model. Given the heterogeneous effects of climatic events across SSA macro-regions, local-specific adaptation and mitigation strategies are suggested to help bringing households on a sustainable path.

Climate change and weather variability pose serious threats to food and nutrition security as well as ecosystems, especially when livelihoods depend heavily on natural resources. This study examines the effect of weather variability (shock) occurring up to three planting and growing season prior on per capita monthly household expenditure in rural Tanzania, Uganda, and Ghana. The analyses combine monthly temperature (1950-2013) and precipitation (1981-2013) data with data from several rounds of household surveys conducted between 1998 and 2013. Substantial spatial and temporal heterogeneity is documented in the incidence of shocks, with effects dependent on both the study and lag period considered. Analysis of short panel data shows the cumulative effect of above-average precipitation on expenditure to be negative in Uganda-while positive in Tanzania-, but the relationship does not persist when pooling survey data spanning over a decade. The evidence from pooled data suggests a positive association between above-average temperature (heat wave) and expenditure in (historically cooler) Uganda, with the opposite effect observed in (the relatively warmer) Tanzania. For Ghana, the association between heat wave and expenditure is positive. There is no evidence of heterogeneous effects along several dimensions, except by agro-ecological condition. Further research into the effects of shocks on more direct outcomes-such as agricultural practices, yields, and dietary intakeis therefore recommended to shed light on possible impact pathways and appropriate localized adaptation strategies.

A growing attention in the empirical literature has been paid to the incidence of climate shocks and change in migration decisions. Previous literature leads to different results and uses a multitude of traditional empirical approaches. This paper proposes a tree-based Machine Learning (ML) approach to analyze the role of the weather shocks towards an individual's intention to migrate in the six agriculture-dependent-economy countries such as Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. We perform several tree-based algorithms (e.g., XGB, Random Forest) using the train-validation-test workflow to build robust and noise-resistant approaches. Then we determine the important features showing in which direction they are influencing the migration intention. This ML-based estimation accounts for features such as weather shocks captured by the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) for different timescales and various socioeconomic features/covariates. We find that (i) weather features improve the prediction performance although socioeconomic characteristics have more influence on migration intentions, (ii) country-specific model is necessary, and (iii) international move is influenced more by the longer timescales of SPEIs while general move (which includes internal move) by that of shorter timescales.

The aim of this study is to examine farm household-level impacts of weather extreme events on Vietnamese rice technical efficiency. Vietnam is considered among the most vulnerable countries to climate change, and the Vietnamese economy is highly dependent on rice production that is strongly affected by climate change. A stochastic frontier analysis is applied with census panel data and weather data from 2010 to 2014 to estimate these impacts while controlling for both adaptation strategy and household characteristics. Also, this study combines these estimated marginal effects with future climate scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5) to project the potential impact of hot temperatures in 2050 on rice technical efficiency. We find that weather shocks measured by the occurrence of floods, typhoons and droughts negatively affect technical efficiency. Also, additional days with a temperature above 31°C dampen technical efficiency and the negative effect is increas...

Vietnam is located in the tropical monsoon region and it often faces many types of extreme weather events, especially storms and droughts. In addition to the effect of climate change, extreme weather events have been becoming more complicated and difficult to predict, causing heavy losses to many areas and economic sectors of the country. These problems impose a great threat to the country to achieve its socio-economic targets and sustainable development goals. This study uses a Riparian approach integrated with two-stage Hsiao method using a panel dataset from 2000–2018 to examine the impact of extreme weather events and climate change on the output of agriculture and fishery enterprises in the Central and Central Highlands regions of Vietnam. Findings from the study indicate that extreme weather events and climate change have a negative impact on agriculture and fishery enterprises in the regions. Specifically, the model results show that the value-added loss to agriculture and fi...

Purpose Ethiopia has registered remarkable achievements in reaching global development goals, including reducing child marriage. Policymakers are keen to understand which investments have contributed to this. We evaluated the association between Ethiopia’s Health Extension Program (HEP) and 12 adolescent health and wellbeing outcomes. Methods We used Young Lives Ethiopia cohort data between 2002 and 2013. We evaluated associations between household support from HEP at age 15 and 12 adolescent outcomes spread across health, gender-based violence, education, and employment at age 19 using the inverse probability of treatment weighting propensity score approach, stratifying by sex. Adjusted probability differences (APDs) and adjusted mean differences (AMDs) were used to contrast exposure to HEP versus no exposure. Results Of 775 adolescents with complete follow-up, 46% were female. Sixty-six percent of adolescents reported support from HEP, with higher rates of support in poorer, less educated, and rural households, particularly in Tigray Province. In boys, HEP was positively associated with education enrolment (APD: +20 percentage points [ppts], 95% confidence interval [CI]: +9 ppts, +31 ppts) and literacy (AMD: +6 ppts, 95% CI: +0.2, +11), and negatively associated with >4 hours in income-generating activities per day (APD: −19 ppts, 95% CI: −30 ppts, −9 ppts). In girls, HEP was positively associated with no child marriage (APD: +16 ppts, 95% CI: +4 ppts, +27 ppts), no adolescent pregnancy (APD: +17 ppts, 95% CI: +6 ppts, +28 ppts), education enrolment (APD: +27 ppts, 95% CI: +15 ppts, +39 ppts), literacy (AMD: +5 ppts, 95% CI: +0.2, +11), and numeracy (AMD: +8 ppts, 95% CI: +3; +13). Discussion Policies promoting HEP are likely to have supported improvements in multiple areas of adolescents’ lives in Ethiopia.

Climate research suggests that global warming will lead to more frequent and more extreme natural disasters. Most disasters are local events with effects on local economic activity. Hence, assessing their economic impacts with the help of econometric country-level analysis may lead to biased results. Moreover, correct identification is further complicated by the possibility that local shocks shift production and consumption to neighboring locations. In this paper, annual night-time light emission data covering about 24,000 grid cells for the years 1992-2013 are matched to geocoded information on meteorological and geological events. Spatial econometric panel methods are applied to account for interdependencies between locations. Interpreting variation in light emissions as reflecting changes in economic activity, findings convey evidence for pronounced local average treatment effects and strong spatial spillovers, particularly for weather shocks. Moreover, substantial heterogeneity across income groups and regions is identified.

The aim of this study is to examine farm household-level impacts of weather extreme events on Vietnamese rice technical efficiency. Vietnam is considered among the most vulnerable countries to climate change, and the Vietnamese economy is highly dependent on rice production that is strongly affected by climate change. A stochastic frontier analysis is applied with census panel data and weather data from 2010 to 2014 to estimate these impacts while controlling for both adaptation strategy and household characteristics. Also, this study combines these estimated marginal effects with future climate scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5) to project the potential impact of hot temperatures in 2050 on rice technical efficiency. We find that weather shocks measured by the occurrence of floods, typhoons and droughts negatively affect technical efficiency. Also, additional days with a temperature above 31°C dampen technical efficiency and the negative effect is increas...

This paper provides a framework for analyzing constraints that apply specifically to women, which theory suggests may have negative impacts on child outcomes (as well as on women). We classify women's constraints into four dimensions: (i) low influence on household decisions, (ii) restrictions on mobility, (iii) domestic physical and psychological abuse, and (iv) limited information access. Each of these constraints are in principle determined within households. We test the impact of women's constraints on child outcomes using nationally representative household Demographic and Health Survey data from India, including 53,030 mothers and 113,708 children, collected in 2015-16. We examine outcomes including nutrition, health, education, water quality, and sanitation. In our primary specification, outcomes are measured as multidimensional deprivations incorporating indicators for each of these deficiencies, utilizing a version of UNICEF's Multidimensional Overlapping Deprivation Analysis index. We identify causal impacts using a Lewbel specification and present an array of additional econometric strategies and robustness checks. We find that children of women who are subjected to domestic abuse, have low influence in decision making, and limited freedom of mobility are consistently more likely to be deprived, measured both multidimensionally and with separate indicators.

Building on the book "Gender, poverty and access to justice: policy implementation in Sub-Saharan Africa" (Lawson, Dubin and Mwambene (eds) (2020), this special volume of essays is the result of the Conference in Cape Town (October 2019), whose main objective was to investigate the intersection of gendered access to justice, poverty and disempowerment across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and provide field-based research and discussions on what does and does not work to improve justice for women and girls in the region. Authors' contributions are designed to be practice and action oriented, drawing on lessons and experiences from programmes and policies that work, and show real potential for their sustainable scalability. In this regard, the essays in this volume reflect a broad spectrum of multidisciplinary contributions, including from policy makers and development practitioners, as well as representatives from local and international civil society organizations, the private sector, academe and the general public. These contributions are structured around the following five key areas: Integrating Justice Programming into the Sustainable Developmental Goals

Copyright practicalactionpublishing.com 'Lawson's thirty years of experience and dedication in understanding and providing appropriate policy advice for extreme poverty and vulnerability in SSA, result in yet another enlightening volume of what works for Africa's poorest.' Susanna Gable, Chief Economist, SIDA 'Reducing child poverty requires a broad variety of policies, based on a thorough analysis of the origins and causes of many different situations. Protection of children, addressing violations of their rights, meeting their basic needs and carving paths towards sustainable living conditions in a caring society demand multidisciplinary and comprehensive policies. General approaches which do not take into consideration the specific circumstances of children in different countries and regions and their different religious, cultural or ethnic backgrounds will not be effective. Family backgrounds matter. So do power relations within communities as well as different rural and urban living experiences. In this book wisdom gained in different African countries has been brought together. The volume combines new thinking with lessons learned in different fields, such as nutrition, health, sanitation and education. It is a must read, both for students of poverty and development and as well as for politicians, policy makers, experts and field practitioners.' Jan Pronk, former Netherlands Minister for Development Cooperation Copyright practicalactionpublishing.com

We combine two data sets to study price rigidity. The first consists of weekly time series of retail, wholesale, and spot prices for twelve products. These time series contain two exogenous cost shocks. We find that prices exhibit more rigidity in response to the second shock than the first. The second data set consists of all publicly available information about the shocks. Content analysis of these information reveals that the first shock is larger and more persistent, and the market has more information on it than the second. We conclude, therefore, that prices are more flexible in response to cost shocks that are larger, that are more persistent, and on which market participants have more information.