Download or read book Can survey design reduce anchoring bias in recall data Evidence from Malawi written by Godlonton, Susan and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recall biases in retrospective survey data are widely considered to be pervasive and have important implications for effective agricultural research. In this paper, we leverage the survey design literature and test three strategies to attenuate mental anchoring in retrospective data collection: question order effects, retrieval cues, and aggregate (community) anchoring. We embed a survey design experiment in a longitudinal survey of smallholder farmers in Malawi and focus on anchoring bias in maize production and happiness exploiting differences between recalled and concurrent responses. We find that asking for retrospective data before concurrent data reduces recall bias by approximately 34% for maize production, a meaningful improvement with no increase in survey data collection costs. Retrieval cues are less successful in reducing the bias for maize reports and involve more data collection time, while community anchors can exacerbate the bias. Reversing the order of questions and retrieval cues do not help to ease the bias for happiness reports.
Download or read book Assessing the impacts of COVID 19 on the coffee value chain in Guatemala Evidence from coffee growers in the Midwest and East written by Hernandez, Manuel A. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2021-12-23 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coffee is a growth market. Current estimates indicate that global coffee production (in volume) has increased by more than 60% since the 1990s. Coffee is produced by around 25 million farmers, which are mainly smallholders in developing and least developed countries, and over 70% of the coffee produced is exported, resulting in about 20 billion US dollars annual foreign exchange earnings (ICO, 2020). COVID-19 represented a severe joint supply and demand shock to the global coffee sector, particularly during the first months after the start of the pandemic. As noted by Hernandez et al. (2020), the coffee industry experienced important disruptions downstream the value chain, including the functioning of key export infrastructure and international shipping, which combined with local currency devaluations and volatile coffee prices, which resulted in significant challenges for coffee growers, farm workers, and traders.
Download or read book Anchoring Bias in Recall Data written by Susan Godlonton and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-reported retrospective survey data is widely used in empirical work but may be subject to cognitive biases, even over relatively short recall periods. This paper examines the role of anchoring bias in self-reports of objective and subjective outcomes under recall. We use a unique panel-survey dataset of smallholder farmers from four countries in Central America collected over a period of three years. We exploit differences between recalled and concurrent responses to quantify the degree of mental anchoring in survey recall data. We assess whether respondents use their reported value for the most recent period as a cognitive heuristic when recalling the value from a previous period, while controlling for the value they reported earlier. The results show strong evidence of sizeable anchoring bias in self-reported retrospective indicators for both objective measures (income, wages, and working hours) and subjective measures (reports of happiness, health, stress, and well-being). We also generally observe a larger bias in response to negative changes for objective indicators and a larger bias in response to positive changes for subjective indicators.
Download or read book The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018 written by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and published by Food & Agriculture Org.. This book was released on 2018-09-14 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New evidence this year corroborates the rise in world hunger observed in this report last year, sending a warning that more action is needed if we aspire to end world hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. Updated estimates show the number of people who suffer from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to prevailing levels from almost a decade ago. Although progress continues to be made in reducing child stunting, over 22 percent of children under five years of age are still affected. Other forms of malnutrition are also growing: adult obesity continues to increase in countries irrespective of their income levels, and many countries are coping with multiple forms of malnutrition at the same time – overweight and obesity, as well as anaemia in women, and child stunting and wasting.
Download or read book Cooking Data written by Cal (Crystal) Biruk and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always “cooked” during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk examines the ways in which units of information—such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers—acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise.
Download or read book Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 written by World Bank Group and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 is the first of an annual flagship report that will inform a global audience comprising development practitioners, policy makers, researchers, advocates, and citizens in general with the latest and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. This edition will also document trends in inequality and identify recent country experiences that have been successful in reducing inequalities, provide key lessons from those experiences, and synthesize the rigorous evidence on public policies that can shift inequality in a way that bolsters poverty reduction and shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. Specifically, the report will address the following questions: • What is the latest evidence on the levels and evolution of extreme poverty and shared prosperity? • Which countries and regions have been more successful in terms of progress toward the twin goals and which are lagging behind? • What does the global context of lower economic growth mean for achieving the twin goals? • How can inequality reduction contribute to achieving the twin goals? • What does the evidence show concerning global and between- and within-country inequality trends? • Which interventions and countries have used the most innovative approaches to achieving the twin goals through reductions in inequality? The report will make four main contributions. First, it will present the most recent numbers on poverty, shared prosperity, and inequality. Second, it will stress the importance of inequality reduction in ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity by 2030 in a context of weaker growth. Third, it will highlight the diversity of within-country inequality reduction experiences and will synthesize experiences of successful countries and policies, addressing the roots of inequality without compromising economic growth. In doing so, the report will shatter some myths and sharpen our knowledge of what works in reducing inequalities. Finally, it will also advocate for the need to expand and improve data collection—for example, data availability, comparability, and quality—and rigorous evidence on inequality impacts in order to deliver high-quality poverty and shared prosperity monitoring.
Download or read book Realizing the Full Potential of Social Safety Nets in Africa written by Kathleen Beegle and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty remains a pervasive and complex phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa. Part of the agenda in recent years to tackle poverty in Africa has been the launching of social safety nets programs. All countries have now deployed safety net interventions as part of their core development programs. The number of programs has skyrocketed since the mid-2000s though many programs remain limited in size. This shift in social policy reflects the progressive evolution in the understanding of the role that social safety nets can play in the fight against poverty and vulnerability, and more generally in the human capital and growth agenda. Evidence on their impacts on equity, resilience, and opportunity is growing, and makes a foundational case for investments in safety nets as a major component of national development plans. For this potential to be realized, however, safety net programs need to be significantly scaled-up. Such scaling up will involve a series of technical considerations to identify the parameters, tools, and processes that can deliver maximum benefits to the poor and vulnerable. However, in addition to technical considerations, and at least as importantly, this report argues that a series of decisive shifts need to occur in three other critical spheres: political, institutional, and fiscal. First, the political processes that shape the extent and nature of social policy need to be recognized, by stimulating political appetite for safety nets, choosing politically smart parameters, and harnessing the political impacts of safety nets to promote their sustainability. Second, the anchoring of safety net programs in institutional arrangements †“ related to the overarching policy framework for safety nets, the functions of policy and coordination, as well as program management and implementation †“ is particularly important as programs expand and are increasingly implemented through national channels. And third, in most countries, the level and predictability of resources devoted to the sector needs to increase for safety nets to reach the desired scale, through increased efficiency, increased volumes and new sources of financing, and greater ability to effectively respond to shocks. This report highlights the implications which political, institutional, and fiscal aspects have for the choice and design of programs. Fundamentally, it argues that these considerations are critical to ensure the successful scaling-up of social safety nets in Africa, and that ignoring them could lead to technically-sound, but practically impossible, choices and designs.
Download or read book The Human Capital Index 2020 Update written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2021-05-05 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human capital—the knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate over their lives—is a central driver of sustainable growth, poverty reduction, and successful societies. More human capital is associated with higher earnings for people, higher income for countries, and stronger cohesion in societies. Much of the hard-won human capital gains in many economies over the past decade is at risk of being eroded by the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. Urgent action is needed to protect these advances, particularly among the poor and vulnerable. Designing the needed interventions, targeting them to achieve the highest effectiveness, and navigating difficult trade-offs make investing in better measurement of human capital now more important than ever. The Human Capital Index (HCI)—launched in 2018 as part of the Human Capital Project—is an international metric that benchmarks the key components of human capital across economies. The HCI is a global effort to accelerate progress toward a world where all children can achieve their full potential. Measuring the human capital that children born today can expect to attain by their 18th birthdays, the HCI highlights how current health and education outcomes shape the productivity of the next generation of workers and underscores the importance of government and societal investments in human capital. The Human Capital Index 2020 Update: Human Capital in the Time of COVID-19 presents the first update of the HCI, using health and education data available as of March 2020. It documents new evidence on trends, examples of successes, and analytical work on the utilization of human capital. The new data—collected before the global onset of COVID-19—can act as a baseline to track its effects on health and education outcomes. The report highlights how better measurement is essential for policy makers to design effective interventions and target support. In the immediate term, investments in better measurement and data use will guide pandemic containment strategies and support for those who are most affected. In the medium term, better curation and use of administrative, survey, and identification data can guide policy choices in an environment of limited fiscal space and competing priorities. In the longer term, the hope is that economies will be able to do more than simply recover lost ground. Ambitious, evidence-driven policy measures in health, education, and social protection can pave the way for today’s children to surpass the human capital achievements and quality of life of the generations that preceded them.
Download or read book PEFA Public Financial Management and Good Governance written by Jens Kromann Kristensen and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2019-11-24 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This project, based on the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) data set, researched how PEFA can be used to shape policy development in public financial management (PFM) and other major relevant policy areas such as anticorruption, revenue mobilization, political economy analysis, and fragile states. The report explores what shapes the PFM system in low- and middle-income countries by examining the relationship between political institutions and the quality of the PFM system. Although the report finds some evidence that multiple political parties in control of the legislature is associated with better PFM performance, the report finds the need to further refine and test the theories on the relationship between political institutions and PFM. The report addresses the question of the outcomes of PFM systems, distinguishing between fragile and nonfragile states. It finds that better PFM performance is associated with more reliable budgets in terms of expenditure composition in fragile states, but not aggregate budget credibility. Moreover, in contrast to existing studies, it finds no evidence that PFM quality matters for deficit and debt ratios, irrespective of whether a country is fragile or not. The report also explores the relationship between perceptions of corruption and PFM performance. It finds strong evidence of a relationship between better PFM performance and improvements in perceptions of corruption. It also finds that PFM reforms associated with better controls have a stronger relationship with improvements in perceptions of corruption compared to PFM reforms associated with more transparency. The last chapter looks at the relationship between PEFA indicators for revenue administration and domestic resource mobilization. It focuses on the credible use of penalties for noncompliance as a proxy for the type of political commitment required to improve tax performance. The analysis shows that countries that credibly enforce penalties for noncompliance collect more taxes on average.
Download or read book Our Continent Our Future written by P. Thandika Mkandawire and published by IDRC. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Continent, Our Future presents the emerging African perspective on this complex issue. The authors use as background their own extensive experience and a collection of 30 individual studies, 25 of which were from African economists, to summarize this African perspective and articulate a path for the future. They underscore the need to be sensitive to each country's unique history and current condition. They argue for a broader policy agenda and for a much more active role for the state within what is largely a market economy. Finally, they stress that Africa must, and can, compete in an increasingly globalized world and, perhaps most importantly, that Africans must assume the leading role in defining the continent's development agenda.
Download or read book The Data Science Design Manual written by Steven S. Skiena and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging and clearly written textbook/reference provides a must-have introduction to the rapidly emerging interdisciplinary field of data science. It focuses on the principles fundamental to becoming a good data scientist and the key skills needed to build systems for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. The Data Science Design Manual is a source of practical insights that highlights what really matters in analyzing data, and provides an intuitive understanding of how these core concepts can be used. The book does not emphasize any particular programming language or suite of data-analysis tools, focusing instead on high-level discussion of important design principles. This easy-to-read text ideally serves the needs of undergraduate and early graduate students embarking on an “Introduction to Data Science” course. It reveals how this discipline sits at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and machine learning, with a distinct heft and character of its own. Practitioners in these and related fields will find this book perfect for self-study as well. Additional learning tools: Contains “War Stories,” offering perspectives on how data science applies in the real world Includes “Homework Problems,” providing a wide range of exercises and projects for self-study Provides a complete set of lecture slides and online video lectures at www.data-manual.com Provides “Take-Home Lessons,” emphasizing the big-picture concepts to learn from each chapter Recommends exciting “Kaggle Challenges” from the online platform Kaggle Highlights “False Starts,” revealing the subtle reasons why certain approaches fail Offers examples taken from the data science television show “The Quant Shop” (www.quant-shop.com)
Download or read book The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020 written by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and published by Food & Agriculture Org.. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updates for many countries have made it possible to estimate hunger in the world with greater accuracy this year. In particular, newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world. Nevertheless, the revision confirms the trend reported in past editions: the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report also shows that the burden of malnutrition in all its forms continues to be a challenge. There has been some progress for child stunting, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding, but at a pace that is still too slow. Childhood overweight is not improving and adult obesity is on the rise in all regions. The report complements the usual assessment of food security and nutrition with projections of what the world may look like in 2030, if trends of the last decade continue. Projections show that the world is not on track to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators are also not on track to meet global nutrition targets. The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. Meeting SDG 2 targets will only be possible if people have enough food to eat and if what they are eating is nutritious and affordable. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs associated with current food consumption patterns, as well as the potential cost savings if food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include sustainability considerations. The report then concludes with a discussion of the policies and strategies to transform food systems to ensure affordable healthy diets, as part of the required efforts to end both hunger and all forms of malnutrition.
Download or read book Personal Networks written by Bernice Pescosolido and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combines classic and cutting-edge scholarship on personal social networks. A must-have resource for both newcomers and seasoned experts.
Download or read book Understanding Policy Change written by Cristina Corduneanu-Huci and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2012-11-09 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the reader with the full panoply of political economy tools and concepts necessary to understand, analyze, and integrate how political and social factors may influence the success or failure of their policy goals.
Download or read book Measuring and Analyzing the Impact of GVCs on Economic Development written by World Trade Organization and published by World Trade Organization. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report is about a huge contribution to our deepening understanding of what the global economy really means and how it is changing. The report helpfully distinguishes elements of an economy that are tradable and the large set that are non-tradable. Clearly the tradables set is expanding with the support of enabling technology. The report argues that connectivity in the networks that define the evolving architecture of GVCs is important. This Global Value Chain Development Report is the result of intensive and detailed work in assembling and analyzing data on the structure of economies and on how they are linked. It creates a much clearer picture of evolving patterns of independence. It also presents a much clearer picture of comparative advantage. --Publisher description.
Download or read book World Happiness Report 2018 written by John F. Helliwell and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World Happiness Report reviews levels of happiness across developed and developing nations, and presents ranking tables on national and regional happiness.
Download or read book The 2003 CAP Reform written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
