Near-Real-Time Welfare and Livelihood Impacts of an Active Civil War: Evidence from Ethiopia (with Kibrom Abay, Guush Berhane, Jordan Chamberlin and Mehari Abay): Food Policy
Ethiopia recently experienced a large-scale war that lasted for more than two years. Using unique High-Frequency Phone Survey (HFPS) data, which span several months before and after the outbreak of the war, this paper provides evidence on the immediate impacts of the conflict on households’ food security. We also assess potential mechanisms and evaluate impacts on proximate outcomes, including on livelihood activities and access to food markets. We use difference-in-differences and two-way fixed effects estimation to compare trends across affected and unaffected regions (households) and before and after the outbreak of the war. Seven months into the conflict, we find that the war was associated with a 37 percentage points increase in the probability of moderate to severe food insecurity. Using the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), we show that exposure to an additional battle leads to a 1 percentage point increase in the probability of moderate or severe food insecurity. The conflict was associated with significant reduction in access to food through supply chain disruptions and by curtailing non-farm livelihood activities. Non-farm and wage related activities were affected the most, whereas farming activities were relatively more resilient. Our estimates, which likely underestimate the true average effects on the population, constitute novel evidence on the near-real-time impacts of large-scale conflict. Our work highlights the potential of HFPS to monitor active and large-scale conflicts, especially in contexts where conventional data sources are not immediately available.
Revisiting Poverty Trends and the Role of Social Protection Systems in Africa During the COVID-19 Pandemic (with Kibrom Abay, Nishant Yonzan, and Sikandra Kurdi): Journal of African Economies
Quantifying the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poverty in Africa has been as difficult as predicting the path of the pandemic, mainly due to data limitations. The advent of new data sources, including national accounts and phone survey data, provides an opportunity for a thorough reassessment of the impact of the pandemic and the subsequent expansion of social protection systems on the evolution of poverty in Africa. In this paper, we combine per capita GDP growth from national accounts with data from High-Frequency Phone Surveys for several countries to estimate the net impact of the pandemic on poverty. We find that the pandemic has increased poverty in Africa by 1.5 to 1.7 percentage points in 2020, relatively smaller than early estimates and projections. We also find that countries affected by Fragility, Conflict and Violence experienced the greatest increases in poverty, about 2.1 percentage points in 2020. Furthermore, we assess and synthesize empirical evidence on the role that social protection systems played in mitigating the adverse impact of the COVID-19 crisis in Africa. We review social protection responses in various African countries, mainly focusing on the impact of these programs and effectiveness of targeting systems. Although the evidence base on the protective role of social protection programs during the pandemic remains scarce, we highlight important findings on the impacts of these programs while also uncovering some vulnerabilities in social protection programming in Africa. We finally draw important lessons related to the delivery, targeting and impact of various social protection programs launched in Africa in response to the pandemic.
COVID-19 and Food Security in Ethiopia: Do Social Protection Programs Protect? (with Kibrom Abay, Guush Berhane, John Hoddinott): EDCC
This paper assesses the impact of Ethiopia's flagship social protection program, the Productive Safety Net Program on the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food and nutrition security of households, mothers, and children. The analysis uses pre-pandemic, in-person household survey data and a post-pandemic phone survey. Two-thirds of the respondents reported that their incomes had fallen after the pandemic began, and almost half reported that their ability to satisfy their food needs had worsened. Employing a household fixed effects difference-in-difference approach, the study finds that household food insecurity increased by 11.7 percentage points and the size of the food gap by 0.47 months in the aftermath of the onset of the pandemic. Participation in the Productive Safety Net Program offsets virtually all of this adverse change - the likelihood of becoming food insecure increased by only 2.4 percentage points for Productive Safety Net Program households and the duration of the food gap increased by only 0.13 month. The protective role of the program is greater for poorer households and those living in remote areas. The results are robust to various definitions of program participation, different estimators, and different ways of accounting for the non-randomness of mobile phone ownership. Productive Safety Net Program participants were less likely to reduce expenditures on health and education by 7.7 percentage points and less likely to reduce expenditures on agricultural inputs by 13 percentage points. By contrast, mothers' and children's diets changed little, despite some changes in the composition of diets, with consumption of animal source foods declining significantly.
Access to health services, food, and water during an active conflict: Evidence from Ethiopia (with Kibrom Abay, Mehari Hiluf Abay, Guush Berhane, Jordan Chamberlin and Kevin Croke): PLOS Global Public Health
Civil conflict began in Ethiopia in November 2020 and has reportedly caused major disruptions in access to health services, food, and related critical services, in addition to the direct impacts of the conflict on health and well-being. However, the population-level impacts of the conflict have not yet been systematically quantified. We analyze high frequency phone surveys conducted by the World Bank, which included measures of access to basic services, to estimate the impact of the first phase of the war (November 2020 to May 2021) on households in Tigray. After controlling for sample selection, a difference-in-differences approach is used to estimate causal effects of the conflict on population access to health services, food, and water and sanitation. Inverse probability weighting is used to adjust for sample attrition. The conflict has increased the share of respondents who report that they were unable to access needed health services by 35 percentage points (95% CI: 14–55 pp) and medicine by 8 pp (95% CI:2–15 pp). It has also increased the share of households unable to purchase staple foods by 26 pp (95% CI:7–45 pp). The share of households unable to access water did not increase, although the percentage able to purchase soap declined by 17 pp (95% CI: 1–32 pp). We document significant heterogeneity across population groups, with disproportionate effects on the poor, on rural populations, on households with undernourished children, and those living in communities without health facilities. These significant disruptions in access to basic services likely underestimate the true burden of conflict in the affected population, given that the conflict has continued beyond the survey period, and that worse-affected households may have higher rates of non-response. Documented spatial and household-level heterogeneity in the impact of the conflict may help guide rapid post-conflict responses.
Respondent Fatigue Reduces Dietary Diversity Scores Reported from Mobile Phone Surveys in Ethiopia during the COVID-19 Pandemic (with Kibrom Abay, Guush Berhane, John Hoddinott): Journal of Nutrition
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred interest in the use of remote data collection techniques, including phone surveys, in developing country contexts. This interest has sparked new methodological work focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of remote data collection, the use of incentives to increase response rates, and how to address sample representativeness. By contrast, attention given to associated response fatigue and its implications remains limited. This study designed and implemented an experiment that randomized the placement of a survey module on women’s dietary diversity in the survey instrument. The study also examines potential differential vulnerabilities to fatigue across food groups and respondents. The findings show that delaying the timing of mothers’ food consumption module by 15 minutes leads to 8-17 percent decrease in the dietary diversity score and a 28 percent decrease in the number of mothers who consumed a minimum of four dietary groups. This is driven by underreporting of infrequently consumed foods; the experimentally induced delay in the timing of mothers’ food consumption module led to decreases of 40 and 11 percent in the reporting of consumption of animal source foods and fruits and vegetables, respectively. The results are robust to changes in model specification and pass falsification tests. Responses by older and less educated mothers and those from larger households are more vulnerable to measurement error due to fatigue.
Sub-sampling a Large Physical Achieve for Additional Analysis to Support Spatial Mapping (with Robel Alemu, Aweke Gelaw, Dawd Gashu, Abdul Mossa, Elizabeth Bailey, William Masters, Martin Broadley, Murray Lark): Geoderma
The value of physical archives of soil material from field sampling activities has been widely recognized. If we want to use archive material for new destructive analyses to support a task, such as spatial mapping, then an efficient sub-sampling strategy is needed, both to manage analytical costs and to conserve the archive material. In this paper we present an approach to this problem when the objective is spatial mapping by ordinary kriging. Our objective was to subsample the physical archive from the Ethiopia Soil Information System (EthioSIS) survey of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR) for spatial mapping of two variables, concentrations of particular fractions of selenium and iodine in the soil, which had not been measured there. We used data from cognate parts of surrounding regions of Ethiopia to estimate variograms of these properties, and then computed prediction error variances for maps in SNNPR based on proposed subsets of the archive of different size, selected to optimize a spatial coverage criterion (with some close sample pairs included). On this basis a subsample was selected.
This is a preregistered experiment in that we have proposed criteria for evaluating the success of our approach, and are publishing that in advance of receiving analytical data on the subsampled material from the laboratories where they are being processed. A subsequent short report will publish the outcome. The use of preregistered trials is widely recommended and used in areas of science including public health, and we believe that it is a sound strategy to promote reproducible research in soil science.
The Impact of Ethiopia's Health Facility Construction Campaign on Health Service Utilization and Outcomes (with Kevin Croke, Andualem Mengistu, Stephen O’Connell): BMJ Global Health
Access to health facilities in many developing countries remains low, with a strong association between individuals’ distance to facilities and health outcomes. Yet plausibly causal estimates of the effects of facility construction programs are rare. We study the impact of Ethiopia’s health center construction program on health service utilization and health outcomes, using a difference-in-difference design to compare households in locations that received new health facilities at different times to households in locations that did not receive a new facility. Starting in 2004, more than 2,800 government health facilities were constructed in Ethiopia. We match facility opening years to child birth years in four rounds of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) using georeferenced data. We find that having a health facility built within 5 km increases facility delivery by 16.4 percentage points, increases the number of antenatal care visits by, and increases caesarean sections by 1.6 percentage points. It is also associated with a reduction in neonatal mortality of 0.6 percentage points. Having a higher-level facility (i.e district hospital) within 5 km increases access to caesarean sections by 7.3 percentage points.
Insuring Well-being? Buyers Remorse and Peace of Mind Effects from Insurance (with Chris Barrett and Erin Lentz): American Journal of Agricultural Economics
In this paper we estimate the causal effects of index insurance coverage on the subjective well-being (SWB) of a poor population in rural southern Ethiopia. Insurance coverage may be welfare enhancing ex ante by reducing exposure to risk. Yet, if the insurance policy lapses without paying out, the purchaser may experience buyer's remorse ex post of the resolution of uncertainty about stochastic losses. The prospective (ex ante) and retrospective (ex post) well-being effects of insurance may therefore differ, especially in the absence of indemnity payments. We separately identify (1) the ex ante SWB effects of current insurance coverage that arise from reducing ex ante risk exposure to potential shocks, and (2) the ex post buyer's remorse effects of lapsed insurance policies that did not pay out. By exploiting the randomization of incentives to purchase a newly introduced index-based livestock insurance product and three rounds of household panel data, we establish that current coverage generates statistically significant gains in buyer's SWB. The ex ante gains more than offset the statistically significant buyer's remorse effect of having lost money on insurance that did not pay out. These findings suggest that insurance can have significant impact on SWB and illustrate that failure to control for potential buyer's remorse effects can bias downwards estimates of the welfare gains from insurance coverage.
High Temperature and Learning Outcomes: Evidence from Ethiopia (with Patrick Behrer and Bhavya Srivastava)
This paper uses data from 2003–19 on 2.47 million test takers of a national high stakes university entrance exam in Ethiopia to study the impacts of temperature on learning outcomes. It finds that high temperatures during the school year leading up to the exam reduce test scores, controlling for temperatures when the exam is taken. The results suggest that the scores of female students are less impacted by higher temperatures compared to their male counterparts. Additionally, the analysis finds that the scores of students from schools located in hotter regions are less impacted by higher temperatures compared to their counterparts from cooler regions. The evidence suggests that the adverse effects of temperature are driven by impacts from within-classroom temperatures, rather than from indirect impacts on agriculture.
How Well Can Real-Time Indicators Track the Economic Impacts of a Crisis Like COVID-19 (with Gi Khan Ten, David Newhouse, and Utz Pape): Development Policy Review, Forthcoming
This paper presents evidence on the extent to which a set of real-time indicators tracked changes in gross domestic product across 142 countries in 2020. The real-time indicators include Google mobility, Google search trends, food price information, nitrogen dioxide, and nighttime lights. Google mobility and staple food prices both declined sharply in March and April, followed by a rapid recovery that returned to baseline levels by July and August. Mobility and staple food prices fell less in low-income countries. Nitrogen dioxide levels show a similar pattern, with a steep fall and rapid recovery in high-income and upper-middle-income countries but not in low-income and lower-middle-income countries. In April and May, Google search terms reflecting economic distress and religiosity spiked in some regions but not others. Data on nighttime lights show no clear drop in March outside East Asia. Linear models selected using the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator explain about a third of the variation in annual gross domestic product growth rates across 72 countries. In a smaller subset of higher income countries, real-time indicators explain about 40 percent of the variation in quarterly gross domestic product growth. Overall, mobility and food price data, as well as pollution data in more developed countries, appeared to be best at capturing the widespread economic disruption experienced during the summer of 2020. The results indicate that these real-time indicators can track a substantial percentage of both annual and quarterly changes in gross domestic product.
Winners and Losers from COVID-19: Global Evidence from Google Search (with Kibrom Abay, Andinet Woldemichael)
As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc across the world, researchers are attempting to quantify the economic fallout from the pandemic as it continues to unfold. Estimating the economic impacts of a prevailing pandemic is fraught with uncertainties about the epidemiology of the disease and the breadth of disruption of economic activities. This paper employs historical and near real-time Google search data to estimate the immediate impacts of COVID-19 on demand for selected services across 182 countries. The analysis exploits the temporal and spatial variations in the spread of the virus and finds that demand for services that require face-to-face interaction, such as hotels, restaurants and retail trade, has substantially contracted. In contrast, demand for services that can be performed remotely or provide solutions to the challenges of reduced personal interactions, such as information and communications technology (ICT), and deliveries, has increased significantly. In a span of three months, the pandemic has resulted in a 63 percent reduction in demand for hotels, while increasing demand for ICT by a comparable rate. The impacts appear to be driven by supply contractions, due to social distancing and lockdown measures, and demand shocks as consumers shelter in place, with the latter dominating for most services. The magnitude of the changes in demand varies considerably with government responses to the pandemic.
Saving Lives Through Technology: Mobile Phones and Infant Mortality (with Justice Tei Mensah, Kibrom A. Abay)
Poor access to healthcare facilities is one of the main drivers of infant mortality in Africa. Digital technologies like mobile phones offer an opportunity to address these constraints. We leverage mobile network coverage expansion and survey data spanning two decades to study the impact of mobile phones on infant mortality in Africa. Our identification strategy leverages plausibly exogenous variations in lightning intensity, and (sub)regional convergence in telecom policies as instruments for mobile network expansion. We find that access to mobile phones significantly reduce infant mortality. A 10 percentage point increase in mobile network coverage is associated with a 0.45 percentage points reduction in infant mortality. Improvement in health knowledge and behavior, and healthcare utilization are plausible channels. These findings provide suggestive evidence of significant health dividends from inclusive digital revolution in developing countries.
Inter-generational Effects of Early Childhood Shocks on Human Capital: Evidence from Ethiopia
This paper studies the inter-generational effects of maternal early childhood shocks on the human capital outcomes of children. I exploit the 1983-1985 Ethiopian famine as an exogenous source of variation to study the effects of exposure to severe shocks in utero and/or during the first three years after birth on the cognitive, non-cognitive and health capabilities of children of mothers who were exposed to the shocks in early childhood. Using data that track children from early childhood through adolescence, I estimate the effects of maternal early childhood shock over their children's life cycle. I find that the famine has had a lasting inter-generational effect. Mothers' early childhood famine exposure reduces their children's height-for-age z-score, schooling, locus of control and self-esteem. These effects are persistent from age one through early adolescence. The main inter-generational transmission channel of the shock is children's maternal human capital endowment. Mothers who suffered the famine in early childhood are shorter and have less schooling. I also find a critical maternal shock duration threshold of three months. These findings point to ineffectiveness of remediation once the damage is done to mothers as young girls. The policy implication is that girls under the age of three with high risk of crossing the critical famine duration threshold should be targeted for health and nutritional interventions.
Mobile phones and Child Health in Africa. with Justice Tei Mensah, Kibrom Abay, Berenger Djoumessi Tiague
Healthcare and Educational Achievement in Ethiopia. with Kevin Croke, Andualem Mengistu and Stephen O'Connell
Impact of Iodine Deprivation on Children's Health and Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Wartime Disruptions in Ethiopia. with Robel Alemu, William Masters and Andualem Mengistu
Access to Health Care and Agricultural Productivity in Ethiopia. with Kibrom Abay, Mesay Gebresilasse and Andualem Mengistu
Farmer Adaptations to Falling Groundwater Levels. with Maulik Jagnani and Meera Mahadevan
Intergenerational Effects of Early Childhood Shocks on Human Capital: Evidence from Ethiopia.
How Do Alternative Targeting Approaches of Social Protection Perform in a Conflict Setting. with Kibrom Abay, Guush Berhane, and Daniel Gilligan
Elite Capture and Pro-Social Behavior in Targeting of Social Protection Programs. with Kibrom Abay, Guush Berhane, Daniel Gilligan and Alemayehu Seyoum Tafesse
The Mental Health Effects of Social Transfers in a Conflict Setting. with Kibrom Abay, Guush Berhane, Daniel Gilligan and Halefom Nigus