Three Essays In The Microeconomics Of Development

Author : Setou Mamadou Diarra
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 107 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (113 download)

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Download or read book Three Essays in the Microeconomics of Development written by Setou Mamadou Diarra and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis, I investigate factors that undermine children's life chances in developing countries, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries . Three essays comprise this thesis. The first two (Chapters 1 and 2) focus on the life chances of adolescent girls in relation to the issue of child marriage, while the third essay (Chapter 3) focuses on child poverty, in relation to the issue of concordance/discordance between monetary and multidimensional measures of this phenomenon. Child marriage is found in almost all regions of the world, but SSA gets the brunt of it, as it is home to 8 of the 10 countries worldwide reporting the highest prevalence rates of this phenomenon. In 2010, 34% (about 67 million) of young women aged 20-24 globally were married before their eighteenth birthday and about 12% were married by age 15. The United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that if present trends continue, 142 million girls will be married before age 18 in the next decade (UNFPA, 2012). Child marriage has been shown to hamper developing countries girls' life chances both directly and indirectly (UNFPA, 2012). Where it exists as a mass phenomenon, it reflects gendered norms that shape adolescent girls' lives through constrained choices and capabilities relative to boys, including a higher care work burden for girls, restricted access to education, limited mobility; limited authority in the family for wives ( particularly over sexuality and fertility decisions). Combating child marriage in SSA and elsewhere may thus yield significant positive spillovers for the achievement of the 2030 United Nation's Agenda for Sustainable Development. The existing child marriage literature highlights the joint role played by supply-side factors - i.e., why parents marry off their underage daughters- and demand-side factors- i.e., why men enter into marital relationships with underage girls- in driving the prevalence rates of child marriage in the developing world. To turn this empirical finding into effective policy action, however, a quantitative assessment of the relative strength of both demandside and supply-side factors in explaining these high prevalence rates is of paramount importance. The first essay of my thesis aims to fill this knowledge gap by measuring the quantitative importance of the intrinsic value Niger's men attach to having child brides. The second essay follows up on the first, by developing a demand-side model of child marriage with empirical application to Nigeria, to explain why a large proportion of men in developing countries marry underage girls. The third essay explores both theoretically and empirically the causes of the observed mismatch between monetary and multidimensional child poverty. Like the first two essays, it is empirically grounded in the experiences of SSA countries, with a practical application to Tanzania. This essay theoretically links child outcomes, such as nutritional status and schooling achievements to parental and household characteristics including household income and parental education. The model used to formalize this link predicts that parental education influences the level of the mismatch between monetary and multidimensional child poverty. Empirical evidence drawn from Tanzania NPS data is consistent with this prediction. In particular, results show that parental education is a negative predictor of the probability that a monetarily non-poor child suffers some basic deprivations, and a positive predictor of the likelihood that a monetarily poor child suffers no basic deprivations. Overall, these three essays contribute to advancing our knowledge of factors that constraint children's life chances in SSA. In particular, my thesis suggests that policy interventions that ignores the extent and causes of local resistance to the implementation of child marriage prevention programs may face uncertain results (Essay 1 and Essay 2). It also highlights another channel through which parental education can play an important role in the improvement of children's life chances in developing countries (Essay 3).