Economics of Less-Developed Regions-

1. Mortality Trends-

Use data from the World Development Indicators (WDI) for your country to document changes in infant, child, and maternal mortality patterns over the last 30 years. You can present the results in a table or graph. How does your country compare to others in its region? Use the World Bank regional categories to determine which region your country is in.

2. Family and Gender

There are many areas of the world in which women and girls are neglected. Suppose that you have been asked by a community leader to determine why females receive worse treatment than males in the community.

(a) How would you estimate the number of "missing women" in the community?

(b) The community leader believes that women and girls are neglected because there are few employment opportunities for women. What are three alternative explanations for gender discrimination?

(c) The community plans to introduce an employment program where married women aged 30-45 are given an opportunity to earn a salary outside the home. How would you measure the impact of this program on gender discrimination using and randomized evaluation?

(d) How could you measure the effect of this program using a "natural experiment" or "difference-in-differences" approach?

(e) Describe a research design you could use to test whether one of the alternative explanations you mentioned in Part (b) was valid. What evidence or information would you collect? What types of comparisons would you make? What would your explanation predict you should find?

3. Barriers to Improving Education

Suppose that policymakers in your country are interested in learning about the relative importance of different barriers to educational attainment among the poor. One group of officials believes that the high costs of education are the major constraint while another group believes that what matters is a lack of information on the returns to education. Some economists at the World Bank offer theoretical arguments as to why both constraints matter and interact with each other. You are granted a budget to design a randomized experiment with 10,000 poor households. You can construct up to three treatment arms in this experiment.

(a) How would you select the 10,000 households to be in your study?

(b) Describe up to three treatments that you would use to determine which of the three hypotheses is correct. How would you assign the 10,000 households across treatment and control groups?

(c) Describe the research design in terms of (i) the key dependent variables of interest, and (ii) the procedure to estimate the treatment effects.

(d) Do you need to have a baseline survey in order to identify the causal impact of the treatments? Or can you just use a single follow-up survey? Explain.