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The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.
This paper provides evidence of the effects of a largescale intervention that focuses on the quality of nutritional and child care inputs during the early stages of life. The empirical strategy uses a combination of double-difference and weighting estimators in a longitudinal survey to address the purposive placement of participating communities and estimate the effect of the availability of the program at the community level on nutritional outcomes. The authors find that the program helped 0-5 year old children in the participating communities to bridge the gap in weight for age z-scores and the incidence of underweight. The program also had significant effects in protecting long-term nutritional This paper-a product of the Poverty Team, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the department to promote rigorous impact evaluations of anti-poverty programs. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at egalasso@worldbank.org. outcomes (height for age z-scores and incidence of stunting) against an underlying negative trend in the absence of the program. Importantly, the effect of the program exhibits substantial heterogeneity: gains in nutritional outcomes are larger for more educated mothers and for villages with better infrastructure. The program enables the analysis to isolate responsiveness to information provision and disentangle the effect of knowledge in the education effect on nutritional outcomes. The results are suggestive of important complementarities among child care, maternal education, and community infrastructure.
We analyse the subjective perceptions of poverty in Madagascar in 2001 and their relationship to objective poverty indicators. We base our analysis on survey responses to a series of subjective perception questions. We extend the existing empirical methodology for estimating subjective poverty lines on the basis of categorical consumption adequacy questions. Based on this methodology, we calculate the household-specific, subjective poverty lines. We are able to compare between the results of subjective poverty analysis using several types of subjective welfare questions. Our results show that the aggregate poverty measures derived from consumption adequacy questions accord quite well with the poverty measures based on objective poverty lines. We demonstrate that the subjective welfare analysis can be used in poor developing countries for evaluating socio-economic and distributional impacts of various policy interventions.
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