Conventional wisdom about US foreign policy towards Africa contains two popular assumptions. First, Democrats are widely considered the party most inclined to care about Africa and the most willing to spend resources on assistance to the continent. Second, the end of the Cold War was widely...

Using longitudinal survey data collected in collaboration with a treatment program, this paper is the first to estimate the economic impacts of antiretroviral treatment in Africa. The responses in two important outcomes are studied: (1) labor supply of adult AIDS patients receiving treatment;...

Our study provides a nationally representative analysis of the gender gap in agricultural productivity in Malawi. We decompose the gap, for the first time, at the mean and selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution into (i) a portion driven by gender differences in levels of...

Despite regulatory efforts designed to make it easier for firms to formalize, informality remains extremely high among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most of the region, business registration in a national registry is separate from tax registration. This paper provides initial results from an...

We show that pregnant women whose first clinic visit coincides with the nurse's attendance are 58 percentage points more likely to test for HIV and 46 percent more likely to deliver in a hospital. Furthermore, women with high pretest expectations of being HIV positive, whose visit coincides with...

Data against natural disasters makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the conditions and actions necessary for establishing effective disaster management information systems. The volume's introductory chapters outline the data needs that arise at different stages in disaster...

This volume provides lessons on the design and functioning of such monitoring systems, based on the experience of twelve Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) countries (Albania, Bolivia, Guyana, Honduras, the Kyrgyz Republic, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Niger, Tanzania, and Uganda). The...

This volume provides an overview of a range of tools for measuring service delivery and offers valuable lessons on the opportunities and constraints practitioners face in measuring performance. The authors investigate country cases using data from a range of sources in a variety of contexts....

Matching grants are one of the most common policy instruments used by developing country governments to try to foster technological upgrading, innovation, exports, use of business development services and other activities leading to firm growth. However, since they involve subsidizing firms, the...

This paper uses data from the General Household Survey Panel 2010/11 to analyze differences in agricultural productivity across male and female plot managers in Nigeria. The analysis utilizes the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method, which allows for decomposing the unconditional gender gap into...