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Women’s Well-Being during a Pandemic and Its Containment

Pandemics are confronted in a different context in developing countries and thus its containment has different consequences. Women may be especially vulnerable in these settings given gender norms, low availability of mental health services, and weaker state capacity. To examine how women fare in these contexts during the COVID-19 Pandemic, the researchers conduct a large phone survey in India. Given the mosaic of policies within relatively small geographic areas, researchers are able to derive meaningful variation in lockdown policies and assess the relationship of containment with mental health and other measures of well-being.

Doing this, the study finds that the pandemic is associated with drastic income losses and increases in food insecurity, as well as declines in female mental health and well-being. With the evidence from the surveys, researchers are able to further show that the negative effects of the pandemic are exacerbated in areas with more containment, and respondents in these areas report both worse female mental health and more food insecurity. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

Migration and the Labour Market Impacts of COVID-19

Since COVID-19 is primarily transmitted via face-to-face contact, migration plays an outsized role in its global spread. Furthermore, as social distancing policies entail a restriction of migration, be it international or national, households’ whose income is dependent to some degree on labor migration remittances have seen their livelihoods considerably affected. With 272 million people living outside of their country of birth and estimated 763 million internal migrants worldwide, of whom two thirds are in LMICs, the issue becomes very relevant in the context of a pandemic. Poor households that engage in labor migration face moreover a triple threat: increased exposure to the virus, local economic exposure to global downturn, and vulnerability to economic contraction in the destination markets.

To investigate the economic impacts of COVID-19, the researchers construct panel data from phone interviews of representative samples of migrant and non-migrant households in April and May 2020 linked to prior studies in Bangladesh and Nepal. With it, earnings declines in the COVID-19 period are found to be 25 per cent greater among migrant households than among non-migrant households across all samples. This leads to excess food insecurity up to four times greater than that faced by non-migrant households. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

Using Bank Savings Product Design for Empowering Women and Agricultural Development

Access to formal deposit accounts is still far from a reality for 1.7 billion adults worldwide, most of them living in developing countries. Therefore, savings by the poor have become a priority in the development agenda and savings mobilization strategies for the poor are widely seen as key initiatives for agricultural development, food security and economic growth. In Ethiopia, the setting of this working paper’s study, bank savings account penetration reaches only 12 percent of adults with primary education, while the gender gap has widened even as total financing available to the world’s poor has increased steadily.

This paper thus investigates a financial intervention that provides small subsidies to cover the costs of opening formal savings accounts to 1.200 agricultural households in Ethiopia. Three groups are targeted as part of the intervention: single deposit account in the name of the household head (90% being male), joint deposit in the name of both husband and wife, and a pure control group.  Results from the intervention show that households with the joint account demonstrate strong positive labor responses in comparison to the other groups, just as significant gains for school-aged girls. These findings can be understood as coming from an increased bargaining power of women in households where they co-own the bank savings account. Read the detailed Working Paper here.

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Our newest publications

Searching with Friends

We study how active labor market policies affect the exchange of information and support among jobseekers. Leveraging a unique social network survey in Ethiopia, we find that a randomized job-search assistance intervention reduces information sharing and support between treated jobseekers and their active job-search partners. Due to lower job-search support, untreated individuals search less and, suggestively, have worse employment outcomes. These results are explained by a model of networks where unemployed individuals form job-search partnerships to exploit the complementarities of job search. These partnerships are broken if policy creates inequality in the access to information about job vacancies.

Young Adults and Labor Markets in Africa

Every year millions of young adults join the labor market in Africa. This paper uses the Jobs of the World Database to compare their job prospects to those of their counterparts in other low-income regions. We show that employment rates are similar at similar levels of development but young adults in Africa are less likely to have a salaried job, especially when the size of their cohort is large. Building on existing evidence on the impacts of interventions targeting both the demand and supply sides of the labor market, we discuss policy priorities for boosting the growth of salaried job creation in the region.

Should Farmers Farm More? Comparing Marginal Products within Malawian Households

According to standard economic theory, households should equate the marginal revenue product of an input across activities within the household. However, this prediction may not hold in the presence of risk. Using data on farm plots and non-farm enterprises in Malawi, we examine the impact of risk on the allocation decisions of agricultural households as they allocate labor across farm and non-farm production. We control for many household and production characteristics, including household fixed effects, and find farm marginal revenue product of labor (MRPL) to be consistently higher than non-farm MRPL. These results hold when restricting estimation to periods of high and low non-farm labor allocation. These results are consistent with farm production being riskier than non-farm production for most households in Malawi. These findings suggest that improved access to insurance of farming activities and wage employment opportunities could increase total household income.

SME’s During COVID-19

The study examines how cottage and microenterprises have been coping with Covid-19. It conducts a largescale panel survey of about 2300 microenterprises across Bangladesh. In the first round of the survey in July 2020, the study found that the average sales were less than half of that of pre-Covid levels and only about 60% of enterprises were fully open. While laying off workers was not that prevalent, employees in more than 80% of enterprises were facing a cut in working hours and wages. To assess the extent of recovery, the second round was conducted in January 2021 – eight months after the first lockdown. It appears that the enterprises have largely recovered; 97% of the enterprises were fully open for business. But they were still struggling with sales and orders, with sales remained 17% lower than the pre-Covid level, indicating a sluggish demand. Recovery was also uneven across sectors. Businesses that require more close contact have much lower recovery. Female workers were disproportionately affected by COVID-19 as they experienced lower wages and reduced employment prospects following the recovery. They also experienced worse psychological stress during the pandemic. These small and medium firms also hardly received any financial support after nine months of the announcing the initial stimulus by the government of Bangladesh, suggesting barriers to accessing such incentives.

Women’s Well-being During a Pandemic and its Containment

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the dual crises of disease and the containment policies designed to mitigate it. There is little evidence on the impacts of these policies on women, who are likely to be especially vulnerable, in lower-income settings. We conduct a large phone survey and leverage India’s geographically-varying containment policies to estimate the association between both the pandemic and its containment policies, and measures of women’s well-being, including mental health and food security. The pandemic resulted in dramatic income losses, increases in food insecurity, and declines in female mental health. While potentially crucial for public health, containment policies are associated with greater food insecurity, particularly for women, and reduced female mental health. For women, average containment levels are associated with a 39-45% increase in the likelihood of sadness, depression, hopelessness, and feeling more worried. Vulnerable groups of women — those with daughters and those living in female-headed households — experience even larger declines in mental health.

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