Rasmus Heltberg

• World Bank

This article aggregates qualitative field research from sites in 17 developing countries to describe crisis impacts and analyse how people coped with the food, fuel, and financial crises during 2008–2011. The research uncovered significant hardships behind the apparent resilience, with widespread reports of food insecurity, debt, asset loss, stress...

Clean, safe energy for rural areas is an important component of green growth and sustainable development. Biogas could be an important contributor, if its record in reality lives up to its expected potential. This paper provides a preliminary assessment of biogas use by smallholder farmers in rural China, using data collected from 2,700 households...

This paper surveys qualitative crisis monitoring data from sites in 17 developing and transition countries to describe crisis impacts and analyze the responses and sources of support used by people to cope. These crises included shocks to export sectors as a result of the global financial crisis, as well as food and fuel price volatility, in the pe...

In the years ahead, development efforts aiming at reducing vulnerability will increasingly have to factor in climate change, and social protection is no exception. This paper sets out the case for climate?responsive social protection and proposes a framework with principles, design features, and functions that would help Social Protection (SP) syst...

This paper develops a methodology for regional disaggregated estimation and mapping of the areas that are ex-ante the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and variability and applies it to Tajikistan, a mountainous country highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The authors construct the vulnerability index as a function of...

The Development Marketplace 2009 focused on adaptation to climate change. This paper identifies lessons from the Marketplace and assesses their implications for adaptation support. Our findings are based on: statistical tabulation of all proposals; in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 346 semi-finalists; and interviews with finalis...

Reporting the results of a novel survey of shocks, coping, outcomes, and safety nets in Pakistan, we find high incidence and cost of shocks borne by households, with health and other idiosyncratic shocks dominating in frequency, costliness, and adversity. Sample households lack effective coping options and use mostly self-insurance and informal cre...

This paper argues that indicators of anthropometric shortfall - especially low height and low weight-for-age - are uniquely suited for assessing absolute deprivation in developing countries. Anthropometric indicators are relatively precise, readily available for most countries, reflect the preferences and concerns of many poor people, consistent wi...

This paper explores the role of social protection in helping Africa adapt to climate change. The increase in covariate (environmental and health) risks due to ongoing and future climate changes, and the demonstrated adverse impacts of such risks, make it important to scale up interventions to reduce household vulnerability. Efforts under way to gea...

This paper presents and applies a conceptual framework to address human vulnerability to climate change. Drawing upon social risk management and asset-based approaches, the conceptual framework provides a unifying lens to examine links between risks, adaptation, and vulnerability. The result is an integrated approach to increase the capacity of soc...

Social protection (income) support to households in the wake of major natural disasters is assuming a growing role for the World Bank, and major cash transfers in Turkey, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Pakistan are reviewed in this article. Such support is usually best provided directly as cash to affected households; it complements other relief and r...

This paper discusses the factors guiding household choices of cooking fuels. This is crucial for policies to combat indoor air pollution. Household income is an important, but not the only, factor. Opportunity costs of firewood also play an essential role. Empirical results are based on the 2000 Guatemalan LSMS survey, which includes a detailed sec...

This paper analyzes trends and outcomes in Sri Lanka's labor markets and seeks to assess the likely impacts of labor market reform. A key question is whether the likely losses for some workers from labor market deregulation is justified by gains in the number of jobs? And are potential losers (workers being laid off) adequately protected or compens...

Poverty reduction and investment in human capital are important concerns of the government of Mozambique. Following independence in 1975, substantial expansion of basic education and health services took place. Enrolment rates went up and mortality declined. These gains, however, were soon undermined by war and economic collapse (Tarp and Arndt, 20...

Poverty reduction strategies often highlight public spending to improve health and education, focusing on investments in human capital among poorer members of society. In addition, debt relief programs such as the enhanced Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative often require increased spending on health and education in return for debt ca...

Modern cooking fuels can provide significant health, productivity, and environmental benefits. Yet spontaneous fuel switching does not occur to the extent often hoped. This paper discusses the determinants of household fuel use and fuel switching, using comparable household survey data from Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, South A...

this report may be reproduced without the express permission of, but with acknowledgment to, the International Food Policy Research Institute

This paper identifies key causal factors behind farmers’ marketing decisions in Mozambique. A two-step decision making process is outlined. Farmers decide, first, whether or not to participate in the market. Next, they decide how much to sell. The model is estimated using a Heckman switching regression approach. The key importance of non-price fact...

Poverty measures and profiles are used increasingly to guide antipoverty policies in low-income countries. An essential element in these analyses is the specification of a poverty line. However, there are many different methods for setting poverty lines, and different methods can yield strikingly different results, with correspondingly different po...

"Following Mozambique's economic collapse in 1986, the country began a wide-ranging process of reform, with the support of the international community. The diagnosis was of an economy that failed to maintain monetary control, consumed beyond its means, focused production excessively on nontraded goods, and relied on inefficient and inflexible micro...

This essay surveys the literature on property rights and natural resource management in developing countries. Focus is on policy relevant discussions concerning collective action, property regimes, local institutions for natural resource management, the evolution of individual property rights to land, land titling by government and poverty-environm...

Poverty measures and profiles are used increasingly to guide antipoverty policies in low-income countries. An essential element in these analyses is the specification of a poverty line. However, there are many different methods for setting poverty lines, and different methods can yield strikingly different results, with correspondingly different po...

This paper anlyses how parental education affects child human capital outcomes, using household survey data from Mozambique. Four indicators of human capital are examined: height-for-age of children below 5 years of age, children''s rate of survival, children''s education, and total fertility of adult women. Using a sequential regression approach,...

William Ascher (1999), Why Governments Waste Natural Resources: Policy Failures in Developing Countries, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 08018 60962. - Volume 6 Issue 3 - Rasmus Heltberg

In this paper we review the available summary measures for the magnitude of socio-economic inequalities in health. Measures which have been used differ in a number of important respects, including (1) the measurement of "relative" or "absolute" differences; (2) the measurement of an "effect" of lower socio-economic status, or of the "total impact"...

This paper disusses domestic energy supply and demand in rural India. Links between forest scarcity and household fuel collection are analyzed in a non-separable household model, focusing on substitution of non-commercial fuels from the commons and the private domain. Based on data from villages bordering a protected area, a novel maximum entropy a...

The subject of this article is the relationships between farm size and productivity and between farm size and profitability in the developing countries. The recent controversies over the inverse size-output relationship are reviewed, and a framework is provided that explains the inverse relationship based on plausible assumptions about imperfection...

The subject of this article is the alleged inverse relationship between farm size and productivity in developing countries. The recent controversy is reviewed, and a framework is provided to explain the inverse relationship based on plausible assumptions about imperfections in the markets for labor, credit and land. On this basis testable hypothese...

Introduction In line with its focus on social policies, Sri Lanka has devoted significant attention to worker protection and to endowing workers with rights and "voice" in the employment relationship. For example, extensive legislation covers different aspects of working conditions and government has ratified eight International Labour Organization...