Tag: world bank

A World Bank Report on the Progress on Sanitation in Rural India

The full title of this report is ” Progress on Sanitation in Rural India: Reconciling Diverse Evidence”.

Here’s the first paragraph of the concluding section in its entirety:

Some of the public discourse surrounding the performance of SBM-G has been dominated by contested claims about the extent of progress achieved in reducing open defecation in rural India. The controversy appears related to the use of different, competing data sources, methodologies, measurement and definitions of sanitation outcomes. To bring some order to these debates, this paper assembles multiple independent data sources – combining both government and non-governmental data – along with harmonization of measures across surveys, to paint the most comprehensive, reliable picture to date of the progress in sanitation in rural India in the past decade, covering the period before and after SBM-G implementation

https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099092923121532756/pdf/P176229130c733b010a59143531b8a716c7d31f859e8.pdf, pp 28

So which sources have been used?

ibid, pp 5

Students unfamiliar with these surveys may want to read the brief description that follows this table in the PDF, to get a sense of who conducts these surveys, and how. This report is worth reading for multiple reasons, but students of economics and statistics will especially enjoy reading this, for it is a good exercise to learn how to reconcile information across different surveys. Section 3, which details the methodology used in preparing this report, is especially useful reading. Pay careful attention to Tables 4,5 and 6 in particular.

Four key results emerge from this report:

  1. Enormous expansion in toilet access, with near-universal coverage of rural sanitation infrastructure
  2. Substantial increase in regular toilet use, especially for the poor and socially disadvantaged groups
  3. Wide variation in progress of regular toilet use across and within states
  4. The impressive gains in regular toilet use are slowing or reversing, sustainability is a key challenge

Each of these are important, and noteworthy. The report speaks about how the Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin (SBM-G) builds on earlier programs – The Central Rural Sanitation Program (1986-1999) and the Total Sanitation Campaign (1999-2012, rebranded as Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan from 2012-2014), and mentions how the scale that this particular program achieved was truly noteworthy:

We find clear evidence of remarkable progress in the provision of sanitation infrastructure, which has now extended toilet access to almost everyone in rural India. This achievement is apparent in both the government data and in independent survey data. Building over 100 million toilets to provide sanitation access to the rural poor is a breathtaking administrative achievement. There is recent research that sheds light on the processes and delivery mechanisms by the which the Indian government was able to deploy resources so quickly, efficiently and widely (Boudet et al 2023). Other developing country governments could learn from that experience, not only in the sanitation sector, but for other development sectors as well.

https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099092923121532756/pdf/P176229130c733b010a59143531b8a716c7d31f859e8.pdf, pp 28

Second, the improvement in regular toilet use is encouraging, and the biggest improvements come from the poorest states, and the most disadvantaged communities:

pp 16
pp 15

But most worrisome is this:

By 2018-19, 87 percent of India’s rural population was regularly using any toilet (unimproved or improved) – a jump of 41 percentage points in just three years (Figure 7). Even the regular usage of “own, improved toilets” doubled during this period from 37 to 74 percent. By historical standards, this represents extraordinary progress achieved within a short period of time. However, that progress has not sustained. Since 2018-19, regular use of any toilet has actually decreased by 12 percentage points. This backsliding implies that a full quarter of the country’s rural population was not regularly using toilets by 2021. When imposing the JMP metric of own, improved toilets, usage falls to 65%.

https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099092923121532756/pdf/P176229130c733b010a59143531b8a716c7d31f859e8.pdf (pp 17) Emphasis added

Toilet usage is as much a hardware problem as it is a software problem. I no longer remember where I heard this line in this context, but it is a line that has stuck with me. If you would like this to be said in the language of the economist, supplying toilets (hardware) is only half the story. Well, less than half the story. As this report puts it: “Sustaining regular toilet use remains a critical challenge, and results from randomized controlled trials conducted by social scientists in several developing countries offer insights on how to sustainably increase sanitation demand.”

There is much more to read and analyze in this report, and it is a report that should be widely read (to give you just one example re: more needs to be analyzed, consider the fact that Gujarat and Tamil Nadu rank below Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan in regular toilet use among the rural population).

We have achieved remarkable progress when it comes to open defecation, and much more remains to be done. We live in times where all of us are willing to acknowledge only one half of the previous sentence, and heap abuse on folks who dare utter the other half – but both things are true at the same time, and both need to be acknowledged.

Also see this earlier EFE post on Where India Goes.

Tim Harford on The Ease of Doing Business Report

But before anything else, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the title of the article – if you haven’t seen the movie, please do. One of my favorite Judie Dench movies.

You may have heard of the problems associated with the Ease of Doing Business report. (The reason I have linked to the Wikipedia page rather than the original page is because it wasn’t opening for me. Your mileage may vary.)

Even a spreadsheet can become a victim of its own success. Just ask the World Bank’s Doing Business report. While many worthy publications from the World Bank are never downloaded, Doing Business has been a smash hit for years. No longer. Amid an ugly scandal about data manipulation that has left the head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, fighting for her career, Doing Business has been cancelled.
The power struggle at the top of the fund involves: a three-way tussle for influence between the US, Europe and China; rivalry between Georgieva, former chief executive at the World Bank, and the current, Trump-nominated bank president David Malpass; and domestic US politics. (Democrats have long disliked the Doing Business report’s low-regulation tone.)
The accusation is that in 2017 the World Bank’s leadership, including Georgieva, pressured the Doing Business team to improve China’s ranking in order to keep the Chinese government happy. The case for the defence is that Georgieva’s team were merely double-checking a sensitive number, that China’s ranking barely moved (from 85th to 78th), and anyway China is now ranked far better (25th) than when Georgieva was at the bank. The fight is as fascinating as it is unedifying.

https://timharford.com/2021/11/notes-on-a-statistical-scandal/

By the way, if you want to learn how to write columns well, you could do a lot worse than reading these three paragraphs.

A short, interesting sentence to begin the column, followed by an easy to read first paragraph that explains what the problem is. The next two paragraphs provide context, give additional details, and bring the reader up to speed, so that Tim Harford can get to the points that he wants to make regarding the whole issue. And contrast that with what I have managed to do so far: four paragraphs, one lengthy excerpt, and two tangential points, one of which is meta. Ah well.

But all of that aside, take some time out to read Tim Harford’s column before reading what follows.

  1. What was the report optimizing for?

    Originally, it seems to have been an attempt to help interested entities understand how easy (or not) it was to do business in a particular country. This helps entrepreneurs (domestic and international) understand some of the potential impediments to starting a business. The report lays out the processes involved in starting a business, and speaks about the length of time required to complete those process. That is surely a good thing, correct?
  2. Is a report not the same as a ranking?

    What matters more to you as a student when it comes to examinations? Are examinations a way for you to reflect upon how much you’ve learnt and what remains to be learnt, or are examinations a way to understand where you are in the pecking order? The problem with the Ease of Doing Business report wasn’t the report itself, it was the rankings that were generated on the basis of the reports.
    As Tim Harford says in his column: “But Klein has one regret: the original decision to publish an overall ranking of which countries were the best and the worst in the world for doing business. Such aggregate rankings make little sense, but they are ubiquitous because they are clickbait. The Doing Business aggregate ranking was no exception. Without it, the report would never have received so much attention. But without the ranking, it is doubtful anyone would have cared enough to try to manipulate the data.”
    And of course the inevitable followed: the rankings became more important than the report itself.
  3. A rare point of disagreement. Here is the quote from his column: “This newspaper recently celebrated the demise of the Doing Business indicators, complaining that countries were “expressly changing policies to score better”. That is a strange objection. Unless the indicators are valueless, when countries try to score better that is a feature, not a bug.”

    When Tim Harford says “this newspaper”, he is referring to the Financial Times, where he happens to be a columnist. I’m unable to access the original FT article from where this point was excerpted, but I happen to agree with excerpt above, and therefore disagree with Tim Harford. That being said, I certainly do wish that the original FT article had been worded better in the case of the sentence that we’re able to read.
    Think about that phrase up above: ““expressly changing policies to score better”.
    I think what they wanted to say was this: countries should ideally have been trying to figure out how to change policies so that in reality, on the ground, it became easier to do business. This should then have been reflected in the rankings. That would have been Utopian. Instead, policymakers and politicians in some cases tried to change the policies so that the ranking improved, without there being much change on the ground. That word, “expressly”, is doing a lot of lifting in that phrase – because all of what I have written is what I think they were trying to get at.
    Put another way, the indicators are not valueless, unless they’ve become the target. And that, really, is all that the FT was trying to say: the indicators did, in fact, become the target. Countries were more focused on the outcome (the ranking) rather than the process (has it actually become easier to do business?), and that is never a good idea.
  4. Consider this quote: “The Doing Business aggregate ranking was no exception. Without it, the report would never have received so much attention. But without the ranking, it is doubtful anyone would have cared enough to try to manipulate the data.”

    It is a question we should all be asking ourselves repeatedly: what are you optimizing for?
    In this case, was the World Bank optimizing for drawing attention to the report? We live in a world in which signaling matters, Goodhart’s Law is real and status is the name of the game. So if the World Bank was optimizing for publicity, it should have acknowledged that all of what eventually happened was a very real risk.
    But if the World Bank was optimizing for preparing a good report that stood up to scrutiny, then it should have acknowledged that the opportunity cost of such a strategy is that hardly anybody would ever read it. But such, alas, is life.

What Should You Read to Get a Better Sense of Poverty Line Estimates?

Ali, an FYMSc student at GIPE reached out with a couple of questions about poverty line estimates – their nature, are they adjusted for inflation, etc. That was in response to my post about the tricky nature of poverty lines. Ali’s comment is towards the bottom of that post.

Here’s my list of things to read in order to understand the concept of poverty lines better:

First, the World Bank itself:

Q: What is the new poverty line, and based on this new measure, how many people are living in extreme poverty in the world?
A: The new global poverty line is set at $1.90 using 2011 prices. Just over 900 million people globally lived under this line in 2012 (based on the latest available data), and we project that in 2015, just over 700 million are living in extreme poverty.
Q: Why raise the poverty line? What was wrong with the $1.25 a day line that we are all used to?
A: As differences in the cost of living across the world evolve, the global poverty line has to be periodically updated to reflect these changes. The new global poverty line uses updated price data to paint a more accurate picture of the costs of basic food, clothing, and shelter needs around the world. In other words, the real value of $1.90 in today’s prices is the same as $1.25 was in 2005.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/brief/global-poverty-line-faq

That answer’s at least one of Ali’s questions – the poverty line is indeed updated to account for inflation. But keep in mind that indices are tricky little devils at the best of times. When it comes to measuring inflation, particularly for a basket of goods that the poor are likely to consume across different countries over long time horizons, it is all but impossible.((and with PPP considerations to boot!)) But still, to the extent possible, poverty lines are adjusted for inflation.

But Lant Pritchett has his reservations:

There is no line at dollar a day in income dynamics. One might think a poverty line exists that demarcates a “poverty trap” and that people “in poverty” have a hard time escaping poverty—except that it doesn’t. All of the available evidence that tracks households over time finds enormous fluidity across the dollar a day threshold–and no evidence that it is harder to increase incomes from just below than just above—there is no line.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/extreme-poverty-too-extreme

… and if you read the entire essay, it is hard to disagree with his point. He has an entire page on his website dedicated to talking about poverty lines, and the articles/videos deserve a closer look by any student of development economics.

I cheated a little bit while writing what I wrote above, because I wanted to give a chronological view of developments in the last decade or so. What’s written above is from 2013-14, and then this happened in 2017:

Starting this month, the World Bank will report poverty rates for all countries using two new international poverty lines: a lower middle-income International Poverty Line, set at $3.20/day; and an upper middle-income International Poverty Line, set at $5.50/day. This will be in addition to the $1.90 International Poverty Line – which remains our headline poverty threshold, and continues to define the Bank’s goal of ending global extreme poverty by 2030.
…
Let us be completely clear: The World Bank’s headline threshold to define extreme global poverty is unchanged, at $1.90/day. The Bank’s goal of ending poverty by 2030, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1.1, are both set with respect to this line. However – as Amartya Sen noted early on, and the Atkinson Commission reminded us – poverty is not a uniquely defined concept. There is an inevitable element of arbitrariness in choosing any poverty line, no matter how carefully it is constructed.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/richer-array-international-poverty-lines

Here’s more from the World Bank, if you’re interested. And if it is data you’re after, try this.

Speaking of Amartya Sen, this paper is a classic, and a must read. Excerpting from this paper is difficult, please, read the whole thing.((If I had to excerpt something, the bicycle passage would have been my choice, but without context it is quite confusing.))

Before we get to India specific literature, a couple of see-also’s: the Wikipedia page on poverty thresholds (of course) and this lovely website that accompanies Martin Ravallion’s book.((The explanation about the cover to the book alone is worth a click-through))

Now, about India specific work on poverty lines.

Here is a short summary by PRS India on the work on poverty lines in India.

Here is a useful survey paper on measuring poverty in India:

Poverty can be measured relatively, but a measure of absolute poverty is more useful for making cross-cultural comparisons. Unfortunately, the measurement of absolute poverty is difficult, because of inter-individual and intra-individual variations in minimum needs over time. As a result, simplistic assessment methods and confusion have marked many of the estimates of absolute poverty in less-developed countries. Using Indian material as an example, this paper attempts to trace the progress of the methodology; to explain how widely varying poverty estimates have come about; and to draw some tentative conclusions about the extent and pattern of absolute poverty in India today

Cutler, P. (1984). The measurement of poverty: A review of attempts to quantify the poor, with special reference to India. World Development, 12(11-12), 1119-1130.

Any GIPE student should know about Dandekar-Rath (part-II here), of course, but this paper goes a bit beyond, and is therefore a better introduction (in my opinion). Speaking of Dandekar, the original paper is worth reading, of course, but this is also an enjoyable read.

Finally, here is an excellent speech by Abhijit Banerjee on different (potential) ways to measure the poverty line.

And finally finally, also look up the FGT formula, and here are past posts on EFE that mention poverty lines.

RoW: Links for 13th December, 2019

  1. “The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 involving infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries and international organizations in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas”
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    Five articles about the Belt and Road Initiative, earlier known as the One Belt One Road Initiative. We begin with the Wikipedia article.
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  2. “The Belt and Road Initiative includes includes 1/3 of world trade and GDP and over 60% of the world’s population.”
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    That excerpt is just the caption to the first chart in this write-up from the WB, but it is the one that really opens ones eyes to how large the BRI is.
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  3. ““There are some extreme cases where China lends into very high risk environments, and it would seem that the motivation is something different. In these situations the leverage China has as lender is used for purposes unrelated to the original loan,” said Scott Morris, one of the authors of the Washington Centre for Global Development report.”
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    The Guardian in a write-up about the same topic.
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  4. “But the Crusades, as well as advances by the Mongols in Central Asia, dampened trade, and today Central Asian countries are economically isolated from each other, with intra-regional trade making up just 6.2 percent of all cross-border commerce. They are also heavily dependent on Russia, particularly for remittances—they make up one-third of the gross domestic product (GDP) of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. By 2018, remittances had dipped from their 2013 highs due to Russia’s economic woes.”
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    The Council of Foreign Relations with their take.
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  5. “Throughout the text, Maçães prefers to use the term ‘Belt and Road’ over the more succinct — and increasingly popular — ‘BRI’. This has the effect of giving credibility to the author’s speculation that eventually, Belt and Road terminology will be used much like ‘the West’ is to refer to the contemporary order. This musing reveals Maçães’s central argument: that the Belt and Road has the capacity to blaze a path to an alternative world order that reflects new universal values. At some points in the text, this comes across as a utopian promise; at other points, an improbable claim. These perspectives are compared and contrasted over the course of five chapters.”
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    Read this review, but more importantly, read the book! A review of the book that Bruno Macaes has written on BRI.