Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could be effective for addressing any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs.

Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. We assemble evidence from over 30,000 respondents in 16 original household surveys from nine countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone), Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines), and Latin America (Colombia). We document declines in employment and income in all settings beginning March 2020. The share of households experiencing an income drop ranges from 8 to 87% (median, 68%). Household coping strategies and government assistance were insufficient to sustain precrisis living standards, resulting in widespread food insecurity and dire economic conditions even 3 months into the crisis. We discuss promising policy responses and speculate about the risk of persistent adverse effects, especially among children and other vulnerable groups.

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We examine the effects of urban form and public transit supply on the commute mode choices and annual vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) of households living in 114 urban areas in 1990. The probability of driving to work is lower the higher are population centrality and rail miles supplied and the lower is road density. Population centrality, jobs-housing balance, city shape, and road density have a significant effect on annual household VMTs. Although individual elasticities are small absolute values (≤0.10), moving sample households from a city with the characteristics of Atlanta to a city with the characteristics of Boston reduces annual VMTs by 25%. © 2005 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Poor sanitation contributes to morbidity and mortality in the developing world, but there is disagreement on what policies can increase sanitation coverage. To measure the effects of alternative policies on investment in hygienic latrines, we assigned 380 communities in rural Bangladesh to different marketing treatments-community motivation and information; subsidies; a supply-side market access intervention; and a control-in a cluster-randomized trial. Community motivation alone did not increase hygienic latrine ownership (+1.6 percentage points, P = 0.43), nor did the supply-side intervention (+0.3 percentage points, P = 0.90). Subsidies to the majority of the landless poor increased ownership among subsidized households (+22.0 percentage points, P < 0.001) and their unsubsidized neighbors (+8.5 percentage points, P = 0.001), which suggests that investment decisions are interlinked across neighbors. Subsidies also reduced open defecation by 14 percentage points (P < 0.001).

Biomass combustion with traditional cookstoves causes substantial environmental and health harm. Nontraditional cookstove technologies can be efficacious in reducing this adverse impact, but they are adopted and used at puzzlingly low rates. This study analyzes the determinants of low demand for nontraditional cookstoves in rural Bangladesh by using both stated preference (from a nationally representative survey of rural women) and revealed preference (assessed by conducting a cluster-randomized trial of cookstove prices) approaches. We find consistent evidence across both analyses suggesting that the women in rural Bangladesh do not perceive indoor air pollution as a significant health hazard, prioritize other basic developmental needs over nontraditional cookstoves, and overwhelmingly rely on a free traditional cookstove technology and are therefore not willing to pay much for a new nontraditional cookstove. Efforts to improve health and abate environmental harm by promoting nontraditional cookstoves may be more successful by designing and disseminating nontraditional cookstoves with features valued more highly by users, such as reduction of operating costs, even when those features are not directly related to the cookstoves' health and environmental impacts.consumer demand experiments | technology adoption | development economics B iomass combustion with traditional cookstoves is the primary cause in developing countries of indoor air pollution (1), a major global health hazard (1-4). A conservative estimate suggests that exposure to indoor smoke produced by household solidfuel combustion is responsible for nearly 3% of the global disease burden and 4% of the disease burden in the high-mortality developing regions of the world (5, 6). Beyond health impact, traditional cookstoves have substantial environmental consequences as well. Traditional cookstoves are inefficient, harnessing only 5-15% of biomass energy (7). As a result, users collect large quantities of fuel from surrounding fields and forestlands, potentially decreasing agricultural productivity and contributing to forest degradation (8,9). Traditional cookstoves also contribute to global warming (10). Incomplete combustion releases heat-trapping pollutants, including methane and black carbon, which have a greater global warming impact than carbon dioxide does per unit of carbon emitted (11,12). Unsustainable harvesting of biomass fuel compounds this problem because carbon dioxide emitted during combustion is not sequestered by subsequent plant growth.Despite these negative effects, half of the world's population and 75% of South Asians continue to burn solid fuels in inefficient traditional cookstoves for cooking and heating (13,14). Many governments and development organizations have attempted to combat indoor air pollution by disseminating cleaner-burning cookstoves (15), but the adoption and use of these nontraditional cookstoves in the developing world has, with few exceptions, remained disappointingly low (16). [The primary exception is China (1...

Persuading people to mask Even in places where it is obligatory, people tend to optimistically overstate their compliance for mask wearing. How then can we persuade more of the population at large to act for the greater good? Abaluck et al . undertook a large, cluster-randomized trial in Bangladesh involving hundreds of thousands of people (although mostly men) over a 2-month period. Colored masks of various construction were handed out free of charge, accompanied by a range of mask-wearing promotional activities inspired by marketing research. Using a grassroots network of volunteers to help conduct the study and gather data, the authors discovered that mask wearing averaged 13.3% in villages where no interventions took place but increased to 42.3% in villages where in-person interventions were introduced. Villages where in-person reinforcement of mask wearing occurred also showed a reduction in reporting COVID-like illness, particularly in high-risk individuals. —CA

We estimate the development effects of electrification across Brazil over the period 1960–2000. We simulate a time series of hypothetical electricity grids for Brazil for the period 1960–2000 that show how the grid would have evolved had infrastructure investments been made based solely on geography-based cost considerations. Using the model as an instrument, we document large positive effects of electrification on development that are underestimated when one fails to account for endogenous targeting. Broad-based improvement in labor productivity across sectors and regions rather than general equilibrium re-sorting appears to be the likely mechanism by which these development gains are realized. (JEL H54, L94, O11, O13, Q41, Q43)