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frica experienced robust economic growth over the past two decades, growing at an average annual rate of 4.5 percent. Did this growth lead to substantial improvements in well-being? Did household income rise and poverty fall? Did other dimensions of well-being, including education, health, physical security, and self-determination, improve? Did all countries and population groups benefit equally, or did progress come at the expense of rising inequality? The answers have been unclear, in part because poverty data on Africa are weak. This report reviews the evidence and provides a unique analysis of the underlying data. It is the first of a two-part volume on poverty in Africa (the second report will explore how to accelerate poverty reduction in the region).

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This paper examines whether a woman's power relative to her husband's affects decisions about use of prenatal and delivery care in Indonesia. Measures of power that span economic and social domains are considered. Holding household resources constant, control over "economic" resources by a woman affects the couple's decision-making. Relative to a woman with no assets that she perceives as being her own, a woman with some share of household assets influences reproductive health decisions. Evidence suggests these decisions also vary if a woman is better educated than her husband, comes from a higher social status background than her husband, or if her father is better educated than her father-in-law.We conclude that both economic and social dimensions of the distribution of power between spouses influence decision-making and that it is useful to conceptualize power as multi-dimensional in understanding the behavior of couples.Although reproductive health and family planning programs provide services with potentially numerous benefits for women and their families, uptake of services offered by these programs is far from universal, even in settings where services are widely available at subsidized prices. Recent efforts to understand barriers to service use have recognized that although women are typically the primary point of contact for reproductive health programs, the decisions that lead women to adopt services occur within the context of a marriage, a household, or a family (Becker, 1996). If a woman and her partner differ in the extent to which they value reproductive health services, then use of those services will be the result of a negotiation between the couple, with the outcome reflecting each person's perception of the value of the services relative to their costs and the relative power of individuals in asserting their own preferences in decision-making.The emphasis of this study is on the association between a series of indicators of the relative power of a man and woman within a couple and the woman's reproductive health behaviors in Indonesia. We focus on the use of prenatal care and choice of location of delivery. These outcomes are of special interest in Indonesia, where maternal mortality rates are relatively high.

This study explores to what extent migration has contributed to improved living standards of individuals in Tanzania. Using a thirteen-year panel survey, we find that migration between 1991 and 2004 added 36 percentage points to consumption growth. Although moving out of agriculture resulted in much higher growth than staying in agriculture, growth was always greater in any sector if the individual physically moved. As to why more people do not move given the high returns to geographical mobility, analysis finds evidence consistent with models in which exit barriers set by home communities prevent the migration of some categories of people. © 2011 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Although there is an extensive literature on the determinants of child labor and many initiatives aimed at combating it, there is limited evidence on the consequences of child labor on socioeconomic outcomes such as education, wages, and health. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy. Five years subsequent to the child labor experience, we find significant negative impacts on school participation and educational attainment, but also find substantially higher earnings for those (young) adults who worked as children. We find no significant effects on health. Over a longer horizon, we estimate that from age 30 onward the forgone earnings attributable to lost schooling exceed any earnings gain associated with child labor and that the net present discounted value of child labor is positive for discount rates of 11.5 percent or higher. We show that child labor is prevalent among households likely to have higher borrowing costs, that are farther from schools, and whose adult members experienced negative returns to their own education. This evidence suggests that reducing child labor will require facilitating access to credit and will also require households to be forward looking.

This article examines the relationship between female schooling and two behaviors-cumulative fertility and contraceptive use-in fourteen Sub-Saharan African countries where Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) have been conducted since the mid-1980s. Average levels of schooling among women of reproductive age are very low, from less than two years to six. Controlling for background variables, the last years of female primary schooling have a negative relation with fertility in about half the countries, while secondary schooling is associated with substantially lower fertility in all countries. Female schooling has a positive relationship with contraceptive use at all levels. Among ever-married women, husband's schooling exerts a smaller effect than does female schooling on contraceptive use and, in almost all cases, on fertility. Although the results suggest commonalities among these Sub-Saharan countries, they also reveal intriguing international differences in the impact of female schooling, which might reflect differences in the quality of schooling, labor markets, and family planning programs, among others. There is considerable debate in the literature as to whether high fertility and high desired family size in Africa are caused by low levels of economic development that favor large families (see World Bank 1984, 1986), or by unique cultural features (see Caldwell and Caldwell 1987, 1990). Without denying the possibility that cultural traits may contribute to higher demand for children in Africa than in other developing regions, most studies have found differentials in current or total fertility by socioeconomic class, even in high-fertility countries

Mortality of parents and other adults due to the African AIDS epidemic could reduce children's primary schooling by reducing households' ability to pay fees, raising the opportunity cost of children's time, and leaving orphaned children with guardians who care less about their education than would their parents. This study measures the impact of adult deaths and orphan status on primary school attendance and hours spent at school using a panel household survey from north-western Tanzania, an area hard-hit by the AIDS epidemic. Attendance was delayed for maternal orphans and children in poor households with a recent adult death; there was no evidence that children 7-14 dropped out of primary school due to orphan status or adult deaths. However, among children already attending, school hours were significantly lower in the months prior to an adult death in the household and seemed to recover following the death. In addition, girls sharply reduced their hours in school immediately after losing a parent. Improvements in school quality and better access to secondary education would improve outcomes for all children, including those affected by adult AIDS mortality. Beyond that, public policy needs to focus on the special schooling constraints faced by children affected by adult deaths, both in terms of increased opportunity costs of their time and the psychological impacts, with an eye to how they might be mitigated and at what cost.