This paper investigates how persistent changes in trust caused by the Great Recession have affected how citizens across Europe responded to the next global crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that increases in mistrust towards institutions caused by individual exposure to the 2007–08 financial crisis led to significant declines in mobility during the initial period of lockdown. We interpret this effect as being consistent with individuals prioritizing their own safety amid perceived breakdowns in the social contract. This result suggests that economic events that lead to changes in trust have lasting legacies by affecting government and citizen responses to future crises.

This study assesses the impact of four coal mines in Mozambique on socio-economic outcomes of the local population. We combine four waves of household surveys with coal mine locations and employ a difference-in-differences model. The timing of the surveys allows us to control for pre-trends and differentiate between the effects during the investment and production periods. The mines led to a causal increase in consumption and a correlational decline in poverty. The mine introduced higher-paying jobs, often obtained by women, which shifted them from agriculture and unpaid work to the mining, service sectors and wage work. This shift impacted family labour dynamics, in particular young males and to a lesser extent young females worked less. The decrease in child labour reduced overall employment. Access to basic services, such as drinking water, electricity and health services, improved. Primary education completion rates increased, while children's schooling was unaffected. Negative consequences were found related to the incidence of sickness and a decline in market access.

We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members' activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios and assess their influence on consumption, as a measure of welfare. Cross-sectional regressions for five urban Sub-Saharan African countries reveal a non-linear relationship between the depth of informality and household welfare. A mixed formality household portfolio has at least the same welfare as a fully formal one. Using panel data for Nigeria, we assess household switches in informality portfolios, accounting for the selection on unobservables, and find it explains most welfare differences. Switching informality portfolios does not change welfare trajectories, with the notable exception of welfare gains for fully informal households becoming fully formal. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that policies incentivizing the formalization of the marginal worker may not result in perceivable welfare effects.

Internal migration plays an important role in the economic development of individuals, their families, and their country.This study describes Mozambique's most common migration patterns from 1992 until 2017 using data from three population censuses.We focus on the most important moves between regions, provinces, and rural and urban areas.Further, we document the characteristics of migrants to assess selection patterns.In the final step, we estimate the relationship between migration and multidimensional poverty by applying inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA).We find that migration in Mozambique was very high, especially between rural areas, after the war ended as people returned from displacement.Still, it is very low in the most recent period.Recently, migration has been the main contributor to the urbanization of the greater Maputo area (capital city).Migrants appear to be positively selected on education, and are, on average, less likely to be poor.

The primary policy response to suppress the spread of COVID-19 in high-income countries has been to lock down large sections of the population. However, there is growing unease that blindly replicating these policies might inflict irreparable damage to poor households and foment social unrest in developing countries. We investigate this concern using Afrobarometer data from 2019 for 30 sub-Saharan African countries. We create a multidimensional index of lockdown readiness based on living conditions and explore its relationship with forms of trust and the potential for social unrest.

The article Multidimensional Poverty of Children in Mozambique, written by Kristi Mahrt, Andrea Rossi, Vincenzo Salvucci and Finn Tarp, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 10 March 2020 without open access.

Research suggests that the social effects of internal migration may be substantially different from those associated with international immigration. In this paper, I provide the first evidence of the effect of internal migration on crime with panel data from Brazilian microregiões (microregions). Using local labor demand shocks as an instrumental variable, I find that a 10% increase in the in-migration rate translates to a 9.4% increase in the homicide rate in destination areas. I propose that the effect is driven by intermediating labor market effects and not by the migrants themselves. Exploring these possible channels, I do not find that crime-prone migrants drive the results. The effect is only significant in locations with high past crime rates, indicating crime inertia, and in places with a small informal sector, suggesting that the impact of internal migration is conditioned by the ability of local labor markets to accommodate migrants. This finding is supported by a negative effect of in-migration on formal employment in rigid markets and a positive effect on unemployment among young men, with the latter explaining most of the total effect.

In this study, we explore the correlates of the employment gender gap among urban youth in Mozambique. Young people are confronted with simultaneous decisions about education, work and family life influenced by social norms around gender roles. Using data from a panel of individuals in 2017 and 2020, aged between 15–25 years in 2017, that covers information on education, employment, fertility, social life, gender norms and more, we observe an increase of 10 percentage points in the raw employment gender gap over time to the disadvantage of young women. Exploiting the longitudinal nature of our data, we apply two methods to assess the main correlates of this gap, an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition on first-differenced data and a data-driven individual-level fixed-effects LASSO approach. Both analyses reveal that young women face a significant trade-off between work and time spent with reproductive activities and that the labour market seems to reward better education only for men.

Informal self-employed traders in developing countries are vulnerable to shocks as they often lack access to social insurance or formal finance. This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these urban traders in the capital of Mozambique, Maputo. Drawing on longitudinal phone survey data over six months, we find they experienced significant negative shocks to earnings, leading to a reduction in savings as well as worsening food security and assets. Individuals simultaneously affected by a municipal policy to remove informal traders from a central market were hit particularly hard as they lost their clients and market stalls. We simulate that a cash transfer equivalent to the government’s proposed COVID-19 response would have significantly buffered these shocks. The findings point to the need for a more shock-responsive social protection system, easy access to liquidity and provision of market infrastructure for informal traders.

This study investigates the short-term impacts of an aggregate socioeconomic shock on household food consumption and children’s nutrition using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique. In response to the economic downturn, households are expected to adjust their food choices both in terms of quality, towards cheaper and unhealthier food, and quantity, reducing diet diversification and increasing the exposure to malnutrition, mainly for children. Empirical evidence on such immediate effects is still scarce, mainly due to a lack of data. This paper aims to fill the evidence gap by relying on household survey data from 2019–20, which includes a detailed consumption module and anthropometric measures for children under five. We use a repeated cross-sectional econometric analysis to look at the variation in household food consumption and child nutrition before and after the pandemic. The results show that there has been a significant reduction in household food consumption and per capita caloric intake and an increase in stunting, especially among newborn children.

Gender gaps in labour force participation in developing countries persist despite income growth or structural change. We assess this persistence across economic geographies within countries, focusing on youth employment in off-farm wage jobs. We combine household survey data from 12 low- and middle-income countries in Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa with geospatial data on population density, and estimate simultaneous probit models of different activity choices across the rural-urban gradient. The gender gap increases with connectivity from rural to peri-urban areas, and disappears in high-density urban areas. In non-rural areas, child dependency does not constrain young women, and secondary education improves their access to off-farm employment. The gender gap persists for married young women independent of connectivity improvements, indicating social norm constraints. Marital status and child dependency are associated positively with male participation, and negatively with female participation; other factors such as education are show a positive association for both sexes. These results indicate entry points for policy.

This study investigates the short-term impacts of an aggregate socioeconomic shock on household food consumption and children's nutrition using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique. In response to the economic downturn, households are expected to adjust their food choices both in terms of quality, towards cheaper and unhealthier food, and quantity, reducing diet diversification and increasing the exposure to malnutrition, mainly for children. Empirical evidence on such immediate effects is still scarce, mainly due to a lack of data. This paper aims to fill the evidence gap by relying on household survey data from 2019-20, which includes a detailed consumption module and anthropometric measures for children under five. We use a repeated cross-sectional econometric analysis to look at the variation in household food consumption and child nutrition before and after the pandemic. The results show that there has been a significant reduction in household food consumption and per capita caloric intake and an increase in stunting, especially among newborn children.

This study seeks to add to the research on inequality in least developed countries, namely in Mozambique, by measuring and mapping indicators of horizontal wealth inequality along geographic regions and ethnolinguistic identities. Using census data for 1997, 2007, and 2017, we identify possible intersecting inequalities, measuring between-group inequality along joint provincial-urban/rural-ethnolinguistic identities. Additionally, we find heterogeneous evolutions of group inequality between 1997 and 2017 among the country's eleven provinces.

This study assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique on household consumption poverty. To predict changes in income and the associated effects on poverty and inequality, we rely on macroeconomic impacts estimated by Betho et al. using a social accounting multiplier model. We assume two main impact channels are at work leading to higher consumption poverty: direct income/wage and employment losses. To estimate the direct income/wage losses, we use the information from Betho et al. on the impact on wages, on gross domestic product by industry, and on household income; to estimate the employment losses, we use the information on the impact on employment from Betho et al. The two impact channels are then combined to assess the final impact on consumption and poverty. Our simulations suggest that consumption decreased by between 7.1 and 14.4 per cent, and that poverty increased by between 4.3 and 9.9 percentage points in 2020, depending on the specification. This corresponds to about 2 million people entering poverty in less than a year and to a reversal of the positive poverty reduction trend observed during the period 2008/09–2014/15. While the COVID-19 shock affected urban areas the most, our results indicate that rural areas experienced a higher increase in poverty rates due to the already low levels of consumption. Poverty most certainly increased in the pre-COVID 2015–20 period due to other shocks, so Mozambique finds itself in an intense and deepening struggle against poverty. In Portuguese Disponível em Português

Climate change is expected to increase the risk in agricultural production due to increasing temperatures and rainfall variability. Smallholders can adjust by diversifying income sources, including through migration. Most existing studies investigate whether households send a migrant after experiencing weather shocks, but the literature lacks evidence on migration as an ex-ante measure. In this paper, we disentangle the direct effect of weather shocks on income from agriculture from the effect of changing weather patterns over a few years on migration as a diversification strategy. Using a novel household survey from Nepal combined with 35 years of rainfall and temperature data, we model migration and agricultural production using a simultaneous estimation methodology. The results confirm the simultaneity of these decisions and show that increasing uncertainty in weather patterns and a warming climate increase outmigration in rural Nepal. These results are in line with the hypothesis that migration acts as an income diversification strategy under climate change.

This study explores the relationship between household poverty and depth of informality by proposing a new measure of informality at the household level. It is defined as the share of activities (hours worked or income earned) without social insurance for wage workers in the household. We apply cross-sectional regressions to five urban sub-Saharan African countries, showing that a household head informality dummy obscures a non-linear relationship between the depth of household informality and welfare outcomes. In some countries, a small share of income from formal jobs is associated with at least the same welfare as a fully formal portfolio. By assessing transitions between household portfolios with panel data for urban Nigeria, we also show that most welfare differences are explained by selection and that movements in and out of formality cannot sufficiently change welfare trajectories. The results call for better inclusion of informal profiles to social insurance programmes.

Abstract Traditional economic models predict rural to urban migration during the structural transformation of an economy. In middle-income countries, it is less clear which direction of migration to expect. In this article, the author shows that in Brazil as many people move out as into metropolitan cities and they mostly move to mid-sized towns. The author estimates the determinants of out-migrants’ destination choice accounting for differences in earnings, living costs, and amenities and tested whether the migrants gain economically by accepting lower wages but enjoying lower living costs. The findings suggest that in their destination choice, out-migrants aim to minimize costs of moving. On average, city-leavers realize higher real wages, including low-skilled migrants who would lose in nominal terms. The article thus provides new evidence on economic incentives to leave big cities in a middle-income country.