Offsets, carbon markets, and climate and economic justice.

Today, 682 million people, or 8.5% of the world's population, live in extreme poverty, which the World Bank defines as subsisting on less than $2.15 per day.

Fixing forest carbon credits.

The world's forests store an estimated 861 billion tonnes of carbon-equivalent to approximately 100 years worth of anthropogenic emissions, at current rates-and with good husbandry could potentially store up to 226 billion tonnes more. Clearly, preserving and repairing forests is a vital element of mitigating climate breakdown.

Measuring time use in rural India: Design and validation of a low-cost survey module.

Time use data facilitate understanding of labor supply, especially for women who often undertake unpaid care and home production. Although assisted diary-based time use surveys are suitable for low-literacy populations, they are costly and rarely used. We create a low-cost, scalable alternative that captures contextually-determined broad time categories; here, allocations across market work, household labor, and leisure.

Modeling fine-grained spatio-temporal pollution maps with low-cost sensors.

The use of air quality monitoring networks to inform urban policies is critical especially where urban populations are exposed to unprecedented levels of air pollution. High costs, however, limit city governments' ability to deploy reference grade air quality monitors at scale; for instance, only 33 reference grade monitors are available for the entire territory of Delhi, India, spanning 1500 sq km with 15 million residents. In this paper, we describe a high-precision spatio-temporal prediction model that can be used to derive fine-grained pollution maps.

Indian female migrants face greater barriers to post-Covid recovery than males: Evidence from a panel study.

Background: India's abrupt nationwide Covid-19 lockdown internally displaced millions of migrant workers, who returned to distant rural homes. Documenting their labour market reintegration is a critical aspect of understanding the economic costs of the pandemic for India's poor. In a country marked by low and declining female labour force participation, identifying gender gaps in labour market reintegration - as a marker of both women's vulnerability at times of crisis and setbacks in women's agency - is especially important.

On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Impacts Labor Supply and Gender Norms.

Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages into their own (versus husbands') accounts. Relative to the accounts only group, women who also received direct deposit and training worked more in public and private sector jobs. The private sector result suggests gender norms initially constrained female employment.

Can democracy work for the poor?

Millions of the world's poorest people now live in middle-income democracies that, in theory, could use their resources to end extreme poverty. However, citizens in those countries have not succeeded in using the vote to ensure adequate progressive redistribution. Interventions aiming to provide the economically vulnerable with needed resources must go beyond assisting them directly, they must also improve democratic institutions so that vulnerable populations themselves can push their representatives to implement redistributive policies.

Improving use of maternal care services among married adolescent girls: an intervention study in rural India.

This study examined the effect of the Safe Adolescent Transition and Health Initiative (SATHI) programme on the use of maternal care services among rural, pregnant adolescents in India. This was an intensive community-based, multi-site intervention project conducted in Maharashtra state between 2008 and 2011. Its aims were to improve the reproductive health of married adolescent girls and avert the adverse consequences of early motherhood.

Women's Political Empowerment and Investments in Primary Schooling in India.

Using a national district-level dataset of India composed of information on investments in primary schooling (data from the District Information Survey for Education [DISE, 2007/8]) and information on demographic characteristics of elected officials (data from the Election Commission of India [ECI, 2000/04]), we examined the relationship between women's representation in State Legislative Assembly (SLA) seats and district-level investments in primary schooling. We used OLS regressions adjusting for confounders and spatial autocorrelation, and estimated separate models for North and South India. Women's representation in general SLA seats typically was negatively associated with investments in primary-school amenities and teachers; women's representation in SLA seats reserved for under-represented minorities, i.

The economic burden of maternal mortality on households: evidence from three sub-counties in rural western Kenya.

Background: This study explores the consequences of a maternal death to households in rural Western Kenya focusing particularly on the immediate financial and economic impacts.

Methods: Between September 2011 and March 2013 all households in the study area with a maternal death were surveyed. Data were collected on the demographic characteristics of the deceased woman; household socio-economic status; a history of the pregnancy and health care access and utilization; and disruption to household functioning due to the maternal death.

Continuing with "…a heavy heart" - consequences of maternal death in rural Kenya.

Background: This study analyzes the consequences of maternal death to households in Western Kenya, specifically, neonatal and infant survival, childcare and schooling, disruption of daily household activities, the emotional burden on household members, and coping mechanisms.

Methods: The study is a combination of qualitative analysis with matched and unmatched quantitative analysis using surveillance and survey data. Between September 2011 and March 2013 all households in the study area with a maternal death were surveyed.

Repayment flexibility can reduce financial stress: a randomized control trial with microfinance clients in India.

Financial stress is widely believed to cause health problems. However, policies seeking to relieve financial stress by limiting debt levels of poor households may directly worsen their economic well-being. We evaluate an alternative policy - increasing the repayment flexibility of debt contracts.

Two sons and a daughter: sex composition and women's reproductive behaviour in Madhya Pradesh, India.

This article examines how the sex composition of women's current children at the start of a pregnancy interval influences both fertility desires and the full range of reproductive actions women may take to realize them, including temporary contraception, abortion and sterilization, in Madhya Pradesh, India, where popular notions of ideal family size and sex composition are dominated by son preference. The analysis is conducted using a dataset of 9127 individual pregnancy intervals from a 2002 statewide representative survey of 2444 women aged 15-39 with at least one child. The results indicate that women's preferences go beyond a singular preference for male children, with the preferred composition of children being two boys and one girl.

Female leadership raises aspirations and educational attainment for girls: a policy experiment in India.

Exploiting a randomized natural experiment in India, we show that female leadership influences adolescent girls' career aspirations and educational attainment. A 1993 law reserved leadership positions for women in randomly selected village councils. Using 8453 surveys of adolescents aged 11 to 15 and their parents in 495 villages, we found that, relative to villages in which such positions were never reserved, the gender gap in aspirations closed by 20% in parents and 32% in adolescents in villages assigned a female leader for two election cycles.

'If your husband calls, you have to go': understanding sexual agency among young married women in urban South India.

Background: Early marriage is common in many developing countries, including India. Women who marry early have little power within their marriage, particularly in the sexual domain. Research is limited on women's ability to control their marital sexual experiences.

Son preference and sterilisation use among young married women in two slums in Bengaluru city, India.

This paper explores the ways in which women's sterilisation decisions are influenced by the combination of a preference for male children and a desire for smaller family size among young married women in two urban slums in Bengaluru, India. While both son preference and an emphasis on sterilisation are well-known demographic characteristics of most South Asian countries, relatively little research has been conducted that links the two. We take advantage of a longitudinal survey of 416 unsterilised married women aged 16-25 to explore how having sons and the number of children influence a woman's sterilisation decision.

Challenging assumptions about women's empowerment: social and economic resources and domestic violence among young married women in urban South India.

Background: Although considerable research has documented the widespread prevalence of spousal violence in India, little is known about specific risk or protective factors. This study examines the relationships between factors that are often considered to be social and economic resources for women and recent occurrence of domestic violence.

Methods: Data were collected from 744 young married women in slum areas of Bangalore, India.

Women deliver for development.

There is a large amount of research into maternal health as a health issue, but maternal health as a development issue has been less explored. This Review analyses the evidence from the past 20 years on the links between maternal health and development to examine maternal health within a development framework. We note that although existing evidence suggests that these links are strong, further research is needed to definitively substantiate how and to what extent maternal health and development affect each other.

What's in a country average? Wealth, gender, and regional inequalities in immunization in India.

Recent attention to Millennium Development Goals by the international development community has led to the formation of targets to measure country-level achievements, including achievements on health status indicators such as childhood immunization. Using the example of immunization in India, this paper demonstrates the importance of disaggregating national averages for a better understanding of social disparities in health. Specifically, the paper uses data from the India National Family Health Survey 1992-93 to analyze socioeconomic, gender, urban-rural and regional inequalities in immunization in India for each of the 17 largest states.

Selective gender differences in childhood nutrition and immunization in rural India: the role of siblings.

This article examines the role of the sex composition of surviving older siblings on gender differences in childhood nutrition and immunization, using data from the National Family Health Survey, India (1992-1993). Logit and ordered logit models were used for severe stunting and immunization, respectively. The results show selective neglect of children with certain sex and birth-order combinations that operate differentially for girls and boys.