November 2017

State of Haryana’s Initiatives for Development of Horticulture in India

Birmingham University, United Kingdom was the venue for a workshop from 16 to 17th November 2017 on “Post-Harvest Losses in Horticulture Crops and the Importance of Clean Cold Chain Development in India”. The UK workshop followed the study tour and conference in India, earlier this year, organized by Birmingham University's Energy Institute in collaboration with India’s National Centre for Cold Chain Development (NCCD) and UK'S Science and Innovation Network.

The objective of the workshop was to co-design the implementation of frameworks for the provision of clean and sustainable post-harvest food cold chain. The latter is defined in the report "India's Third Agricultural Revolution- Doubling Farmers' Income through Clean Cold Chains" as an integrated and seamless network of refrigerated and temperature controlled pack houses, distribution hubs and vehicles used to maintain the safety, quality and quantity of food while moving it swiftly from farm gate to consumption centre. Such facilities, the report highlights, ought to be attractive to end users, civil society, government, policy makers and industry to ensure impact, legacy, and scalability.

In the above context, intensive brainstorming was facilitated in the workshop by academics, experts, and industry leaders with senior officials fromthe government of Haryana, Punjab, and Andhra Pradesh. The aim was understanding the barriers in the cold value chain from the first mile (farm) to the last mile (consumer) in accessing markets by small and marginal farmers. The aim was also to explore how improved and clean cooling technologies can be appropriately designed to enable such small and marginal farmers to avail opportunities for reaching markets with their horticultural produce, without loss of time so that their income is enhanced. Lastly, the workshop focused on the need for and role of area clusters and farmer producer organizations to drive such a supply chain with skilled manpower and innovative financing/ business models.

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Agriculture Development

Tracing the roots of TCdata360 datasets: an interactive network graph

When doing data analysis, it's common for indicators to take the spotlight whereas datasets usually take the backseat as an attribution footnote or as a metadata popup.

However, we often forget how intertwined dataset sources are and how this affects data analysis. For instance, we can never assume that indicators from different datasets are mutually exclusive – it's possible for them to be the same indicator or to have an influence on the other as a component weight in an index, if the other dataset were used as a source for the other.

In this blog, we're interested to see if this applies to TCdata360 by taking a deeper look at its "dataset genealogy" and answer questions such as – Is it safe to do cross-dataset analysis using TCdata360 datasets? Are there interesting patterns in the relationships between TCdata360 datasets?

Quick introduction to network graphs

We call a dataset which serves as a data source for another dataset as "source", and a dataset which pulls indicator data from another as "target". Collectively, all of these are called "nodes".

To see the relationships between TCdata360 datasets, we mapped these in a directed network graph wherein each dataset is a node. By directed, we mean that source nodes are connected to their target nodes through an arrow, since direction is important to identify source from target nodes. For the purposes of this blog, we restricted the network graph to contain datasets within TCdata360 only; thus, all data sources and targets external to TCdata360 will not be included in our analysis.

Here's how the network graph looks like.

Each dataset is represented by a circle (aka "node") and is grouped and color-coded by data owner or institution. The direction from any source to target node is clearer in the interactive version, wherein there's a small arrow on the connecting line which shows the direction from target to source.

South-South Learning: South Africa learns from Malaysia’s experience with credit guarantee schemes to finance SMEs

Stronger together? Reflections on an 11-year journey through water reform

The year is 2006, the scene is Honduras. As an enthusiastic new team member of a World Bank water sector reform project, I am trying to participate in the high-level discussions around decentralization and local government empowerment in the provision of water and sanitation services in my (then) broken Spanish. Coming from Switzerland, a small country with thousands of local service providers, I am convinced a bottom-up approach to service delivery is THE solution. Hasn’t the hugely influential 2004 World Development Report argued for exactly that – shortening the accountability route between customers and service providers? We are the champions of local, elected mayors, who want nothing more than to prove they could deliver better than the central government’s utility.

It’s now 2010 and I’m still in Honduras, now amid the reform implementation when reality kicks in. Three new municipal utilities have been established, with catchy logos and new staff and management. Operating costs, salaries in particular, have been slashed, and there’s a sense of opportunity – but also challenges. Those elected mayors are thinking about the next election and not very keen on adjusting tariffs to where they need to be. Installing water meters, a cornerstone of the modernization strategy, is facing a huge backlash from those very customers who are making direct use of the shorter accountability route to make their concerns heard. And services aren’t really getting better as fast as we would want…

Forward to 2014 – I’m now in Croatia. I’m sitting in a non-descript conference hall in Zagreb, Croatia, trying to inform a diverse set of local and central government stakeholders about the pros and cons of merging municipal water utilities into regional operators, as everyone else seems to be doing in the region. In fact, since my transition to Europe & Central Asia the year before, I observe what appears to be a serious case of reformitis: consultants and policy advisors are dutifully preaching the regionalization of just recently decentralized service providers to help implement the European Union’s stringent and costly environmental regulations.

Information-driven voter disagreement over more authoritarianism: Experimental evidence from Turkey: Guest post by Ceren Baysan

This is the third in this year’s series of posts by PhD students on the job market.

Globally, civil liberties and political rights have been declining for eleven consecutive years (Freedom House, 2017). The erosion of these measures runs counter to a priori expectations that circumstances would improve: the number of democracies had doubled within the past five decades and information is increasingly available to voters due to a growing and diverse set of media sources. The presence of more accessible information has been linked to improved political accountability, a fundamental factor of development (Drèze and Sen, 1989; Besley and Burgess, 2002). On the other hand, increased access to information is also believed to polarize voters, offering a possible explanation for the backsliding of democratic norms (Downs, 1957; Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2011). In my job market paper, I show that experimentally varied exposure to the same information in a partisan campaign polarized vote choice on weakening the system of checks and balances in Turkey.

New financial management technologies improve transparency and trust in Afghanistan

Many government civil servants are now using technology to improve transparency and credibility of government offices in Kandahar Province. Photo credit: Taimani Films/World Bank

The use of technology in Afghanistan’s government offices is not yet the norm. However, in the Directorate of Ministry of Finance (Mostofiat) in Kandahar Province, a province associated more with insecurity than with technology, we have used the power of technology to improve transparency and credibility of government offices.

Finance is the backbone of any country’s economy. Therefore, it is very important for it to be transparent and credible so that citizens as well as donors feel committed to the development process. With this in mind, we decided to implement the Afghanistan Financial Management Information System (AFMIS) and Standard Integrated Government Tax Administration System (SIGTAS), with the help of the Public Financial Management Reform (PFMR), a project implemented by the Ministry of Finance (MoF) with support from the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). SIGTAS was also supported through the ARTF Incentive Program.

Since 2007, when we started using AFMIS, we have been able to manage and execute budget-related activities, collect revenue, and pay salaries on time. A computerized system, AFMIS enables multiple users to access financial information and records, whenever and wherever they want. This was not possible with manual records.

Fighting climate change with green infrastructure

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Image: chombosan / Shutterstock

According to NASA, 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001. So—with climate change high on the global agenda—almost every nation signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, the primary goal of which is to limit the rise in global temperatures to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. However, with the acute effects of global warming already being felt, further resilience against climate change is needed.

To meet both mitigation and adaptation objectives, “green infrastructure” can help.

What's the cost of open government reforms? New tool can help you find out

Advocacy around open government reforms to date has largely revolved around the intrinsic value of transparency, accountability, and participation. In a resource-constrained environment, development practitioners, policy makers, and citizens increasingly have to be more judicious. Adopting new methods or tools – such as open contracting mechanisms, open data dashboards and participatory budgeting – is not free. How can we measure the instrumental value of open government reforms?

How can Malawi move from falling behind to catching up?

A bypass under construction in Lilongwe. A sign that Malawi is inching its way forward. Photo: Govati Nyirenda/World Bank

A new Country Economic Memorandum gives us a chance to step back and look at the deep drivers of growth since Malawi’s independence in 1964. What stands out, though, is just how far Malawi has fallen behind its peers. It’s easy to look at the seemingly insurmountable challenges the country faces—from droughts and floods to the country’s landlocked status—yet other countries in the region have experienced just as many climate-related disasters, and overcome them better. And throughout the 50 plus years of its independence, Malawi has been fortunate to be at peace and mostly politically stable.

How behavioral science has helped me deal with development projects and my children

Children in kindergarten in rural Uzbekistan. © Matluba Mukhamedova/World Bank

“Working on the World Development Report 2015 and subsequently in the eMBeD Unit mainstreaming the use of behavioral insights within World Bank’s projects, has also been very helpful when dealing with my kids”, I told a class of undergrads where I had been invited as a speaker. The first question I was asked in the open Q&A was whether I could elaborate on that statement. How had behavioral insights helped me with my kids? Students wanted to know more. The fact that college students picked up on this sentence out of an hour-long conversation on my experience with behavioral work at the World Bank struck me.

Define the problem in terms of a behavior. Ask how rather than why. Change the frame, the perspective of looking at a problem. Diagnose the constraints. Test and adapt your interventions. These are some of the messages we teach in our workshops on behavioral insights designed for our colleagues and counterparts in governments. They are simple, yet very powerful, and they have certainly helped me working on projects in a wide range of places such as Brazil, Ethiopia and the Maldives, but also, unexpectedly, in dealing with my children.

November 2017

Quick introduction to network graphs

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