The Kyoto Environment and Development Seminar cordially invite you to join the hybrid seminar.

Kyoto Environment and Development Seminar #19-20

• Date & Time: May 25, 2023, Thursday, 15:00-18:15 (JST)
• Language: English
• Venue: Seminar Room E217 (GSA, Kyoto University) / Zoom Web Seminar
• Speaker: Takeshi Sakurai (University of Tokyo) and John Gibson (University of Waikato)

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Presentation by Takeshi Sakurai
Title: Improving Infant Nutrition through the Market: Experimental Evidence from Ghana

Abstract:

This study investigates the impact on infants’ nutritional status of introducing a new complementary food product for infants into the market. We conducted experimental sales of the product, Koko Plus, with randomly selected mother-infant pairs every week for half a year in Ghana. We found that the introduction of Koko Plus into the market significantly increased children’s weight. However, the effect was heterogeneous: it was smaller among children whose baseline weight was lower. We investigated the mechanisms underlying this heterogeneity and found that it was associated with access to safe drinking water. If mothers gave their children safe drinking water, the sale of Koko Plus significantly increased their child’s weight regardless of baseline nutrition status. The results imply that the success of a market-based approach to complementary food products in improving infant nutrition is dependent on access to safe drinking water.

Presentation by John Gibson
Title: Measuring rural economic activity remotely: Do we just need better sensors?

Abstract:

It is difficult and expensive to measure rural economic activity in developing countries. The usual survey-based approach is less informative than often realized due to combined effects of the clustered samples dictated by survey logistics and the spatial autocorrelation in rural livelihoods. Administrative data, like sub-national Gross Domestic Product for lower level spatial units, are often unavailable and informality and seasonality of many rural activities raises doubts about the accuracy of these measurements. In order to overcome these barriers a recent literature argues that high-resol ution satellite imagery can be used to measure rural economic activity and can provide indicators of rural living standards. Potential advantages of using remote sensing data include greater comparability between countries irrespective of their varying levels of statistical capacity, cheaper and mor e timely data availability, and the possibility of extending estimates to spatial units below the level at which GDP data or survey data are reported. While there are many types of remote sensing data, economists have particularly seized upon satellite-detected nighttime lights (NTL) as a proxy for local economic activity. Yet there are growing doubts about the universal usefulness of this proxy, with recent evidence suggesting that NTL data are a poor proxy in low-density rural areas of developing countries. This study examines performance in predicting rural sector economic activity in China with different types of satellite-detected NTL data that come from sensors of varying resolution. We include the most popular NTL source in economics, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program data, whose resolution is, at best, 2.7 km, two data sources from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiomet er Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi/NPP satellite which have spatial resolution of km, and data from the Luojia-01 satellite which is even more spatially precise, with a resolution of km. With this range of resolutions we can ascertain whether better sensors, used by the more spatially precise d ata sources, lead to more accurate predictions of county-level primary sector GDP. We supplement this statistical assessment with a set of ground-truthing exercises. Overall, our study helps to inform decisions about future data directions for studying rural economic activity in developing countries .

Chair:

Ken Miura (Division of Natural Resource Economics, Kyoto University)

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Contact

Division of Natural Resource Economics, Kyoto University
 Ken Miura

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