Evaluating Workfare When the Work Is Unpleasant : Evidence for India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
Prevailing practices in evaluating workfare programs have ignored the disutility of the type of work done, with theoretically ambiguous implications for the impacts on poverty. In the case of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme,...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2012/11/16981158/evaluating-workfare-work-unpleasant-evidence-indias-national-rural-employment-guarantee-scheme http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12113 |
| Summary: | Prevailing practices in evaluating
workfare programs have ignored the disutility of the type of
work done, with theoretically ambiguous implications for the
impacts on poverty. In the case of India's National
Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, past assessments have
relied solely on household consumption per person as the
measure of economic welfare. The paper generalizes this
measure to allow for the disutility of casual manual work.
The new measure is calibrated to the distribution of the
preference parameters implied by maximization of an
idiosyncratic welfare function assuming that there is no
rationing of the available work. The adjustment implies a
substantially more "poor-poor" incidence of
participation in the scheme than suggested by past methods.
However, the overall impacts on poverty are lower, although
still positive. The main conclusions are robust to a wide
range of alternative parameter values and to allowing for
involuntary unemployment using a sample of (self-declared)
un-rationed workers. |
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