Calendrier du 07 décembre 2022
Development Economics Seminar
Du 07/12/2022 de 16:30 à 18:00
Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan
VICENTE Pedro (University Nova de Lisboa)
Motivating Volunteer Health Workers in an African Capital City
écrit avec Mattia Fracchia, Teresa Molina-Milla´n,
Community Health Workers (CHWs) are central to health systems. Still, they are typically unpaid volunteers in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper follows all the CHWs in the capital city of Guinea-Bissau and tests the impact of different types of non-financial incentives on health indicators. We analyze two randomized interventions for CHWs: (i) an honorific award aimed at raising their social status; (ii) a video treatment aimed at increasing their perceived task significance. While employing administrative and survey data, we find that the social status intervention, differently from the task significance one, causes clear improvements in household health, particularly for young children.
Economic History Seminar
Du 07/12/2022 de 12:00 à 13:30
Salle R2.01 Campus Jourdan
VONYO Tamas ()
War and Socialism: Economic Backwardness in Eastern Europe
The monograph project builds on the author’s extensive research on economic growth in Central and Eastern Europe under state socialism. Relative backwardness had long been understood as a potential source of growth from Marx, through mid-twentieth century structural economics, to neoclassical growth theory. To economic historians, the canonical references are Gerschenkron on late industrialization and Abramovitz on conditional convergence. In these theoretical frameworks, the postwar economic performance of Eastern Europe was interpreted as a growth failure. Socialism was successful in mobilizing resources for growth but used them inefficiently. Early growth accounts confirmed this view, which echoed institutionalist interpretations favored by comparative economists in Eastern Europe. New growth models, by contrast, highlight the role of endogenous innovation and skill-biased technical change. Human capital is broadly seen as the main source of long run growth. Our standard view on comparative development in Europe since WWII requires revision, both considering recently revised Eastern European growth accounts and new tenets in growth theory. The core argument of the book is that the disproportionately large negative impact of the world wars, with long exposure to warfare, unprecedented population shocks and political disintegration, permanently dislocated the economies of Eastern Europe. Colossal loss of human capital thwarted innovation, reduced returns on new investment, and delayed both postwar reconstruction and structural modernization. The main negative effect of the Cold War was neither trade diversion nor the burden defense spending but instead administrative barriers of access to western technology. Socialist economic progress was stalled in the 1980s not by systemic failure but by the oil shocks and sovereign debt crises in their aftermath. Growth came to a standstill not because of a productivity failure but because of the failure to sustain capital high levels of investment. Post-socialist development could not achieve convergence either despite liberal reforms or reintegration into western markets. Disintegration (often in violent form) and depopulation returned to Eastern Europe after 1990, limiting growth in much the same fashion as they had done half a century earlier.