Nepal Study Center
The University of New Mexico

CALL FOR PAPERS

The first issue of the Development Journal of the South (DJS) is out. DJS is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing the debate about development in low-income and middle-income countries around the world. DJS is an open-access multidisciplinary journal on economic and sociopolitical issues faced by nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, collectively known as the Global South. DJS invites theoretical and empirical papers that innovatively use quantitative and qualitative information from a variety of disciplines including economics, political science, and sociology. DJS has a special, though not exclusive, interest in papers that analyze survey data to understand critical issues in development. Insightful reviews of comparative development between two or more nations or regions within a nation, between the North and the South, or between South and South are also welcome. The goal of the Journal is to inform development debate from public policy and social welfare perspectives.
All the papers published in Vol. 1, No. 1, 2015, of DJS are available in pdf format and are fully downloadable from https://ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/djs/issue/current/showToc.

The details of submission guidelines are available at https://ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/djs/about/submissions

The manuscript review process is simple and fast. Referee reports are normally available within two months. Please consider submitting your next paper to the DJS. 

KNOWLEDGE SHARING INITIATIVES OF NSC

The Nepal Study Center (NSC) at the University of New Mexico (UNM) is dedicated to fostering intellectual collaboration and sharing knowledge through various research initiatives.

Himalayan Policy Research Conference

The Center organizes an Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference in October. This is a part of the larger South Asia Conference organized annually by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI.  NSC also publishes a proceedings issue in December that includes the abstracts of the presented papers.

Working Paper Archive

The NSC-UNM's Himalayan Research Papers Archive portal welcomes scholars to upload their research working papers. This portal is designed to showcase academic research work of scholars who are interested to disseminate their work for wider citation and readership.

Development Journal of the South

DJS is published by the University of New Mexico’s Nepal Study Center. Those intending to publish their papers are welcome to submit them to the Development Journal of the South. There is no fee for manuscript submission to the DJS or for publication in the Journal. 

DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL OF THE SOUTH, VOL. 1, ISSUE 1:

ABSTRACTS

1. Knowledge, Information, and Water Treatment Behavior of Residents in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal

Hari Katuwal, Mona K Qassim, José A. Pagán, Jennifer A Thacher, and Alok K. Bohara

Access to safe drinking water plays a crucial role in the overall social and economic development of a community. Unsafe water delivered to household taps increases the risks of waterborne diseases and threatens population health. Consumers can adopt a number of averting behaviors such as filtering or boiling their water. While these approaches are effective in reducing the likelihood of contracting a waterborne disease, not all households treat their water. Given this, it is important to develop a better understanding of factors that influence water treatment behavior. In this paper, we examine determinants of water treatment behavior using survey data (N=1200) from Kathmandu, Nepal. In particular, this paper focuses on the impacts of knowledge, exposure to information, and community participation on drinking water treatment behavior. Previous research has found that income, education level, awareness, and exposure to media are major factors that impact the individual-level decision to treat water before using it. We contribute to this literature by explicitly examining how knowledge about waterborne diseases, exposure to water quality information campaigns, and participation in community organizations impact drinking water treatment behavior. The results from probit regression analyses suggest that either a one percentage increase in the knowledge index or community participation index both increase the likelihood of utilizing drinking water treatment methods by about 0.17 percentage points. Households connected to the distribution system are 31 percentage points more likely to treat water compared to those that are not connected to the system. Multinomial results indicate that wealthier households use more than one treatment method.

2. Prevalence of Child Malnutrition in North Kivu, DRC: Evidence from Bunyuka Parish

Sky Barlow, Zike Chen, Gavin Finnegan, Blaise P. Furaha, Brandon Pichanick, Cait Stadler, Julie Swensen, Leslie E. Ruyle, and Kishore Gawande

Sub-Saharan Africa is the second most undernourished region in the world, with an estimated 265 million people in 2009. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has the highest percentage of undernourished people in the region, 75% from 2004 to 2006. The Kivu region in Eastern DRC, in particular, has suffered through decades of conflict, and lack of security and infrastructure obstruct data collection in this region. The main contribution of this paper is to present primary survey evidence on the prevalence of malnutrition in the village of Bunyuka in North Kivu. From a sample of over 700 mothers and 1400 children, we find significant prevalence of malnutrition and high dependence on nutritionally deficient food sources.

3. Agriculture, Labor Intensive Growth, and Structural Change: East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa

Richard Grabowski

In this paper, it is argued that physically abundant labor is not necessarily relatively cheap labor.  The latter depends upon the cost of food staples.  Given the non-tradability of the latter, rapid growth without rapid agricultural productivity growth will make labor increasingly costly.  This will make the transition to labor intensive manufacturing and the exportation of such products very difficult. More importantly, it results in a structural change process in which the economy skips manufacturing and instead shifts in to capital intensive services. The experiences of Taiwan, Indonesia, and Uganda are used to illustrate these ideas.

4. Spousal-Differences in Perception of Female Autonomy in Household Decision-Making in Nepal

Sharmistha Self

The primary objective of this paper is to see how spouses differ in terms of their perception of female autonomy in household decision-making in Nepal and the factors that influence these perceptions. Understanding the perception of female autonomy is important in general but particularly so for developing countries with traditional male-dominated and well-defined patriarchal roles in society. In general the results seem to converge between men and women when it comes to perception of female autonomy in non-economic decision making but not when it relates to decision-making in economics matters. The results have important policy implications.

5. Firm Size, Foreign Exposure and Inequality in Wage: A Decomposition Analysis

Satis Devkota, Kul Kapri, and Mukti Upadhyay

This study uses pooled cross-section data from two large surveys of firms in Nepal to determine wage inequality. Applying an inequality decomposition procedure, the estimated wage inequality is then attributed to various factors that affect the labor demand function in the country. We find that firm size and exposure of firms to international trade are among the factors showing statistical significance in affecting wage disparity in Nepal. To the extent wage inequality can be attributed to the factors considered in this study, firm size alone accounts for 55 to 84 percent of the inequality depending on the size indicators such as employment or sales. On the other hand, foreign exposure, unlike strongly suggested in the literature, has played much less of a role.