Aspirations and Well-being in Rural Ethiopia
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Transcript of Aspirations and Well-being in Rural Ethiopia
ETHIOPIAN DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Aspirations and Well-being in Rural Ethiopia
Tanguy Bernard1, Stefan Dercon2, Kate Orkin3, and Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse1
1International Food Policy Research Institute, 2 University of Oxford, 3 University of Cambridge
Towards what works in rural development in Ethiopia: Evidence on the impact of investments and policies
December 13th, 2013 Hilton Hotel, Addis Ababa
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Motivation Elements of the aspirations framework Aspirations project Field experiment – design and findings
Outline
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Conceptual – ‘opportunities’
Empirical – Why do the poor not ‘invest’?
Ethiopians and fatalism?
Focus 1 - ‘external circumstances’ and ‘opportunities’.
Low returns to investments; Unexploited opportunities due to lack of information or
knowledge; Social constraints;
Focus 2 - constraints associated with the manifested attributes of decision makers
Identity issues: sense of self; Psychological issues: impatience, commitment, and psychological
barriers
Aspirations failure perspective
Motivation – why aspirations
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Aspirations:
A desire or an ambition to achieve something An aim and implied effort to reach it A set of future-regarding preferences
Related concepts
Economics : Satisficing Psychology : Self-efficacy, locus of control Anthropology : Aspiration failures
Common elements
Goals and aspirations are important determinants of success; Evolution through time in response to circumstances; Role of social comparisons and learning from relevant others,
An individual-level yet culturally (collectively) determined attribute towards exploration of individual-group symbiosis
Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
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Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
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What are Aspirations?
Aspirations have two distinctive aspects:
• Future-oriented - are goals that can only be satisfied at some future time (differ from immediate gratifications);
• Motivators - are goals individuals are willing, in principle, to invest time, effort or money in to attain (different from idle daydreams and wishes)
Note: the ‘willingness to invest’ is ‘potential’, or ‘conditional’
Aspirations and expectations – preference vs. beliefs;
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Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
Why are aspirations important/useful?
Aspirations (or the capacity to aspire):
Reflect bounded rationality;
Are socially determined (social interaction);
Are distributed unevenly within communities.
Condition individual behaviour and well-being
Useful device in analysing and/or addressing poverty
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Conceptual Schema
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The “Aspirations” project
Step 1 – correlates of aspiration-related conceptsStep 2 – test and validate a measurement strategyStep 3 – assess validity of the “aspiration window” hypothesis
An experiment Exogenous shock to aspirations: Mini-documentaries of local
success stories screened to randomly selected individuals. Placebo: local TV show.
3 rounds of data• Baseline pre-treatment (Sept-Dec 2010)• Aspirations retest immediately after treatment• Follow-up (Mar-May 2011)
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On going experiment
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Observations
"Weak" treatment, but:
Documentaries affected aspirations, expectations, expenditure on children’s schooling, time allocation, savings behaviour, and hypothetical loan demand, perceptions more than the placebo even 6 months after treatment;
Direct and, even more visible, indirect (group) effects are detected – more of an aspiration window story rather than a role model one;
It is not obvious why some effects are direct (savings) while others are indirect (time allocation);
Further analysis; Expanding coverage – Malawi, Pakistan via IFPRI;
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