Abstract
Regression discontinuity designs applied to a set of household surveys from the 1980-90s allow to examine whether Cote d'Ivoire's aggregate wealth was translated at the borders of neighboring countries. At the border of Ghana and at the end of the 1980s, large discontinuities are detected for consumption, child stunting, and access to electricity and safe water. Border discontinuities in consumption can be explained by differences in cash crop policies (cocoa and coffee). When these policies converged in the 1990s, the only differences that persisted were those in rural facilities. In the North, cash crop (cotton) income again made a difference for consumption and nutrition (the case of Mali). On the one hand, large differences in welfare can hold at the borders dividing African countries despite their assumed porosity. On the other hand, border discontinuities seem to reflect the impact of reversible public policies rather than intangible institutional traits.
Highlights
Résumé: En appliquant plusieurs méthodes de régressions par discontinuité à un ensemble d'enquêtes auprès des ménages pour les années 1980 et 1990, nous examinons si la richesse macroéconomique de la Côte d'Ivoire se constatait aux frontières avec les pays voisins
Are African boundaries still abstract lines drawn on a map, so that divided areas remain alike and no difference in welfare is observed when crossing the border? Or have they become real,strong discontinuities that reveal an ongoing process of national integration? These are the questions that we address in this paper
In comparison with the Ghana and Mali cases, we argue that the absence of a large difference in cash crop income may account for why no border discontinuity is found in consumption per capita or in children’s stunting
Summary
We discuss the conditions under which the borders we study can be considered historical “natural experiments”. In the overall population, D can be arbitrarily correlated with Y (0) or Y (1); Y may be directly generated by D in addition to W (Lee 2008, 680) Under these conditions, the RD estimate is a weighted average of the difference y1(w) − y0(w) for each type w, with weights equal to the probability of being close to the border: f (0|w)/f (0). In the case of the Mali border, where sample sizes do not allow the implementation of the narrowest 50 km bandwidth, we instead produce 100 km bandwidth estimates, where, for “border RD” and “matching RD”, we add the square of the distance to the border (D2, interacted with the C dummy as well). In the remainder of this paper, we use the acronym “BD” for border discontinuity
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