Benford's Law and Fraud Detection. Facts and Legends

Is Benford's law a good instrument to detect fraud in reports of statistical and scientific data? For a valid test the probability of "false positives" and "false negatives" has to be low. However, it is very doubtful whether the Benford distribution is an appropriate tool to discriminate between manipulated and non-manipulated estimates. Further research should focus more on the validity of the test and test results should be interpreted more carefully.Benford's law, fraud detection, false positive, false negative, regression coefficients

Income Diversification and Poverty in a Growing Agricultural Economy: The Case of Ghana.

This paper analyses changes in income portfolios of rural households and its determinants for the case of Ghana in the 1990s. Our analysis shows that, contrary to common beliefs, rural Ghana has seen major economic transformation, as households increasingly diversify their livelihoods by both increased migration and more local non-farm employment. These diversification decisions seem to be driven to a large extent by desperation rather than new opportunities, in particular with regard to migration. Low-income households increase their income share in particular from local non-farm activities through more participation while returns to diversifying activities stagnate or even decrease. Therefore households with a low non-labour asset-base are increasingly diversified and poor. In contrast, asset-rich households are more successful at either diversifying or specialising in those activities the household is relatively good at. They also tend to benefit more from agricultural growth.Income diversification; non-agricultural activities; remittances; migration; inequality; poverty; sub-Saharan Africa; Ghana;

The Impact of Agricultural Market Liberalisation from a Gender Perspective: Evidence from Uganda

Focusing on intra-household allocation, we investigate the effects of coffee market liberalisation in Uganda. As coffee has traditionally been a male domain, higher income from this activity might increase gender disparities. In addition, gender-related inefficiency in household production might undermine the positive impact of improved incentives. Using data from three household surveys conducted between 1992 and 2006, we estimate Engel curves, coffee yield and labour input equations incorporating bargaining proxies. We find that income from coffee is increasingly pooled and therefore shared more equally among household members. Yet, we can only detect partial improvements in production efficiency: bargaining still appears to constraint output efficiency and the distribution of household resources continues to follow gendered lines. --Market liberalisation,Gender,Bargaining,Intra-household allocation,Sub-Saharan Africa,Uganda

MDG achievements, determinants and resource needs : what has been learnt ?

This paper reviews the effectiveness and efficiency of key policy instruments for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Based on a simple cross-country regression analysis, the paper argues that average Millennium Development Goal progress is likely to be too slow to meet education and health sector targets in a number of developing countries. The paper further shows that MDG achievement can be described by a transition path with declining rates of progress. More detailed analysis reveals that the transition toward universal primary school enrollment in poor countries with low initial enrollment has accelerated considerably in the more recent past. The main part of the paper then focuses on the role of demand versus supply-side factorsin social service utilization in education and health. The review arrives at the following rules of thumb that reflect some of the key determinants of achievement of the Millennium Development Goals: First, specific single policy interventions can have a considerable impact on social service utilization and specific human development outcomes. For example, improving access to basic health services, in particular to vaccination, has been a key factor in reducing child mortality rates in a number of very poor countries. Second, demand-side policies have proved extremely effective, for example in raising school enrollment and attainment levels. However, there may be more scope for targeting the demand-side in the health sector. Third, policy effectiveness and efficiency are highly dependent on initial conditions and the specificities of the respective policy. Fourth, complementarities between MDG targets, in particular social service utilization, are likely to be very important.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Education For All

Multinomial goodness-of-fit: large sample tests with survey design correction and exact tests for small samples

A new Stata command called -mgof- is introduced. The command is used to compute distributional tests for discrete (categorical, multinomial) variables. Apart from classic large sample $\chi^2$-approximation tests based on Pearson's $X^2$, the likelihood ratio, or any other statistic from the power-divergence family (Cressie and Read 1984), large sample tests for complex survey designs and exact tests for small samples are supported. The complex survey correction is based on the approach by Rao and Scott (1981) and parallels the survey design correction used for independence tests in -svy:tabulate-. The exact tests are computed using Monte Carlo methods or exhaustive enumeration. An exact Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for discrete data is also provided.multinomial, goodness-of-fit, chi-squared, categorical data, exact tests, Monte Carlo, exhaustive enumeration, combinatorial algorithms, complex survey correction, power-divergence statistic, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Benford's law

The complementarity of MDG achievements : the case of child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper analyzes complementarities between different Millennium Development Goals, focusing on child mortality and how it is influenced by progress in the other goals, in particular two goals related to the expansion of female education: universal primary education and gender equality in education. The authors provide evidence from eight Sub-Saharan African countries using two rounds of Demographic and Health Surveys per country and applying a consistent micro-econometric methodology. In contrast to the mixed findings of previous studies, for most countries the findings reveal strong complementarities between mothers’ educational achievement and child mortality. Mothers’ schooling lifts important demand-side constraints impeding the use of health services. Children of mothers with primary education are much more likely to receive vaccines, a crucial proximate determinant of child survival. In addition, better educated mothers tend to have longer birth intervals, which again increase the chances of child survival. For the variables related to the other goals, for example wealth proxies and access to safe drinking water, the analysis fails to detect significant effects on child mortality, a finding that may be related to data limitations. Finally, the study carries out a set of illustrative simulations to assess the prospects of achieving a reduction by two-thirds in the under-five mortality rate. The findings indicate that some countries, which have been successful in the past, seem to have used their policy space for fast progress in child mortality, for example by extending vaccination coverage. This is the main reason why future achievements will be more difficult and explains why the authors have a fairly pessimistic outlook.Population Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Early Child and Children's Health,Early Childhood Development,Adolescent Health

Uganda: No more pro-poor growth?

This article illustrates changing growth regimes in Uganda from pro-poor growth in the 1990s to growth without poverty reduction, actually even a slight increase in poverty, after 2000. Not surprisingly, we find that good agricultural performance is the key determinant of direct pro-poor growth in the 1990s as well as lower agricultural growth is the root cause of the recent increase in poverty. Yet after 2000, low agricultural growth appears to have induced important employment shifts out of agriculture, which have dampened the increase in poverty. We also assess the indirect way of pro-poor growth by analysing the incidence of public spending and the tax system and find that indirect pro-poor growth has only been achieved to a limited extend. --