Drivers of poverty, mortality and labor supply in developing countries

This book contributes to the empirical literature on poverty, mortality and labor supply in developing countries. Each of the three essays included in this book make use of new household data sets that were collected to innovatively address a well-defined research problem. The first chapter investigates the relationship between undernutrition and child mortality in sub-Sahara Africa and explains why children around Lake Victoria have very low chances to survive up to age 5 despite being extremely wellnourished. The second chapter examines the effect of fertility on female labor force participation and instructively shows that the need to finance basic expenditures on children forces women to enter the labor market in a developing country context. The third chapter studies the effect of cash crop choice, the switch from coffee to cocoa in Indonesian agriculture, on the growth in per-capita incomes in rural Indonesia following the crisis of 1997/98.