Essays on democratization, development, and well-being in Myanmar

Abstract

This dissertation studies the effect of government policies on development and well­ being. We examine the policies such as the agricultural loan policy, an education for all policy. In addition, this study discovers the impact of democratization on household welfare and access to public goods. Chapter one studies on democratization, ethnic fractionalization, and household welfare in Myanmar. We use the difference-in-differences method to study the impact of the policy. Results indicates that democratization bring tangle benefits to households, welfare and access to public goods. However, the results discover the effect of democratization is constrained by ethnic fractionalization. We find the more ethnically heterogeneous society has less benefits of democratization. All results are robust and highly significant to using alternative measure of fractionalization indexes: religious fractionalization index and polarization index. Chapter two examine the long-term impact of "education for all” policy on child mortality and labor outcomes by using the fuzzy regression discontinuity (RDD) method. The results show that mother education reduces the child mortality significantly. We also find that the more educated mother care more on early childhood learning. We find more educated females participate more in the current labor force and the more educated person work less in the elementary sectors. The study also explores the possible channel of causality through which the mother education may have an effect on child mortality. Chapter three studies the impact of agricultural loan on farm production and household consumption. The paper use difference-in-differences method to examine the impact of policy. The finding indicates that the policy has a positive effect on chemical fertilizer use, pesticides use, and labor use in rice cultivating households. Moreover, the result shows a significant increase of per acre yield in rice plot. The results indicate that the policy has a positive and significant effect on total households' consumption calories. The studies discover that the government agricultural loan policy has a significantly benefits for rice cultivating households comparing to other crop cultivating households.