Impacts of corporate agri-business on Bolivia’s Indigenous Peoples: a case study of soya bean value chains in the region of Santa Cruz

Abstract

Eliminating poverty is now considered an almost impossible task without alternative financing sources beyond public spending. Public-Private Partnerships (PPP)s have been recommended to governments for leveraging capital and expertise from the private sector to deliver public goods and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)s. This research investigates the effects that PPPs can have on poverty and well-being in the context of Bolivia. Employing a variety of approaches based on Differences in Differences (DID) and Synthetic Control Methods (SCM), this thesis analyses the impacts of the alliance between the national government and the soybean sector on the livelihoods of indigenous peoples of the country. Pooled cross-sections of household-level data are sourced directly from Bolivia’s National Institute of Statistics and multiple imputation is used to handle missing values. The findings reveal that the PPP is associated with a decrease in the multidimensional poverty of indigenous peoples living in Santa Cruz, the region where this alliance operates. Different assumptions including strict exogeneity and the stable unit treatment value assumption are considered, where this thesis conducts a series of robustness checks and sensitivity analyses to evaluate the validity of the output from both the DID and SCM designs. Given the controversy of this particular partnership, which is opposed by many, the primary aim is to provide empirical evidence on its effects on multidimensional poverty, and in turn supplement the literature that poses the question for why the national government opted for this PPP in the first place. A wider benefit from this work is that it can serve as a case study on the effectiveness of PPPs for development in the context of developing countries that may be similar to Bolivia. This may be useful not only in academic contexts, but also in the present international policy arena that promote PPPs as the mechanism to achieve the SDGs.