Search

Summary: The objective of this paper is to present an overview of ethnicity, ethnic strife, and its consequences, as seen from the perspective of the disciplines of economics, political science, social anthropology, and sociology. What exactly is ethnicity—how is it to be defined, characterized, and measured? What exactly are the causal links from ethnicity so defined to its presumed consequences, including tension and violence? What are the feedback loops from the consequences of ethnic divisions back to these divisions themselves? How can policy, if at all, mitigate ethnic divisions and ethnic conflict? Finally, what role does interdisciplinarity have in helping to understand ethnicity and ethnic strife, and how can interdisciplinary collaboration be enhanced? These are the questions which this paper takes up and deals with in sequence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper analyzes rights-based and economic approaches to the provision of health care and education in developing countries. It assesses the foundations and uses of social rights in development, outlines the economic approach to health care and education, highlights differences and similarities, and assesses the hard questions that the economic critique poses for rights. The paper argues that the policy consequences of the approaches overlap considerably. Differences include the consequences of long-term deprivation, metrics for tradeoffs, and the behavioral distortions of subsidies. But the differences are not irreconcilable, and advocates of the approaches need not regard each other as antagonists. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper examines the social determinants of the rule of law by comparing Jamaica and Barbados, two countries with many similarities, but with divergent outcomes concerning the rule of law. The research takes a comparative historical approach, specifically investigating the origins of the divergence of the rule of law between Jamaica and Barbados by focusing on the late colonial period (1937–1966). Using new data collected from archival research, state legitimacy is identified as the key factor that helps explain the divergent trajectories of the rule of law in Jamaica and Barbados post-independence. Going beyond state-based explanations of the rule of law, the analysis suggests that the rule of law not only depends on characteristics of the state, but also on characteristics of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In this paper, we investigate the impact of monitoring and social ties on moral hazard behavior within group lending programs. Our study is based on data from an extensive questionnaire held in Eritrea among participants of 102 groups. We separately analyze the impact of group leaders and other group members. We show that the monitoring and the social ties of group leaders and not the other group members reduce the moral hazard behavior within groups. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper discusses two well-known market-based social change initiatives, Fair Trade coffee and Forest Stewardship Council certification, which harness market forces to pursue social and environmental objectives. A serious challenge for both is to operate in the conventional market without undermining their original objectives. A global commodity chain analysis approach is combined with insights from economic sociology embeddedness theory to explore the social, cultural and organizational factors shaping the initiatives’ governance structures. Both initiatives are seen to move along opposite organizational trajectories, but face similar pressures from conventional market logics, practices and dominant actors. A preliminary framework is proposed for comparative assessment, focusing on distribution of benefits, how conventional market institutions may be questioned, and how internal governance manages diverse stakeholder interests and influence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper I examine the links between women, food security and development from a crossnational perspective. I find that the “proximity to gender equality” constructed from the United Nations’ human development and gender-related development indices improves development in the form of both child hunger and child mortality. Extending these results, other forms of female empowerment including female contraceptive prevalence significantly improve development outcomes in less-industrialized societies. Findings are net of theoretical controls for economic development, population pressure, globalization, democratization, and region, further strengthening the importance of gender considerations. Countries that incorporate gender into policy and program considerations benefit from such inclusion in the form of social and economic development outcomes. Findings are an important crossnational extension of existing research, utilizing new measures that capture the important development dynamic. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Why do emigration rates vary across Latin America? Since more than three-quarters of Latin America’s emigrants go to the United States, the paper estimates a model of emigration to the United States to isolate the fundamentals driving Latin American emigration. The model is estimated separately for all sending countries and for Latin America, asking whether migrants from the two respond differently to fundamentals. They do not. The estimates are then used to identify the sources of Latin American emigration since the early 1970s and compares them with those of Africa and Asia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper draws on recent evidence––economic, sociological and anthropological––from Latin America to forward a view of the informal sector in developing countries primarily as an unregulated microentrepreneurial sector and not as a disadvantaged residual of segmented labor markets. It offers alternative explanations for many of the characteristics of the sector customarily regarded as evidence of its inferiority. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]