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12. Climate migration amplifies gender inequalities
- Author:
- Sofie Henriksen, Sine Plambech, Kolja Dahlin, and Benedikte Raft
- Publication Date:
- 08-2024
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
- Abstract:
- Nepal is one of the countries in the world most vulnerable to climate change. International labour migration has become a strategy to secure funds to protect against the consequences of climate change, but for women it is not so simple.
- Topic:
- Climate Change, Migration, Poverty, Labor Issues, Women, Inequality, and Gender
- Political Geography:
- South Asia and Nepal
13. The Congolese Fight for Their Own Wealth
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 06-2024
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- The DRC’s vast mineral wealth contrasts with its extreme poverty, caused by exploitation and conflict. The dossier emphasises sovereignty and dignity, echoing Congolese activists’ visions for freedom.
- Topic:
- Poverty, Sovereignty, Conflict, Minerals, Exploitation, and Activism
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Democratic Republic of the Congo
14. Mapping Fragility – Functions of Wealth and Social Classes in US Household Finance
- Author:
- Orsola Costantini and Carlo D'Ippoliti
- Publication Date:
- 01-2024
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
- Abstract:
- Which households are more exposed to financial risk and to what extent is their debt systemically relevant? To provide an answer, we advance a new classification of the population, adapted from Fessler and Schürz (2017), based on the type of wealth families own and their sources of income. Then, we investigate data from eleven waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), a triennial survey run by the U.S. Federal Reserve, to explore the association of different debt configurations and motives to get into debt with our class distinctions. Our new approach allows us to assess competing hypotheses about debt and financial vulnerability that have so far been analyzed separately in disconnected strands of literature. The results of our study reinforce and qualify the controversial hypothesis that relative poverty and inequality of income and access to services have been important factors explaining household indebtedness and its relationship with economic growth over time.
- Topic:
- Debt, Poverty, Inequality, Finance, Fragility, and Income Distribution
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
15. Can Poverty Graduation Programs Truly Free the Poor from Poverty? Reflections on International and Regional Experiences
- Author:
- Howaida Adly Roman
- Publication Date:
- 10-2024
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- Poverty is an intractable structural issue, which raises a question that has been perplexing for many years: Why have multiple efforts to combat poverty not liberated the poor from its bond and captivity, allowing them the freedom of sufficiency and human dignity? Does the reason lie in the inadequacy of these efforts, or because the efforts did not address the issue of poverty from its structural causes, instead only dealing with its symptoms? The reasons for questioning this issue are varied. This uncertainty has led to the emergence of a new type of intervention that has been tested initially on limited populations, known as the “graduation out of poverty” approach. This approach was motivated by the recognition in the late 1990s that traditional poverty reduction and microfinance programs could not reach the poorest because, in addition to the barrier of income marginalization, the poor face multidimensional social, economic, and political poverty, as well as psychological and cultural barriers.1 Poverty graduation programs offer an integrated package of interventions aimed at lifting the poor out of their situation and ensuring the sustainability of their emancipation over a specific time, ranging from 24 to 36 months. In 2002, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) developed a program to target the poorest of the poor to free them from their situation and ensure sustainable livelihoods.2 BRAC is a non-governmental organization founded in 1972; its work continued until 2001 when it expanded to include many other countries in the global south, applying its experience in poverty alleviation and establishing branches in many other countries.3 The interventions of these programs seek to combine addressing the immediate needs of those targeted with long-term investment in technical skills, life skills, asset transfer, entrepreneurial development, promoting savings opportunities, and planning for the future to ensure a sustainable exit from poverty and a stable life for these social groups.4 This paper aims to examine poverty exit programs that have been implemented in diverse social, economic, and cultural contexts around the world to draw key conclusions about the ability of these programs to deal with the root causes of poverty and vulnerability. The paper also seeks to investigate the extent to which these programs are scalable, meaning that they can be applied to larger populations; their sustainability; and the guarantee that the poor will not fall back into poverty. The paper focuses on analyzing three experiences from the Arab region, two from Egypt and one from Yemen. Yemen’s program, which is the earliest in the region, dates back to 2006 when the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) and the Ford Foundation decided to expand the approaches to graduation out of poverty through various contexts. In Egypt, the Bab Amal program was implemented by a group of NGOs, while the Forsa program was a government program for graduating beneficiaries of conditional cash transfers (CCT) – the Takaful program – that was implemented in partnership between the Ministry of Social Solidarity and NGOs. Bab Amal was started earlier and has undergone preliminary evaluations, while Forsa is still in its infancy. Research into global poverty graduation programs may help these two experiments avoid making similar mistakes, especially in the context of scaling up. Based on the above, this paper will shed light on what poverty graduation programs are, how they emerged and for what reasons, what role NGOs played, how governments began to adopt these programs and apply them and later expand them, and what the challenges and issues of expansion are. The paper concludes by analyzing a number of challenges facing these programs – chief among them of course the challenge of sustainability – and finally, the lessons learned.
- Topic:
- Development, Poverty, Economic Inequality, and Social Programs
- Political Geography:
- Middle East, Yemen, North Africa, and Egypt
16. A Critical Study of the Role of Zakat in Social Protection in Sudan from 1980 to 2021
- Author:
- Medani Abbas Medani
- Publication Date:
- 09-2024
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- Sudan suffers from a high percentage of its total population, more than 65%, living in poverty. This percentage is affected by poor economic growth, the spread of civil conflicts and the resulting migration and destruction, and loss of livelihoods.1 With such a high incidence of poverty, social protection networks do not cover large segments of the Sudanese population. Since the early 1990s, Sudan has embarked on economic reform programs that include the removal of subsidies on basic, government-subsidized commodities such as bread and fuel. As is well known, the implementation of these policies requires effective social protection networks to minimize the effects of these policies on the poor, which is not an easy task in a low-income country where there are already serious questions about the government’s ability to develop an effective social protection system. In light of limited government resources and a large security and military budget, especially during the period of al-Bashir’s rule from 1989 to 2019, the government’s ability to allocate resources to support social protection programs has been weak. This means that the Zakat Chamber is considered the main provider of social protection interventions in Sudan. It targets poor and vulnerable segments, as Zakat resources represent about 87% of the total interventions of government social protection networks (excluding government support).2 This study starts from the premise that Zakat can be an effective tool in financing and implementing social protection programs, as well as social protection institutions in Sudan, if properly managed. As such, the paper traces the historical development of the Zakat system in Sudan and the impact of the ruling regimes on Zakat’s roles in the social protection system. The study also examines the impact of the Bashir regime (1989-2019) on the Zakat system from the perspective of economic and political empowerment, and the extent of the regime’s impact on Zakat’s ability to strengthen social protection networks in Sudan. The nature of the political system plays a role in determining the frameworks of the Zakat system: the Zakat Chamber law authorizes it to disburse Zakat under the discretionary authority of the ruler as the original authority. In other words, the ruler’s discretion affects the distribution of Zakat resources to projects.3 The study examines the period of Omar al-Bashir’s regime, which lasted from 1989 to 2019. The study then deals with the period following the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood rule in the transitional period from 2019-2021, and proceeds to shed light on the role of the Zakat Chamber after the outbreak of the Sudanese war on 15 April 2023. The study concludes with the positives and challenges facing the role of Zakat in social protection in Sudan. It also provides recommendations aimed at reviewing the program, which, despite its expansion, is accompanied by issues in terms of its use in collecting and providing resources that are not subject to appropriate exchange and institutional controls and as a tool affected by the nature of the ruling political regime and its priorities, which may contradict the goals of Zakat and social protection. The importance of addressing the relationship between Zakat and social protection in Sudan lies in the fact that Zakat is categorized as one of the most important social protection resources. Zakat, for much of the period under study, was a compulsory religious tax, a fact that goes against the principles of Islamic countries in dealing with the Zakat obligation. The link between Zakat and social protection needs a careful approach that separates the roles that Zakat can play in social protection. Zakat is not just a charitable act and can have macroeconomic effects, falling into the trap of being used as an easy tax resource by which governments evade their roles in developing and institutionalizing social protection. This paper attempts, through the experience in Sudan, to contribute to the development of the debate and experience on the roles of Zakat in social protection.
- Topic:
- Poverty, Social Protection, and Zakat
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Sudan
17. Contractual Origins of Anti-Americanism: Pew 2013 Results
- Author:
- Cem Birol
- Publication Date:
- 07-2024
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace
- Institution:
- Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research
- Abstract:
- Economic Norms Theory (ENT) implies that anti-modernist and anti-market values flourish in countries where the central authority poorly monitors contracts that bind economic transactions. Decades of research show that ENT astutely predicts civil war and interstate war incidents, as well as people’s support for war, and suicide bombing in defense of Islam. This paper investigates the association between contract enforcement and anti-Americanism, which is the ENT’s core, yet is a statistically under-evaluated implication. Accordingly, in countries with poor economic contract monitoring, power-contending elites can attribute the resultant loss of prosperity to the USA and relatedly spread anti-American values among citizens. It is the urban poor who are cognitively most available to adopt such elite-driven anti-Americanism since they tend to be hurt most socially and economically by unfulfilled market contracts. To investigate this argument, I statistically estimate random intercept models on a sample of Pew Global Attitudes Project’s 2013 survey results. I observe that a three-way interaction among individuals’ urbanity, poverty, and their nations’ poor contract enforcement indicators increase anti-Americanism.
- Topic:
- Economics, Poverty, Urban, Survey, Economic Norms Theory (ENT), Hierarchical Modelling, and Anti-Americanism
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus and United States of America
18. Trouble In Afghanistan’s Opium Fields: The Taliban War On Drugs
- Author:
- International Crisis Group
- Publication Date:
- 09-2024
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- International Crisis Group
- Abstract:
- The Taliban have instituted a ban on narcotics in Afghanistan. While that has led to a massive drop in production, it is hitting the rural poor particularly hard. Foreign donors should work with the government to ensure the policy does not further undermine vulnerable populations.
- Topic:
- Poverty, Narcotics Trafficking, Law Enforcement, Taliban, Rural, and Opium
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan and South Asia
19. Transfers and the rise of Hindu nationalism in India
- Author:
- Amal Ahmad
- Publication Date:
- 06-2024
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP)
- Abstract:
- In democracies with widespread poverty, what is the impact of programmatic transfers on voting and on incumbent power? This paper provides the first village-level quasiexperimental evidence on this for India, in the context of the Hindu-nationalist party in power. First, I provide a novel method for linking Indian villages to polling booths and for obtaining village-level electoral data. Second, focusing on a program which transfers development funds to villages with a high share of disadvantaged castes, I use a discontinuity design to identify the effects of both past and promised transfers on voting in India’s largest state. Promised transfers increase village turnout slightly but neither treatment impact the villages’ vote share for the Hindu-nationalist incumbent, which is high across the board. The results suggest that political competition limits the impact of programmatic transfers on voting behavior, and they shed light on the recent slide to ethnic nationalism in the world’s largest democracy.
- Topic:
- Development, Poverty, Democracy, Voting, and Hindu Nationalism
- Political Geography:
- South Asia and India
20. An Integrative Framework to Assess Trade-Offs and Implications of Choosing Measurements
- Author:
- Laura García Montoya
- Publication Date:
- 08-2024
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Kellogg Institute for International Studies
- Abstract:
- Deciding how to measure critical social science concepts like inequality and democracy is one of the most consequential decisions researchers and policymakers make. Yet we lack concrete guidelines to recognize and weigh the tradeoffs that make going from concept to measurement such a challenging task. This paper builds on existing work on measurement validity and develops a framework that allows scholars to identify the trade-offs between three desirable properties of measurement: completeness, interpretability, and normative alignment. The first challenge results from the inherent trade-off between completeness and interpretability. The second challenge results from the lack of empirical tools to assess the normative implications of choosing one indicator over another one. To exemplify how to navigate these challenges, the paper engages with debates on how to measure democracy and inequality. The paper aims to guide scholars in the consequential task of choosing one indicator that matches their research goals as well as their normative orientations.
- Topic:
- Poverty, Democracy, and Inequality
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus