Inequality Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

For researchers interested in understanding men's health, there are two main literatures to harvest. The first is research on men's health arising from the study of men and masculinities. The second is the broader study of inequalities in health, including gender inequalities in health. However, these literatures have remained distinct. This paper seeks to develop a model of understanding men's health from both of these literatures. In order to achieve this integration, this paper argues that studies of men's health should be based on 'critical studies on men' which emerges from feminist theory. Critical studies on men's health is then integrated into the broader explanatory options identified in the health inequality literature in order to provide a more fulsome account of variance within men's health and between the health status of men and women. Given the amenability of men's health issues to interrogation within this resulting framework, it is argued that the inequalities literature should start to include men's health issues in its work. r

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- Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Feminist Theory

Bakhtine a décrit le carnaval comme un espace utopique, populiste et festif. Mon propos est que le Grand Magal, un événement religieux mouride au Sénégal ainsi qu'une fête nationale populaire, partage de nombreux parallèles notables avec le carnaval, un argument qui permet de mieux comprendre son importance de même que sa nature. Tout comme le carnaval, le Grand Magal est un espace contradictoire où les oppositions binaires s'estompent : les participants y célèbrent non seulement leur foi mais aussi leur existence humaine en embrassant les plaisirs mondains. Temporairement libérée des règles et des rôles habituels dictés par la vie quotidienne, la communauté mouride peut envisager le futur et le renouvellement, et ainsi échapper aux difficultés de la réalité. Fondée en 1887 par le Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba – fondateur du mouvement soufi musulman – à la suite d'une vision sacrée, la ville de Touba, au Sénégal, est le centre spirituel des Mourides. Chaque 18 Safar, au mois de novembre, environ 4 à 5 millions de Soufis font leur pèlerinage – leur zyara – à Touba. Celui-ci se nomme le Grand Magal : le Magal Gu Ma en wolof. Mag signifie « être important » ou « être vieux ». Magal peut donc être traduit par « célébration » ou « anniversaire » (Coulon 1999 : 196). Pendant le Magal, les disciples mourides – les talibés – font une circumambulation autour des monuments associés au Fondateur, tels que sa tombe, qui se trouve dans la grande mosquée construite en son honneur. Ils présentent des offrandes à leurs marabouts et surtout font des oblations au Khalife Général, qui est

- by Kate Kingsbury
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- Religion, Poverty, West Africa, Sufism

This paper proposes to revisit the debate on trade and investment agreements (TIAs), development and inequality, looking at the role of global value chains (GVCs) and trans-national corporations (TNCs). It first presents stylized facts about trade and investment (agreements), declining global economic growth and rising inequality under the latest round of globalization. It then provides a long-run perspective on the mixed blessings of external opening, summarizing some key contributions of the mainstream literature, which are converging with long-standing research findings of more heterodox economists, and the eroding consensus today. Based on this stock-taking, it takes a fresh critical look at the TIAs-GVCs-TNCs nexus and their impact. Using data on value-added in trade and new firm-level data from the consolidated financial statements of the top 2000 TNCs going back to 1995, it examines whether the fragmentation of production along GVCs led to positive structural change or rather stimulated unsustainable trends in extractive and FIRE sectors. It then turns to the role of TNC-driven GVCs as a vehicle for economic concentration. Finally, it presents evidence linking TIAs and their correlates to rising inequality. Key findings include the fact that the ratio of top 2000 TNCs profits over revenues increased by 58 percent between 1995 and 2015. Moreover, the rise in top 2000 TNCs profits accounts for 69 percent of the 2.5 percentage points decline in the global labour income share between 1995 and 2015, with the correlation coefficient between annual changes in both variables as high as 0.82. The paper concludes by calling for a less ideological policy debate on TIAs, which acknowledges the mixed blessings of external financial and trade opening, especially their negative distributional impact and destabilizing macro-financial feedback effects, which both call for policy intervention. As an alternative to short-sighted protectionism, it further discusses possible options for anticipating undesirable effects arising from TIAs (e.g. rising carbon emissions, economic instability, inequality, etc.) and addressing those in TIAs themselves.

To have a different set of educational standards for those who begin as second-class citizens is to condemn those youth to permanent second class status. My recent work, "Educational Standards: How to learn from Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 as we reopen schools" resulted in a flurry interesting comment, causing me to question an axiom that I was taught, but to my detriment did not always abide: Did you ever get in trouble for something you chose not to say? For some reason, the comments on the work were addressed to areas that were not mentioned or included in the text. Comments on policy came from friends at the university level, district leaders and principals were concerned about inequities in funding, teachers wanted to talk teacher quality, and everyone wanted a discussion of the value America places on education. So, let us attempt to give voice to several of the important comments.

- by Bruce Katz
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- Institutional racism, Inequality, Educational Standards

This article explores the patterns of class inequality and capital accumulation in Brazil, showing the drivers and limits of the decline in inequality that occurred during the Workers' Party governments. It proposes that minimum wage hikes and greater social security changed the demand pattern and kick-started a cumulative causation process. Growth and redistribution thus reinforced each other for a period, and then spelled their own limits. As growth accelerated in the 2000s, a Gini decomposition indicates that class inequality decreased, but confined to changes between workers-capitalist income and social stratification were preserved. This also endogenously led to a re-gressive structural change, as low-productivity, labour-intensive services grew and international trade patterns worsened. This created a medium-term dependence on commodity prices for balance-of-trade solvency, and heightened cost-push inflation, which could not be overcome under the limited policy framework in place. The constrained basis for reducing inequality and the regressive structural change underscore that developmental strategies requires broad, multi-dimensional inequality-reducing measures and an encompassing catching-up project.

We propose that historical resource scarcity played a role in the evolution of gender norms inimical to women, cultures that persists to this day. This is a plausible thesis for three reasons. First, male dominance in some species of non-human primate may have been shaped by their resource environments. Second, the prehistoric human skeletal record suggests scarcity led to decline in girls’ share of nutrition in parts of the world. Third, poverty is observed to contribute to gender bias in intra-household resource allocations in less developed countries. The proposition that historical habitual scarcity may have engendered cultures of gender inequality is supported by our finding that nations’ historical resource endowments, measured by the availability of arable land, are negatively related to their present levels of gender inequality as gauged by, for example, the UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index. It is supported as well in analyses at the sub-national level, which discover there ar...

- by Chandan Jha
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- History, Geography, Economics, Culture

Socioeconomic inequalities in the health of adults have been largely attributed to lifestyle inequalities. The cognitive development (CD) and emotional health (EH) of the child provides a basis for many of the health-related behaviours which are observed in adulthood. There has been relatively little attention paid to the way CD and EH are transmitted in the foetal and childhood periods, even though these provide a foundation for subsequent socioeconomic inequalities in adult health. The Mater-University of Queensland Study of Pregnancy (MUSP) is a large, prospective, pre-birth cohort study which enrolled 8556 pregnant women at their first clinic visit over the period 1981-1983. These mothers (and their children) have been followed up at intervals until 14 years after the birth. The socioeconomic status of the child was measured using maternal age, family income, and marital status and the grandfathers' occupational status. Measures of child CD and child EH were obtained at 5 and 14 years of age. Child smoking at 14 years of age was also determined. Family income was related to all measures of child CD and EH and smoking, independently of all other indicators of the socioeconomic status of the child. In addition, the grandfathers' occupational status was independently related to child CD (at 5 and 14 years of age). Children from socioeconomically disadvantaged families (previous generations' socioeconomic status as well as current socioeconomic status) begin their lives with a poorer platform of health and a reduced capacity to benefit from the economic and social advances experienced by the rest of society.

- by Jake Najman
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- Anthropology, Education, Cognitive development, Behavior
- by richard freeman
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- Labour Economics, Applied Economics, Inequality, Incentives

This paper explores the relationship between different levels of education and poverty through an analysis of household-level data from 60 villages in Bangladesh. First of all, it depicts the overall trend in school enrollment at primary and secondary level between 1988-2000, and confirms the inequality that exists in the access to education at post-primary level. This is followed by a presentation of income and occupation data that show a strong positive correlation with the level of education. In the second part, an income function analysis has been done to assess the impact of education along with other determinants. Marginal returns to upper secondary and primary level of education have been found to be higher than lower secondary education. The third part analyzes the effects of education on child/woman ratio, and on the secondary school participation rate of male and female children. Both poverty and low education have positive but weak effect on child/woman ratio. On the othe...

- by Manik Lal Bose
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- Functional Analysis, Poverty, Political Science, Rural Poverty

Starting from the approach proposed by Schluter and Trede we develop a continuous and alternative measure of mobility which first, allows to identify mobility over different parts of the earnings distribution and second, to distinguish between mobility that tends to reduce or increase the level of permanent inequality. This paper focuses on four European countries, Denmark, Germany, Spain and the UK. In a global perspective, mobility in the short and long-run analysis tends to equalize the level of permanent inequality. Six year changes comparing the average between 1994 and 1995 with the average of 2000 and 2001, suggests that Denmark has the highest mobility mainly almost entirely from higher mobility at the middle and top of the distribution. Germany has the lowest overall mobility. Overall mobility over six years produces only a modest reduction in inequality patterns (5 to 10%) adopting the Gini index and there is no clear correlation between mobility and inequality levels. Exploiting the decomposability of the mobility index developed, we carry out a local analysis by earnings quintiles which draw some general key facts. It emerges that it is the bottom 20 percent of the earnings distribution that makes the largest contribution to the global mobility pattern and that mobility, with the exception of Denmark, does not lead to clear convergence to the mean but at points around 0.7-0.8 and 1.5 to 2 times the mean.

- by Claudia Vittori
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- Mobility, Inequality, Gini Index, Indexation
- by Robert Dimand
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- Economics, Social Policy, Inequality, Income Tax

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson attempt to explain why significant income disparity exists in today's world among nations in their recent book called Why Nations Fail. Acemoglu and Robinson's main argument is that political and economic institutions are the fundamental cause of the income inequality in today's world. They make a distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions in terms of their impact on a nation's development. While inclusive political and economic institutions spur economic prosperity, extractive ones explain why some nations are poor. This book intensely discusses how institutions play a significant role for a nation's development. Application of their institutional analysis at the global and regional levels would give further insights in terms of the impacts of institutions on development.

- by Raif Can
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- Economics, Political Science, Economic Development, Institutions
- by Eric Gould
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- Urban Economics, Urban And Regional Planning, Applied Economics, Inequality

An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the CESifo website: www.CESifo.de * We would like to thank Mikael Lindahl and Daniele Checchi for sharing their datasets. We are also grateful to Robert Shimer, Giorgio Primiceri and Alan Krueger for helpful comments. EDUCATION, GROWTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY Coen Teulings Thijs van Rens* CESifo Working Paper No. 653 (4)

- by Thijs van Rens
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- Economics, Econometrics, Higher Education, Human Capital

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

- by Rinku Murgai
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- Economics, Agricultural Economics, Applied Economics, Inequality

This paper has not undergone the review accorded to official World Bank publications. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of The World Bank or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. The boundaries, colors, denominations, and other information shown on any map in this work do not imply any judgement on the part of The World Bank concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries.

- by Hana Brixi
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- Community Development, Health Care, Economic Growth, Fertility

In this article, we review 25 years of sociological scholarship published in Sociology of Health and Illness on medical technologies. We divide the literature into three theoretical perspectives: technological determinism views medical technology as a political force to shape social relationships, social essentialism emphasizes how medical technologies are neutral tools to be interpreted in social interactions, and technology-in-practice highlights the dialectic relationship between technology and its users in health care. While the technology-in-practice orientation allows social scientists to critique the high hopes and dire warnings embedded in medical technologies, we argue that the logical next step of this paradigm is to move beyond criticism and influence the creation and implementation of medical technologies.

- by Stefan Timmermans
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- Sociology, Medical Sociology, Technology, Bibliometrics

This essay is adapted from a plenary talk the author gave at the “Growing Apart:
The Implications of Economic Inequality” interdisciplinary conference at Boston College on 9 April 2016, as well as portions of his book Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy, a sociological ethnography based on interviews and observations of unemployed autoworkers in Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Canada, during and after the Great Recession. The essay discusses four themes from this research. First, it provides a sociological understanding of how long-term unemployment and economic inequality are experienced by today’s less advantaged workers. Second, it illustrates how social policy can improve their circumstances. Third, it examines the limits of policy, and how dealing with inequality also requires changing the broader culture. Fourth, it makes the case for one possible approach to bring about that cultural change: a morality of grace.

- by Victor T Chen
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- Education, Unemployment, Labor Markets, Morality
- by Tammy Anderson
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- Psychology, Drugs And Addiction, Mass Communication, Race and Ethnicity

this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at... more

- by Frank Byamugisha
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- Climate Change, Property Rights, Economic Growth, East Asia

The question whether a socially mobile society is conducive to subjective well-being (SWB) has rarely been investigated. This paper fills this gap by analyzing the SWB effects of intergenerational earnings mobility and equality in educational attainment at the societal level. Using socio-demographic information on 44’000 individuals in 30 OECD countries obtained from the World Values Survey 1997-2001, this study shows that living in a socially mobile society is conducive to individual life satisfaction. Differentiating between perceived and actual social mobility, we find that both exert rather independent effects, particularly in their interplay with income inequality. We identify a positive interaction of perceived social mobility that mitigates the overall SWB lowering effect of income inequality. In contrast to expectations, a high degree of actual social mobility yields an overall impact of income inequality that is SWB lowering, while for low social mobility the effect of ineq...

- by Justina Fischer
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- Justice, Social Mobility, Inequality, Subjective Well Being
- by Novos Debates and +1
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- Poverty, Homelessness, Social Exclusion, Urban Poverty

Although there has been rapid expansion of higher education around the globe, such expansion has not resulted in a more equitable system. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, equity in higher education is conceptualised as 'parity of participation' and includes both equity of access and outcomes. The tensions between expansion and equity are illustrated by comparing South Africa's equity challenges with those of Brazil and the USA. Focusing on South Africa's critical choices, four scenarios or possible futures are provided to illustrate some of the trade-offs and strategic choices. The main argument is that if South Africa's higher education system continues to expand without a concomitant investment in the effectiveness of teaching and learning, it will not achieve the policy goals of equity of access and outcomes. Furthermore the investment needs to be strategically targeted to interventions that can serve as systemic levers of change for reducing drop-out rates and improving graduation rates. To this end, over the next decade the state needs to prioritise an investment in an undergraduate curriculum more 'fit for purpose'. The investment needs to be in curriculum reform that normalises different levels of foundational provision, identifies and removes curriculum obstacles that delay or impede graduation, and provides opportunities for 'breadth' for all students, not only those who come from privileged backgrounds. Significance: • If South Africa's higher education system continues to expand without a concomitant investment in the effectiveness of teaching and learning, it will not achieve the policy goals of equity of access and outcomes.

- by Suellen Shay
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- Higher Education Policy, Curriculum, Inequality, Higher education in Brazil

This article introduces the first version of a new, standardized data tool that can be used to test models of global income allocation, the Standardized Income Distribution Database (SIDD). It is based on a comprehensive collection of income distribution data compiled by the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER 2000). International and intertemporal inconsistencies in these data have historically limited its use. We estimate adjustment factors for different scopes of coverage, income definitions, and reference units which, when applied to the raw data, bring all data to a common standard based on national coverage, gross income, and household per capita inequality. Criterion validity checks confirm that these adjustments boost the correlation between measured income inequality and national social indicators. The SIDD is also clean, free of duplicates, and easy to access. The SIDD will be useful both to students reading income inequality and to those conducting broad cross-national research on the relationship between income inequality and a range of important outcomes, such as health, criminality, and social support. Country and decades Country and decades Algeria,

- by María José Álvarez-Rivadulla
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- Sociology, Economics, Data Analysis, Economic Inequality

Despite the call for a better understanding of macro-level factors that affect population health, social epidemiological research has tended to focus almost exclusively on national-level factors, such as Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP/c) or levels of social cohesion. Using a world-systems framework to examine cross-national variations in infant mortality, this paper seeks to emphasize the effects of global trade on national-level population health. Rather than viewing national-level health indicators as autonomous from broader global contexts, the study uses network analysis methods to examine the effects of international trade on infant mortality rates. Network data for countries were derived from international data on the trade of capital-intensive commodities in 2000. Using automorphic equivalence to measure the degree to which actors in a network perform similar roles, countries were assigned into one of six world-system blocks, each with its own pattern of trade. These blocks were dummy-coded and tested using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. A key finding from this analysis is that after controlling for national-level factors, the two blocks with the lowest density in capital-intensive exchange, i.e., the periphery, are significantly and positively associated with nationallevel infant mortality rates. Results show the effects of peripherality and stratification on population health, and highlight the influence of broader macro-level factors such as trade and globalization on national health.

- by Ana Teixeira
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- Economics, Anthropology, Epidemiology, Globalization

Montesquieu and Adam Smith undertook deep analyses of the structural laws of agrarian civilizations and described the traps and tendencies which would prevent any final escape from constant toil and inequality. David Hume's work in certain of his 'Essays' complements their work. He shows the social, political, religious and economic conditions which had made England the most free and wealthy nation in the world by his time. Simultaneously he shows the strong forces which would ultimately lead to stasis even in the English case.

- by Alan Macfarlane
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- Religion, Economics, Political Economy, Philosophy

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had an unprecedented global impact, with almost no country left untouched. While COVID-19 is a health pandemic, it has impacted societies in many ways causing unforeseen social and economic challenges. In Uganda, a country where an overwhelming majority of people earn their daily living in the informal work sector, and live in densely populated neighborhoods and overcrowded family housing, conforming to the government's strict lockdown, curfew and health measures beginning from March 31 was experienced differently, depending on gender, level of education, and more specifically, the economic status of individuals. The research conducted in this paper offers an assessment of how the government mandated regulations influenced behavior change and overall impacted a rural population in Kagadi District, Western Uganda. The findings offer insight into how the government and other organizations can better plan, create and carry out emergency measures and guidelines based on the reality of the general population in the event of recurring or future outbreaks.

- by brenda bushell
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- Uganda, Inequality

This article makes a contribution to the ongoing debates about universalism and cultural relativism from the perspective of sociology. We argue that bioethics has a universal range because it relates to three shared human characteristics,-human vulnerability, institutional precariousness and scarcity of resources. These three components of our argument provide support for a related notion of 'weak foundationalism' that emphasizes the universality and interrelatedness of human experience, rather than their cultural differences. After presenting a theoretical position on vulnerability and human rights, we draw on recent criticism of this approach in order to paint a more nuanced picture. We conclude that the dichotomy between universalism and cultural relativism has some conceptual merit, but it also has obvious limitations when we consider the political economy of health and its impact on social inequality.

- by Bryan Turner
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- Philosophy, Ethics, Bioethics, Human Rights

The complex relationship between economic growth, job creation, peak oil and climate change is discussed. This starts from seven facts and leads to five propositions to deal with the consequences of these facts. The overall message is that global economic policy should be redirected, that we need a better understanding of the reasons for the current economic malaise, that "peak oil" remains a concern (despite shale "fracking"), and that climate change is a relevant economic issue demanding a serious response. There is probably only one strategy that has a chance of reversing the present ଝ This paper reflects views expressed by the authors at a 1-day symposium held at INSEAD on April 10, 2013, in honor of the lifetime research by the first author. The following individuals contributed to the conference held at INSEAD on April 10, 2013 and assisted in shaping the present paper although they have not participated as authors: Paolo Frankl (IEA), Marina Fischer-Kowalski (IFF-Klagenfurt), Landis Gabel (INSEAD) and Ludo van der Heyden (INSEAD).

- by Skip Laitner
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- Climate Change, Economic Growth, Energy, Resource Productivity
- by Vijaya Hogan
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- Health, Equity, Saúde Coletiva, Inequality

The Covid-19 pandemic came at a time when South Africa was already experiencing chronic and unacceptably high unemployment, especially among the youth. What statistics and analysis have neglected to reveal in any real way, however, is the personal affect of unemployment on those who find themselves permanently excluded from the labour force, and driven to abandon conventional means of seeking any, usually part-time, work, drawing instead on desperate measures to find jobs. The author spoke to a number of these young people and recounts their personal stories as part of a wider project on the area on responses to the youth unemployment crisis.

- by Siphelo Ngcwangu
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- Education, Sociology of Work, Inequality, Youth unemployment in south africa

Conflicting cultural and religious values pose challenges-challenges that are too often ignored-to efforts to comprehend and to solve tough social problems. Value-conflict challenges call for much more thoughtful attention both by analysts seeking to understand the sources of problems, and by advocates for particular solutions. This contribution to the ARNOVA Policy Brief series draws on a wide range of historical and social research to advance its argument for recognizing value conflicts.

Poverty and poverty reduction are currently the central concerns of development discourse and policy. Despite recent theoretical advances, poverty analysis continues to be dominated by an income/consumption conception of poverty. We argue... more

- by David Hulme
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- Economics, Politics, Social Welfare, Inequality
- by Joël Noret
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- Social Theory, African Studies, Anthropology, Development Studies

In this article we draw on the method proposed by CROP (Comparative Research on Poverty) so as to spell out the causal mechanisms provoking the durable inequalities that underlie social inclusion policies in Argentina. We use Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis in order to highlight how international organizations and the Argentinean government have understood social inclusion as a way to observe and judge the everyday practices of the most vulnerable groups, thus imprinting a noticeable gender bias to the Families for Social Inclusion Program (Programa Familias para la Inclusión Social).

- by Xavier Rambla
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- Discourse Analysis, Gender Studies, Social Policy, Globalization

This paper analyses how high-stakes, standardised testing became the policy tool in the U.S. that it is today and discusses its role in advancing an ideology of meritocracy that fundamentally masks structural inequalities related to race and economic class. This paper first traces the early history of high-stakes testing within the U.S. context, focusing on its deep-rooted connections with eugenics and IQ testing in schools. It then turns to the more recent history of high-stakes testing, highlighting the ways that race and class inequality, as well as the ideology of meritocracy, manifest in the United States today as part of a legacy of inequality.

- by Wayne Au
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- Sociology, Inequality, Meritocracy

Grandparents play a vital role in providing childcare to families. Qualitative research and evidence from parents raise concerns that it is grandparents who are socioeconomically disadvantaged who provide grandchild care more regularly, perform more intensive tasks, and care out of financial necessity. However, no European studies have investigated these issues at population level. This study is based on grandparents aged 50+ who looked after grandchildren. Data are from wave 8 of the nationally representative English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2016/2017). We exploit newly collected information on frequency of grandchild care, activities, and reasons for care. Using multinomial regressions, we first examined the extent to which grandparents' socioeconomic characteristics (wealth and education) are associated with frequency of grandchild care. Second, using logistic regressions, we investigated whether wealth and education are associated with activities and reasons for grandchild care. Overall, grandparents from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to provide more regular childcare. Similarly, grandparents in the lowest wealth quartile were more involved in hands-on activities (cooking, taking/collecting grandchildren to/from school), whereas highly educated grandparents were more likely to help grandchildren with homework. Finally, better-off grandparents were more likely to look after grandchildren to help parents and provide emotional support and less likely to report difficulty in refusing to provide care. Our findings show that grandparental childcare varies by socioeconomic status with more intensive childcare activities falling disproportionately on those with fewer resources, and this may act to exacerbate existing socioeconomic inequalities in later life.

- by Giorgio Di Gessa
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- Socioeconomics, Education, Aging, Family Caregivers/Carers

El articulo describe los cambios ocurridos en la estructura social del trabajo urbano argentino entre el punto mas alto del crecimiento economico bajo el regimen de politicas neoliberales de la decada del novena (1998), la crisis socio economica del periodo 2001-2002 y el todavia vigente proceso de crecimiento con politicas heterodoxas. Se analizan las variaciones en las composiciones de la fuerza de trabajo en terminos de pertenencia sectorial (formal, informal y publico) y calidad de los puestos (estables, precarios y marginales), asi como el impacto de la crisis del regimen social de acumulacion sobre las brechas de ingreso de los ocupados. Los autores discuten sobre la profundidad del proceso y la plausibilidad de la hipotesis del cambio de regimen desde el ano 2003.

- by Agustín Salvia
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- Philosophy, Political Science, Economy, Social Structure

In diesem Open-Access-Buch wird die subjektive Wahrnehmung und Bewältigung von Armut im Kontext der strukturellen Einbindung der Betroffenen konzeptualisiert und erfasst. In einer reichen Gesellschaft arm zu sein, bedeutet nicht nur ein materielles Problem, sondern auch die Infragestellung der sozialen und gesellschaftlichen Zugehörigkeit der Betroffenen. Um dem zu entgehen, sind die Akteure auf voneinander abgrenzbare Kontexte in ihrem Netzwerk angewiesen, in denen sie Anerkennung und Teilhabe generieren können. Wer in dieser Lage auf sich selbst zurückgeworfen ist, erfährt Armut als die Zerstörung seiner bzw. ihrer Identität als respektables Mitglied der Gesellschaft. Der Kampf gegen die Armut darf daher nicht gegen die Armen geführt werden, sondern muss ein Kampf um Orte und Gelegenheiten sein, an denen wir zeigen können, dass es (auch) auf uns ankommt. Es zeigt sich, dass materielle Knappheit in Abhängigkeit der sozialen Einbindung unterschiedlich wahrgenommen wird. Die Bewältigungschancen verschlechtern sich, je weniger Gelegenheitsstrukturen zur Erreichung von Anerkennung und Teilhabe den Befragten in ihrem sozial-räumlichen Umfeld zur Verfügung stehen.

- by André Knabe
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- Social Networks, Typology, Poverty, Mixed Methods
- by Giuliana B . Prato
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- Urban Anthropology, Inequality

This study investigates the relationship between U.S. state-level CO 2 emissions and two measures of income inequality: the income share of the top 10% and the Gini coefficient. Each of the inequality measures, which focus on unique characteristics of income distributions, is used to evaluate the arguments of different analytical approaches. Results of the longitudinal analysis for the 1997 to 2012 period indicate that state-level emissions are positively associated with the income share of the top 10%, while the effect of the Gini coefficient on emissions is non-significant. The statistically significant relationship between CO 2 emissions and the concentration of income among the top 10% is consistent with analytical approaches that focus on political economy dynamics and Veblen effects, which highlight the potential political and economic power and emulative influence of the wealthy. The null effect of the Gini coefficient is generally inconsistent with the marginal propensity to emit approach , which posits that when incomes become more equally distributed, the poor will increase their consumption of energy and other carbon-intensive products as they move into the middle class.

- by Andrew Jorgenson and +1
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- Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, Ecological Economics, Income inequality

Lay persons who are trained to conduct research in their own communities form an essential part of many research projects. However, the effects of conducting research in their own communities have not been adequately explored. This paper examines the experiences, perceptions, and challenges faced by a group of community researchers during their involvement in a research project that examined if, and how, the relationships between mothers and their adolescent daughters could be harnessed to develop a daughter-initiated cervical cancer intervention. Seven community researchers interviewed 157 mother-daughter pairs in Cape Town, South Africa. We examine the use of journaling as a tool to document the experiences of community researchers, and we consider how journaling may help the community-based researcher grapple with the research process, and, more broadly, what such journal content illustrates with respect to the nature and challenges of community-engaged health research. An analysis of the content of the journals provides a strong indication of how personal and intimate the research process can be for community researchers by virtue of the background that they bring into the process as well as the additional weight of the research process itself. The complexities of navigating dual and somewhat oppositional roles -the role of impartial scientist or researcher and the role of invested community person -has been both underestimated and insufficiently researched.

- by Doria Daniels
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- Sociology, Anthropology, Ethics, Research Ethics

The paper argues that the economic imbalances that caused the present crisis should be thought of as the outcome of the interaction of the effects of financial deregulation with the macroeconomic effects of rising inequality. In this sense rising inequality should be regarded as a root cause of the present crisis. We identify four channels by which it has contributed to the crisis. First, rising inequality creates a downward pressure on aggregate demand since it is poorer income groups that have high marginal propensities to consume. Second, international financial deregulation has allowed countries to run larger current account deficits and for longer time periods. Thus, in reaction to potentially stagnant demand two growth models have emerged: a debt-led model and an exportled model. Third, (in the debt-led growth models) higher inequality has led to higher household debt as working class families have tried to keep up with social consumption norms despite stagnating or falling real wages. Fourth, rising inequality has increased the propensity to speculate as richer households tend hold riskier financial assets than other groups. The rise of hedge funds and of subprime derivatives in particular has been linked to rise of the superrich.

- by Engelbert Stockhammer
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- Economic Theory, Applied Economics, Hedge Funds, DISTRIBUTION

A general method for building parametric-functional families of Lorenz curves, generated from an initial Lorenz curve (which satisfies some regularity conditions) is presented. It is shown that these families can be ordered in a manner which leads to a hierarchy of Lorenz curves. The method starts from a generating Lorenz curve¸(p) and builds the family by increasing the number of parameters, which can be easily interpreted in terms of the elasticities of¸(p). The method is applied to a family we term the Pareto family, since they use the Pareto Lorenz curves as their generating curves. The family is shown to contain an important number of classical Lorenz curves used in the existing literature. Several properties of this family are analyzed, these include the population function, inequality measures and Lorenz orderings. A general method for the estimation of these family is given and applied to the Pareto family. Finally, an application is presented for data from various countries. The results are very robust across data sources. The Pareto models fit very well in a number of applications.

- by Daniel Slottje
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- Econometrics, Inequality, Boolean Satisfiability, Lorenz Curve