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Although the theory of cumulative causation posits a “saturation point” at which all members of a rural community who are potential transnational migrants will have migrated, in the case of dynamic out-migration centers, this saturation point may never be reached. This is because growth centers – the growth often having been propelled by wages and remittances of prior migrants – attract in-migrants from poorer, less dynamic, surrounding ranchos that eventually become incorporated in transnational migration networks of the more dynamic rancho. It is also due to intermarriage as well as friendship and ritual kinship ties between members of the core rancho and surrounding ranchos.

This paper examines the gender differences of expenditure distribution within the last decade in Spain. In particular, the Lorenz dominance is tested using expenditure distributions as approximated by the Dagum model. The sensitivity of the results to some conceptual choices, such as the equivalence scale or the gender reference, is also analysed.

Taking a gender-sensitive approach, this study examines the socio-economic and institutional drivers of household vulnerability to the shocks occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study employs country-level panel data for Nigeria. Data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson's chi-square, and ordered logistic regression. The study found significant heterogeneity in vulnerability to the COVID-19 shocks between the male-headed households (MHHs) and female-headed households (FHHs) (p < 0.1). The econometric results reveal that in the MHHs, the geographical location, livelihood diversification, and ownership of television were the significant drivers of vulnerability to COVID-19–related shocks. In the FHHs, credit constraints, household size, value of the household assets, geographical location, ownership of television and radio, and experiences of previous shocks were found to be significant drivers of vulnerability to COVID-19–related shocks. This study provides insights for designing inclusive social protection interventions and gender-sensitive COVID-19 recovery policies.

Poverty and informal employment are often regarded as correlated phenomena. Many empirical studies have shown that informal employment has a causal impact on household poverty, mainly through low wages. Yet other studies focus on the reverse causality from poverty to informality, arising from a range of constraints that poverty poses to jobholders. Only recently have empirical researchers tried to study the simultaneous two-way relationship between poverty and informality. However, existing studies have relied upon cross-sectional data and static econometric models.

This chapter takes the next step and studies the dynamics of poverty and informality using longitudinal data. Our empirical analysis is based on a bivariate dynamic random-effect probit model and recent panel data from Argentina. The method used provides a means of assessing the persistence over time of poverty and informal employment at the individual level, while controlling for both observed and unobserved determinants of the two processes. The results show that both poverty and informal employment are highly persistent processes. Moreover, positive spillover effects are found from past poverty on current informal employment and from past informality to current poverty status, corroborating the view that the two processes are also shaped by interrelated dynamics in segmented labor markets.

This paper analyzes changes in property rights, land uses, and culturally based notions of ownership that have emerged following privatization of communal land in a Samburu pastoralist community in Northern Kenya. The research challenges the strict dichotomy between private and collective rights often found in property rights literature, which does not match empirical findings of overlapping and contested rights.

Part of a long-term ethnographic project investigating the process of land privatization and its outcomes, this paper draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted by the author in Samburu County in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Interviews focused on how land is being used post-privatization as well as emerging social norms regulating its use.

Privatization privileges male household heads with powers including rental, sale, and bequeathal of land. However, informal rights to land extend to women and other household members. Exercise of legal rights is frequently limited due to knowledge and resource gaps. New rules regulating land use have emerged, some represent sharp divergences from past practice while others support shared access to land. These changes challenge Samburu cultural notions of individuality, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.

This research illuminates complex changes following legal shifts in property rights and demonstrates the interactions between formal laws and informal social norms and cultural beliefs about land. The result is that privatization does not have easily predictable outcomes as some theories of property would suggest.

Empirical investigation of the effects of legal changes enables fuller understanding of the implications of policy changes that many governments are pursuing privatization with limited understanding of the likely effects.

Despite the general presumption in favor of trade liberalization, the question of how to implement it in a way to ensure equitable income distribution and sustainable poverty alleviation in developing countries is at the core of the current trade debate. We build a macroeconomic framework that integrates both market and non-market activities, while distinguishing male and female workers throughout, in order to evaluate impacts of tariffs elimination on men and women in South Africa. Our study reveals a strong gender bias against women with a decrease in their labor market participation, while men participate more in the market economy. This strong result is due to the fact that female workers are concentrated in contracting sectors that were initially among the protected sectors and that benefit little from the fall in input prices. In contrast, male workers are more concentrated in the expanding export-intensive sectors. Female labor market participation drops particularly for Black African women, as they are more concentrated in contracting sectors. As male labor market participation and real wages increase more than for their female counterparts, their income share increases within the household. Women continue to suffer nonetheless from a heavy time use burden given their increased domestic work with trade liberalization.

This chapter attempts to explicitly integrate the idea of reference group when measuring relative deprivation. It assumes that in assessing his situation in society an individual compares himself with individuals whose environment can be considered as being similar to his. By environment we mean the set of people with a similar set of observable characteristics such as human capital, household attributes, and location. We therefore propose to measure relative deprivation by comparing the actual income of an individual with the one he could have expected on the basis of the level of these characteristics. We then aggregate these individual comparisons by computing an index of “distributional change” that compares, on a non anonymous basis, the distributions of the actual and “expected” incomes. At the difference of other approaches to relative deprivation, our measure takes into account not only the difference between the actual and “expected” individual incomes but also that between the actual and “expected” individual ranks. We applied our approach to Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, using a survey that covered a period of six years (from 2000 to 2005). We then observed that our measure of deprivation is well suited to study wage deprivation across genders and is able to proxy subjective deprivation in living standards reported by survey respondents better than conventional measures of relative deprivation.

This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and at how it participates in shaping the way researchers, teachers and support staff perceive themselves and their experiences. It is based on a multiple case study and combines an intersectional and a socio-clinical approach. The empirical data is constituted by in-depth interviews with women conducted in Ireland and Chile, and includes some observations made in France. A thematic analysis of individual narratives of self-ascribed experiences of being bullied enables to look behind the veil drawn by managerial discourse, thus providing insights into power vectors and power domains contributing to workplace violence. It also shows that workplace bullying may reinforce identification to undervalued social categories. This contribution argues that neoliberal managerial discourse, by encouraging social representations of “neutral” individuals at work, or else celebrating their “diversity,” conceals power relations rooting on different social categories. This process influences one’s perception of one’s experience and its verbalization. At the same time, feeling assigned to one or more of undervalued social category can raise the perception of being bullied or discriminated against. While research has shown that only a minority of incidents of bullying and discrimination are reported within organizations, this contribution suggests that acknowledging the multiplicity and superposition of categories and their influence in shaping power relations could help secure a more collective and caring approach, and thus foster a safer work culture and atmosphere in research organizations.

This paper proposes a generalized approach to the issue of decomposing inequality by population subgroups. This generalization uses the concept of Shapley value decomposition and takes into account the fact that either the between or the within groups inequality may be considered as residual terms, that the population size of the subgroups may have an impact on inequality and finally that there are various ways of ranking the individuals when defining the Gini index of inequality. The paper presents an empirical illustration based on the 1998 Israeli Income Survey where the subgroups distinguished are the male- and female-headed households.

Floods are among the most significant and frequent hazards to affect communities in the downstream part of the Ba River in Western Viti Levu, Fiji Islands. They often leave in their wake displacements and death putting thousands at risk of sliding into poverty. Using the recent 2009 and 2012 floods, we examine how social capital aids in post-disaster response and recovery among residents in five selected villages in the downstream communities of the Ba River. Data were collected from a questionnaire survey administered to 97 households and semi-structured interviews with a further 20 respondents. It is conventionally believed that moving supplies, aid and expertise into flood-affected areas offers the best path to effective response and recovery. By contrast, our results indicate that residents of downstream communities in Ba District are using four approaches to create and deploy social capital among them to facilitate disaster response. The patterns of social capital used for effective response include practices of search and rescue, information, mutual assistance and commercial cooperation. Such strategies help to build resilience at household and community levels and reduce risks of loss of life and costly damage to property. The findings can be used to generate policies concerning the integration of social capital as a component of flood disaster response and recovery mechanisms.