Search results

This paper examines William Stanley Jevons’s approach to human “improvement” in comparison with that of Carl Menger. In Jevons’s view, people are relatively static when left to their own devices. Thus, to “attack” the “citadel of poverty” they must be improved by those who know what is “best” for them. Menger’s view of people as planners, by contrast, is one in which people are capable of improving themselves. Jevons was a social reformer who placed great faith in education, and painful training and instruction, broadly defined, as key mechanisms of reform. Less frequently acknowledged but no less important, Menger also foresaw “the improvement of mankind” from within, as consumers came to better understand how best to attain their wants and needs over time.

Sterilization is endorsed as a method of family planning by international governmental organizations; abortion is not. Focusing on policy development for these two issues in a single country, Peru, we ask how power and inequality operate under conditions of global consensus or dissensus. The case of sterilization unfolded the way many previous research studies would predict, with Peruvian state actions corresponding to a global diffusion process. We find that global consensus provided cover for top-down actions that violated the human rights of indigenous women in the country, who were predominantly poor, non-Spanish speakers, and residents of the mountainous, sparsely populated parts of the country. With respect to abortion in Peru, in the absence of global consensus, the state resisted calls for change, advocacy networks have worked at cross-purposes, and a powerful local actor, the Catholic Church, has effectively blocked liberalization efforts. As with sterilization, however, marginalized indigenous women and their interests were rendered invisible.

Sterilisation in India (and globally) has a contentious and deeply politicised history. Despite this troubling legacy, India continues to rely on female sterilisation as the main form of contraception and family planning. Abortion, which has been legal under broad grounds since 1971, intersects with sterilisation at different points over women's reproductive lifecourse. Drawing on three case studies exploring women's abortion trajectories in Karnataka, India (2017), this chapter examines sterilisation as a reproductive technology (RT) in women's abortion narratives. These include experiences of failed sterilisation necessitating abortion, as well as narratives around pre- and post-abortion counselling with sterilisation conditionalities. Women report healthcare workers shaming or scolding them for not being sterilised after their last pregnancy – demonstrating the prominence of sterilisation as an enforced social norm using ‘health’ frames. Using reproductive justice (RJ) as a lens, I analyse how sterilisation interacts with abortion and the narratives of shame and stigma that surround the two technologies and make visible the ways in which it results in the denial and restriction of women's reproductive freedoms.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the budget of the Indian family planning programme from a human rights perspective. Family planning services play an important role in the realisation of the reproductive rights of women. In India, the family planning programme is one of the largest in the world with thousands of patients, mostly women, accessing services every year. Although the Indian legal system guarantees the right to health, Indian women from marginalised sections of society still battle inadequate services and the absence of health care that respects their right to reproductive autonomy and choice. Therefore, the question is: in the presence of a strong legal framework, what are the factors that contribute to this phenomenon?

The authors have gathered data from the project implementation plans at the state level comparing year-wise expenditure for family planning against overall expenditure for reproductive, maternal and child health expenditure. The data are then compared to the number of women using sterilisation to suggest a relationship between both. Finally, the article relies on desk research to review scholarship on the Indian family planning programme and applicable human rights obligations.

The paper finds that social-economic rights such as the right to health are applicable to government spending and budgeting. It also finds current spending in the NHM is insufficient to guarantee women’s reproductive rights as the vast majority of resources are spend on sterilisation, thus limiting women’s ability to choose the number and spacing of children.

The data used in this research bears one limitation: the propensity of the government to change the guidelines as to how States should present their budgets in the project implementation plans. The authors have adjusted the data so that it remains comparable. However, the adjustment was not possible for all expenditure data, which is why the current study is limited to the family planning programme alone.

The paper argues that to be human rights compliant, health budgets of the NHM need to be geared towards the specific needs of women in terms of family planning. Finally, the article briefly outlines the role played by human rights and human rights litigation in impacting government budgets.

India’s family planning programme has been examined from a performance and medical standpoint, focussing on medical indicators such as total fertility rate, unmet needs for family planning, amongst others. Academic scholarship has investigated through statistical analysis patterns of contraceptive use and contraceptive mix. What is absent, however, is an assessment of the programme from a right-based perspective by looking at the human rights obligations of India and their normative implications for the Indian family programme.

The objective of this study is to address this central question: “What role do ICTs play in reducing poverty?”

First, in this study, we defined poverty in terms of its roots within health, economic development and education. Then, we conducted a systematic review of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) literature. From our analysis, we proposed a series of subsidiary questions and in-depth answers about the impact of ICTs on alleviating health-related, economic and educational causes of poverty.

This study observed positive effects of ICTs on healthcare, economic and educational dynamics and concluded that the development of more advanced infrastructure and greater access to such technology can amplify that impact.

This article explains how applications of ICT across sectors can substantially enhance quality of life and give people an opportunity to take control of their health-related, economic and educational futures. This study uniquely affords an integrative analysis of research and new thought about how to integrate key ICTs for more effective initiatives and investments to reduce poverty.

In the “What’s Hot in 2019: Expanded and Interconnected Notions of Literacy” survey (Cassidy, Grote-Garcia, & Ortlieb, 2019), Early Literacy was identified as a “very hot” topic. This chapter addresses how literacy practices in homes and in schools contribute to early literacy achievement; neighborhood realities are acknowledged. A brief list of expectations for early literacy learners is discussed, and competencies not always found in standards lists are described. Examples of current community activism efforts are noted, and there is a call for literacy academics to speak out against inequities in literacy learning.

Previous literature has clearly demonstrated the need for sound government policies or “institutions” to promote and support entrepreneurship in a country. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of one such institution – political stability – in boosting entrepreneurial endeavors. A politically stable nation will have lower risk and transaction/contracting costs, and higher levels of government transparency, predictability, and accountability. Thus, the paper should expect that with greater political stability there should be a greater degree of entrepreneurial activity.

Using dynamic panel estimators (System GMM estimators) and considering multiple proxies of political risk, our results confirm this hypothesis. Such estimators handle challenges associated with panel data efficiently.

The paper's results show that greater political stability for a country does indeed lead to an increased rate of entrepreneurship and wealth creation.

Entrepreneurship is critical to the process of economic growth and development. To prosper, countries must unleash the creative talents of their citizens through the decentralized process of formal private sector entrepreneurship. New legal businesses create jobs, opportunities, wealth, and goods and services that make a nation grow. Sadly in many nations, this process is stifled and poverty is the result. While previous research has examined which types of specific policies matter for promoting entrepreneurship, the paper considers the different question of how the stability of political institutions impacts the rate of entrepreneurship.

‘The children we are dealing with, they are so damaged – their lives are so damaged – they are beyond repair!’ The Clinical Psychologist who said this¹ went on to talk about a cluster of children with whom she had worked, children all from the same community, who had Speech & Language Disorder (S&LD), or (and sometimes both) Attention Deficit & Hyperactivity Disorder (S&LD/ADHD).² What is remarkable about that therapist's statement, made casually, and at the same time a statement by a professional, is the insight expressed in the clause, amplified by the parentheses surrounding it and by and the stress on the word, ‘their lives are so damaged’, that these children's speech and language and related cognitive difficulties are not to be understood psychologically, at the level of the inner life of the individual child, but rather in a broader, holistic sociological context – ‘their lives’ as a whole. In other words that the speech and language disorders of children are to be grasped and understood by use of Mills’ (1959) ‘sociological imagination’ whereby we can come to see and to understand the recursive interrelationship between a person's personal biography, their private troubles of milieu, and the broader historical and public issues of social structure, only by comprehending both together.

The Old City of Aleppo, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site, a living town of 110,000 inhabitants residing in thousands of historical courtyard houses and an important commercial centre is now the subject of an internationally recognized rehabilitation scheme. This paper describes the history of this project and identifies a series of lessons to be learnt about the complex process of rehabilitation in a living historic environment.