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- Convenors:
-
Edward Webster
(University of the Witwatersrand)
David Francis (University of the Witwatersrand)
Imraan Valodia (University of the Witwatersrand)
- Stream:
- I: Rethinking development and development research
- Location:
- G1
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to identify key questions, rationale and methodology to develop a southern approach to the study of inequality. The panel will draw together researchers from across a range of key southern countries, including South Africa, Brazil, Colombia and India.
Long Abstract:
Wits University is embarking on a collaborative project which aims to conceptualise, understand and address inequality from a southern perspective. Inequality studies are dominated by northern researchers and are informed by the northern context. Our new centre (the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies) is designed to provide a forum for predominantly southern researchers, to develop a specific southern research agenda which seeks both to understand and challenge inequality in South Africa and the global south. While much of the northern research has focused on technical solutions to address inequality, we believe that these solutions will not be politically feasible unless the social and political forces driving high levels of inequality in the south are clearly understood and addressed. Inequality is a global problem, and studying and addressing it in the south will enable us to enter into a dialogue about inequality in other settings. At the centre of our analysis is the concept of power, and how its unequal distribution produces and reproduces inequality. We are also concerned to identify alternative sources of power, policy instruments, and movements that challenge inequality. This panel will bring together researchers from key southern countries which represent the changing geography of economic and political power in the global system. The panel will begin to develop the key questions, rationale and methodology to develop a southern approach to the study of inequality.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
In this paper we will present emerging thinking on developing a southern approach to inequality which is informed by the study of inequality in South Africa. Our approach is underpinned by a focus on interdisciplinarity, power, and south-south research collaboration.
Paper long abstract:
Wits University has embarked on a multi-partner research and policy project focusing on understanding and addressing inequality, and building a collaborative southern institution to strengthen and sustain this work. Our starting premise is that while technical solutions to addressing inequality are very important, they will not be politically feasible unless the social and political forces driving high levels of inequality in South Africa are clearly understood and addressed. However, inequality is a global problem, and studying and addressing it in South Africa will also enable us to enter into a dialogue about inequality in other settings, particularly in the rest of the global south. The global south is emerging at the forefront in the use of socio-economic rights and the law to achieve social change. The changing geography of economic and political power in the world system is in fact closely related to the emergence of a new geography of global inequality in which more than 70 percent of the world's poor now live in middle-income countries. And crucially, widening inequalities between and within countries is coupled with the persistence of poverty.
The objective of our study is a comprehensive and broadly shared understanding of how inequality is produced and reproduced in South Africa and in comparable countries in the global south, and the identification of the sources of power that can address and overcome this inequality.
Paper short abstract:
This paper documents the evolution of income inequality in Brazil since 1990´s, and discusses the immediate determinants of the evolution of the Brazilian inequality. Moreover, this paper reviews the social policies implemented in Brazil during this period.
Paper long abstract:
The Brazilian per capita family income distribution changed dramatically particularly since 1990´s. This period witnessed both an increase in income as well as a reduction in inequality. This paper documents the evolution of income inequality in Brazil, and discusses the immediate determinants of the evolution of the Brazilian inequality by decomposing the changes in per capita family income distribution into its different components. Moreover, this paper reviews the social policies implemented in Brazil during this period that may be associated with the documented changes. This paper will also attempt to discuss how the various groups in the Brazilian society have benefited from the changes in income inequality and policies implemented.
Paper short abstract:
This paper compares the pattern of growth and inequality in Brazil and India since the mid 20th century. It considers a variety of economic, social and political institutions and forces, and their impact on labour market inequalities and other aspects of social and economic differentiation.
Paper long abstract:
When considering the long-term pattern of growth and inequality, Brazil and India seem in some ways to be mirror images of each other. In Brazil growth was high in the decades before 1980 and inequality rose, peaking at the end of the 1980s and then declining until the recent crisis. By 2011 it was almost back to the level of 1960. In India, inequality fell from the 1950s to the 1970s, bottomed out and then did not change much for 20 years. But as growth accelerated from the end of the 1990s, inequality started to rise, so that in 2012 it was higher than in the 1950s, and in some respects higher than in Brazil.
These patterns reflect a variety of economic, social and political forces, which need to be examined in terms of both historical processes and structural inequalities in access to resources and labour markets. This presentation adopts a "Regulation School" approach to the institutional configuration of each country in order to interpret these outcomes, and shows how the comparison of the two cases helps to identify and analyse both similarities and differences between them.
Paper short abstract:
We will examine the evolution of income inequality and precariousness in Brazil and Mexico during the period 2005-2016
Paper long abstract:
In a series of recent texts we have worked on the impact that job precariousness has on income inequality, both at the national and subnational level in Brazil, Ecuador an México. The guiding idea is that the expansion (or contraction) of precarious work depends on the existence of a cumulative circular causation process (in other words a double feedback mechanism) that links inequality to job precariousness: the persistence of precarious work leads to increasing inequality, as one of the main characteristics of the former is the payment of low wages; on the other hand, increasing wage inequality negatively affects labor bargaining power, facilitating the imposition of precarious work relations upon the workforce.
We have tested this mechanism, by comparing the evolution of a precariousness index, based Jerry Rodgers´s original definition of precariousness., and different measures of inequality.
Our paper will present an expanded discussion of the links between labor bargaining power, precariousness and inequality. Then we will proceed to discuss the construction of a precariousness index that can be estimated with existing data in Latin American countries and will present the political economic logic behind its construction. In sequence, we will discuss the evolution of income inequality, precariousness and bargaining power in Brazil and México from 2005 to 2016
Paper short abstract:
Market intervention transfers resource to women but decision making is vested in men given social structures. Reservation in local government improves status of women in social structures. We address gender equality through market intervention in dairy and spillover effects of political reservation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to understand conditions under which access to market type development interventions produce significant impacts on women empowerment. Markets provide economic resources to women; however its ability to influence women's participation in household and village level decisions remains unclear. While market intervention such as dairy farming may formally transfer resources to women, decision making powers are vested with male members of the household due to the presence of ex-ante social structures and norms. This remains a source of gender inequality in India. Along with the distributive development policies that benefit women economically, political reservation in local government is one statutory effort to improve the condition of women in the existing social structure.
We conjecture that market interventions can produce two types of empowerment impacts for women inside the rural households: (a) it produces direct impact by making women control economic resources, and (b) these interventions can produce amplified empowerment impacts by taking benefit of the spillover effects of women reservations in local government. We, therefore, try to test three hypotheses: 1) market access interventions have positive effects on women empowerment, 2) reservations for women in local government bodies have amplified effect of the intervention on women empowerment, and 3) spillover effect of the intervention through reservations on women empowerment is larger than the direct intervention effects. We use data collected from six Indian states on the impact of implementation of the National Dairy Plan, Phase I (NDP-I) to test these hypotheses.
Paper short abstract:
The paper has the following starting point: ending with the 'latifundio' is no longer at the center of the debate in Colombia. The left, including demobilized FARC (as well the right) are now bargaining the adjudication, and the terms of accretion, of vacant, publicly owned land.
Paper long abstract:
The theme that greatly worries the economic elite in Colombia is not expropriation, they are confident they have prevented this threat. Both the right and the left are now obsessed with the distribution of publicly owned land.
Relocating the debate from demanding the break up of property concentration to the legal structures that regulate barren land adjudication and accumulation, requires a different set of tools.
Limiting public policy choices to the distribution of vacant land demands an appraisal and description of the political choices this produces; the legislative and regulatory architecture that are a consequence of this conservative axis as well as the winners and losers of these choices.
The paper has two goals. First, and as in previous research, my objective is to critique the superficial and thin interpretation that technocrats have of property. As a result of the deep influence that Hernando De Soto's work on property formalization has had, technocrats have been demanding the formalization of barren land as essential to post-conflict property regulation. Their starting point is a classic, individualistic, formalistic understanding of property. On the other side of the political spectrum, the left and center left have been aiming at enforcing existing limits over the amount of publicly owned land that can be assigned and opposing the legalization of accumulated vacant land.
Second, my goal is to narrate transition differently. Less as a total breaking point with the past and more as a product of existing political, legal and regulatory structures.