120,207 research outputs found

    Household Access to Microcredit and Children's Food Security in Rural Malawi: A Gender Perspective

    Get PDF
    Using data from the 1995 Malawi Financial Markets and Food Security Survey, this study seeks to discover if women's relative control over household resources or intra-household bargaining power in rural Malawi, gauged by their access to microcredit, plays a role in children's food security, measured by anthropometric nutritional Z-scores. Access to microcredit is assessed in a novel way as self-reported credit limits at microcredit organizations. Since credit limits, that is, the maximum sums that might be borrowed, hinge upon supply-side factors such as the availability of credit programs and the financial resources of lenders, it is plausible they are more exogenous than demand driven loan uptake or participation in microcredit organizations, the common ways of gauging access to microcredit. It is indicated that whereas the access to microcredit of adult female household members improves 0–6 year old girls', though not boys', long-term nutrition as measured by height-for-age, the access to microcredit of male members has no such salutary effect on either girls' or boys' nutritional status. This may be interpreted as evidence of a positive relation between women's relative control over household resources and young girls' food security. That women's access to microcredit improves young girls' long-term nutrition may be explained in part by the subsidiary finding that it raises household expenditure on food.intra-household distribution, bargaining, microcredit, gender, Malawi

    The Politics of Democratizing Finance: A Radical View

    Get PDF
    How can finance be durably democratized? In the centers of financial power in both the United States and the United Kingdom, proposals now circulate to give workers and the public more say over how flows of credit are allocated. This article examines five democratization proposals: credit union franchises, public investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, inclusive ownership funds, and bank nationalization. It considers how these plans might activate worker and public engagement in decision making about finance by focusing on three modes of public participation: representative democracy, direct democracy, and deliberative minipublics. It then considers the degree to which democratization plans might be resilient to de-democratization threats from business. It argues that of the five, bank nationalization goes furthest in guarding against de-democratization threats but is still pocked with pitfalls if it relies solely on representative democracy. It argues that two criteria appear necessary for democratically durable alternatives: the active direct participation of workers and citizens and the weakening of businesses’ capacity for democratic retrenchment. finance, democracy, labor, credit, business powe

    Formal finance and trade credit during China's transition

    Get PDF
    Using a large panel dataset of Chinese industrial firms, the authors examine the determinants of access to loans from formal financial intermediaries and extension of trade credit. Poorly performing state-owned enterprises were more likely to redistribute credit to firms with less privileged access to loans through trade credit, a pattern consistent with some of the extension of trade credit being involuntary. By contrast, profitable private domestic firms were more likely to extend trade credit than unprofitable ones. Trade credit likely provided a substitute for loans for these private firms'customers that were shut out of formal credit markets. As biases in lending became less severe, the amount of trade credit extended by private firms declined.Investment and Investment Climate,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Financial Intermediation

    Stay by thy neighbor? Social organization determines the efficiency of biodiversity markets with spatial incentives

    Full text link
    Market-based conservation instruments, such as payments, auctions or tradable permits, are environmental policies that create financial incentives for landowners to engage in voluntary conservation on their land. But what if ecological processes operate across property boundaries and land use decisions on one property influence ecosystem functions on neighboring sites? This paper examines how to account for such spatial externalities when designing market-based conservation instruments. We use an agent-based model to analyze different spatial metrics and their implications on land use decisions in a dynamic cost environment. The model contains a number of alternative submodels which differ in incentive design and social interactions of agents, the latter including coordinating as well as cooperating behavior of agents. We find that incentive design and social interactions have a strong influence on the spatial allocation and the costs of the conservation market.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

    Access and allocation in global biodiversity governance: a review

    Get PDF
    Access and allocation is one of the five analytical themes of the science plan of the Earth System Governance (ESG) project. Concerns over access and allocation are at the core of struggles and conflicts brought about by the often ineluctable trade-offs related to biodiversity conservation and the global, national and local governance systems that aim to contribute to global biodiversity conservation. Access and benefit-sharing mechanisms, integrated conservation and development projects, payments for ecosystem services or community conservation programmes have all tried balancing environmental objectives with concerns for the allocation of natural resources and associated rights within society, and for access to basic human needs. As a contribution to this special issue on access and allocation, this paper aims to contribute to the analysis of the relevance of questions of access and allocation to ESG by providing an in-depth review of the literature on access and allocation in biodiversity conservation at different scales. We describe how the concepts of access and allocation have been used and conceptualized in the literature produced between 2008 and 2018, and we discuss the two key issues which dominate the literature (1) benefit-sharing; and (2) the role of local institutions. By drawing on the trends and evidence from the literature, we consider the lessons for the next generation of ESG scholars and draw out some key policy implications to be included in the debates on the post-2020 strategic plan for biodiversity

    Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal life styles in urban populations

    Full text link
    Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types in shopping patterns. In the latter, the uneven distribution of transaction types is bound with the temporal sequences of purchases of individual choices. In this work, we define a framework using a text compression technique on the sequences of credit card purchases to detect ubiquitous patterns of collective behavior. Clustering the consumers by their similarity in purchases sequences, we detect five consumer groups. Remarkably, post checking, individuals in each group are also similar in their age, total expenditure, gender, and the diversity of their social and mobility networks extracted by their mobile phone records. By properly deconstructing transaction data with Zipf-like distributions, this method uncovers sets of significant sequences that reveal insights on collective human behavior.Comment: 30 pages, 26 figure

    Dowry and Intrahousehold Bargaining: Evidence from China

    Full text link
    This paper analyzes the relationship between a woman’s intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage. Simultaneity problems common to the literature are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position. Omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in the year preceding marriage and sibling sex composition as instruments for dowry. Instrumented dowry positively impacts several measures of a wife’s welfare, including time allocation, household purchases, and the wife’s decision-making authority, thereby offering strong evidence to support collective models of the household.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39994/3/wp608.pd

    A review of gender and sustainable land management: Implications for research and development

    Get PDF

    A reconstructive critique of IPE and GPE from a critical scientific realist perspective: An alternative Keynesian-Kaleckian approach

    Get PDF
    This paper offers, first, a critique of the relative lack of economic theory in ‘British’ Global Political Economy and then use of neoclassical rational choice theory in American mainstream IPE from the perspective of critical scientific realism. Keynesian economic theories provide perhaps the most obvious alternative. Keynes’ General Theory has been followed by many, forming also the basis of Minsky’s long ignored but now, after the 2008-9 crisis, all of a sudden famous explorations on the mechanisms of financial markets. While a major leap forward, we argue that these theories are historically and conceptually limited. Keynes’ critique of neoclassical economic theory and his alternative theories of particularly the effective demand and of money and credit can be strengthened by following also a neo-Kaleckian approach which avoids some of the inconsistencies of neo-Keynesianism. We indicate where further conceptual work is required and provide several illustrations from the neo-Kaleckian and neo-Keynesian theory to suggest a partial agenda of further scientific work including the explanation of unnecessary and undesired global fluctuations, tendencies and crises and possible collective responses to them. We also suggest the possibility of going beyond Keynes and Kalecki in terms of a general field theory of global political economy that can accommodate the deep normative and institutional underpinnings of the historically evolving planetary political economy
    corecore