Turning on the townships: a study of discourses of financial inclusion in South Africa

thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Johannesburg, August 2015Financial inclusion is promoted as an important economic development program to solve the lack of access to formal financial services for billions of people around the world. The concept “financial inclusion” has entered mainstream business and development discourses as an all-encompassing term for innovation in financial services for the poor. South African policymakers and financial service providers have embraced this approach to address some of the country’s political, social and economic imbalances. A number of examples are held up as successes of financial inclusion such as India’s “Jan Dhan Yojana” initiative. The program, launched in August 2014, signed up 75 million people to new bank accounts in under three months. South African policymakers and financial service providers have also embraced financial inclusion to address the country’s political, social and economic imbalances. Several consequences challenge this optimistic view. The first issue is the high level of dormancy across various services. India’s account has up to 75% dormancy, much like South Africa’s Mzansi account launched expressly for financial inclusion in 2005. It was abandoned by 2012 due to lack of use. The second major issue is adverse inclusion that arises after people are “financially included” and they end up worse off than before. In August 2014 African Bank, the largest lender to low-income individuals in South Africa, failed because it had issued loans to customers who eventually could not afford to repay them. Despite these issues, the focus of financial inclusion remains on targets of density, penetration and geographic access as measured in the World Bank’s Findex, a global financial inclusion database. Practitioners and researchers tend to be concerned with how people as borrowers, savers, bank account users and mobile phone users access and use financial services. Yet an unexplored issue is how these subject positions came to be, how they are maintained and the specific rationalities that accompany them. Following Foucault, this study is an attempt to understand how the concept of financial inclusion has functioned in our society to create human beings as subjects. This is a seven-year genealogical research project of South Africa’s national financial inclusion effort. Over this period, three discourse clusters were identified and analysed. The first cluster consists of 12 texts produced by a range of public, private and civil society institutions. The second cluster of academic discourses on financial inclusion consists of 3 83 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2009 and 2013. The third cluster is a collection of texts from local sources in two townships produced by those individuals who are often the subjects in the other discourse clusters. The analysis reveals dominant modes of objectification in each cluster and the synthesis enables the search for evidence of a regime of truth on financial inclusion. Evidence indicates that dominant discourses of financial inclusion, irrespective of origin, limit subjects to existing practices of money management. Therefore, despite claims of the sweeping changes that can result from financial inclusion, this study argues that this form of development discourse perpetuates existing concentrations of wealth. Counter-narratives that link financial inclusion and asset building offer an important break in this dominanceMT201

Citizens’ assemblies provide an institutional foothold for republican political practices

Calls for a UK citizens convention to assess and rethink our current political and democratic arrangements have been frequently heard in the wake of the referendum on Scottish independence, held last autumn. John Grant argues that these conventions can be useful in providing an institutional foothold for republican ideas, which have struggled to find a policy outlet despite an intellectual renaissance over the last 30 years or so

Turning on the township : financial inclusion in South Africa

PURPOSE : The purpose of this paper is to explore practitioner and academic conceptualisations about what drives individuals (who are the target of financial inclusion efforts) to adopt and use financial services. It compares this with individual’s personal subjectivities to understand how the similarities and differences might contribute to problems in financial inclusion efforts. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH : To uncover such conceptualisations, a Foucauldian discourse analysis of three texts is conducted. FINDINGS : The analysis uncovers the ways in which financial subjects are produced. Important points of discontinuity are evident between texts, pointing to potential failures within financial inclusion constructs. Distilling aspects of continuity between texts shows up three kinds of subjects produced predicated on the site of economic engagement as owners of bodies, tangible property and intangible property. These subjects are shown to all share concerns with income and expense management. The analysis shows that subject positions and strategic actions (including the use of financial service providers) are mutually reinforcing, and that therefore financial subjects will engage only to the extent that the product or service enacts their subject position. With the financial subject as the starting point, it is possible to understand the use or rejection of particular financial products and services. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS : Asset building is proposed as a field of activity not currently considered part of mainstream financial inclusion, questioning the terms on which individuals are to be financially “included”. ORIGINALITY/VALUE : Approximately 2 billion people globally, and 66 per cent of adults in sub-Saharan Africa, are excluded from the formal financial system. While financial inclusion is considered beneficial, many projects face significant challenges. This suggests insufficient understanding of what drives individuals to adopt and use financial services. This paper makes a contribution by exploring the gap between academics, practitioners and individuals using a method that has not previously been applied in this field, and uncovering differences in understanding that have not previously been explored. The insights into financial inclusion in provided in this paper are original in the literature.http://www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/ebrhj2019Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS

The time resolution of the St. Petersburg paradox

A resolution of the St. Petersburg paradox is presented. In contrast to the standard resolution, utility is not required. Instead, the time-average performance of the lottery is computed. The final result can be phrased mathematically identically to Daniel Bernoulli's resolution, which uses logarithmic utility, but is derived using a conceptually different argument. The advantage of the time resolution is the elimination of arbitrary utility functions.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur

The industrious revolution, the industriousness discourse, and the development of modern economies

ABSTRACTThe idea of industriousness has been an ever-recurring issue since Max Weber launched it as a putative explanation of the advent of economic modernity. The notion of ‘industrious revolution’ has provoked a renewed flourishing of publications focusing on this issue. Although most historians agree on the emergence of industriousness in seventeenth-century Europe, there is no consensus regarding the chronology, hence the real causes, of this mental and discursive shift. This article emphasizes the problematic role played by literary evidences in these social and cultural models of diffusion of new consumer values and desires. It then establishes the timing of the emergence of the ‘industriousness discourse’ using an original approach to diffusion based both on the quantitative analysis of very large corpora and a close reading of seventeenth-century economic pamphlets and educational literature. It concludes first that there was not one but several competing discourses on industriousness. It then identifies two crucial hinges which closely match the chronology proposed by Allen and Muldrew, but refutes that championed by de Vries and McCloskey. The industrious revolution as described by these authors would have happened both too late to fit its intellectual roots and too early to signal the beginning of a ‘consumer revolution’.This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research CouncilThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X1300052

Living standards and plague in London, 1560–1665

This article uses individual records of 930,000 burials and 630,000 baptisms to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of birth and death in London from 1560 to 1665, a period dominated by recurrent plague. The plagues of 1563, 1603, 1625, and 1665 appear of roughly equal magnitude, with deaths running at five to six times their usual rate, but the impact on wealthier central parishes falls markedly through time. Tracking the weekly spread of plague, we find no evidence that plague emerged first in the docks, and in many cases elevated mortality emerges first in the poor northern suburbs. Looking at the seasonal pattern of mortality, we find that the characteristic autumn spike associated with plague continued into the early 1700s. Natural increase improved as smaller crises disappeared after 1590, but fewer than half of those born survived childhood

A chronology of global air quality

Air pollution has been recognized as a threat to human health since the time of Hippocrates, ca 400 BC. Successive written accounts of air pollution occur in different countries through the following two millennia until measurements, from the eighteenth century onwards, show the growing scale of poor air quality in urban centres and close to industry, and the chemical characteristics of the gases and particulate matter. The industrial revolution accelerated both the magnitude of emissions of the primary pollutants and the geographical spread of contributing countries as highly polluted cities became the defining issue, culminating with the great smog of London in 1952. Europe and North America dominated emissions and suffered the majority of adverse effects until the latter decades of the twentieth century, by which time the transboundary issues of acid rain, forest decline and ground-level ozone became the main environmental and political air quality issues. As controls on emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides (SO2 and NOx) began to take effect in Europe and North America, emissions in East and South Asia grew strongly and dominated global emissions by the early years of the twenty-first century. The effects of air quality on human health had also returned to the top of the priorities by 2000 as new epidemiological evidence emerged. By this time, extensive networks of surface measurements and satellite remote sensing provided global measurements of both primary and secondary pollutants. Global emissions of SO2 and NOx peaked, respectively, in ca 1990 and 2018 and have since declined to 2020 as a result of widespread emission controls. By contrast, with a lack of actions to abate ammonia, global emissions have continued to grow

Phonetic and Phonological Posterior Search Space Hashing Exploiting Class-Specific Sparsity Structures

This paper shows that exemplar-based speech processing using class-conditional posterior probabilities admits a highly effective search strategy relying on posteriors' intrinsic sparsity structures. The posterior probabilities are estimated for phonetic and phonological classes using deep neural network (DNN) computational framework. Exploiting the class-specific sparsity leads to a simple quantized posterior hashing procedure to reduce the search space of posterior exemplars. To that end, small number of quantized posteriors are regarded as representatives of the posterior space and used as hash keys to index subsets of neighboring exemplars. The $k$ nearest neighbor ($k$NN) method is applied for posterior based classification problems. The phonetic posterior probabilities are used as exemplars for phonetic classification whereas the phonological posteriors are used as exemplars for automatic prosodic event detection. Experimental results demonstrate that posterior hashing improves the efficiency of $k$NN classification drastically. This work encourages the use of posteriors as discriminative exemplars appropriate for large scale speech classification tasks