EMPOWERING POOR RURAL WOMEN IN INDIA: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM ANDHRA PRADESH

Even though overall growth in India has recently accelerated, it has largely bypassed rural areas and agriculture; in fact it is agreed that the ratio of rural to urban poverty has increased. As a consequence, some of the marginalized groups in a society that is already characterized by a high level of inequality in opportunities and segregation along lines of, gender, caste, and social status, are widely reckoned to not have benefited from overall growth. To enable women and backwards castes to expand their livelihood opportunities, a vast range of government programs have been initiated and large amounts of resources are being channeled to poor areas. An increasingly popular approach to do so relies on the concept of Community Driven Development (CDD) whereby resources are made available to encourage formation of savings groups at the local level and, once they have attained a certain degree of maturity, the channeling to such groups of funds (either as a credit or a grant) which they can use for small projects aimed to improve their livelihood. This paper uses one of the earliest projects of this type, the Andhra Pradesh (AP) District Initiatives Project, a US $ 250 Mn intervention that was started in 2000, to provide an initial assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the CDD approach. One of the interesting characteristics of the CDD approach is its desire to combine interventions to increase food security and deal with immediate needs with social mobilization to overcome long-standing patterns of discrimination and prejudices and attention to longer-term economic needs. Two interesting aspects of the AP program that greatly facilitate assessment of impact is the fact that only women's groups were eligible and that even in cases where it built on pre-existing group structures, the project aimed to establish second-tier organizations at the village and mandal (county) level which, by pooling the resources of individual groups aimed to significantly expand their ability to respond to shocks. It is therefore possible to compare between women and men in the project area, as well as between pre-existing groups in areas affected by the project and in areas that were not eligible, to assess project impacts. To do so, we rely on a comprehensive set of surveys that included 2,700 households (with separate questionnaires being administered to men and women in the household), 2,200 self help groups, and 200 village organizations in both project and control areas conducted in mid-2004. In addition to the standard issues, the questionnaire elicited retrospective information on most issues so as to be able to compare differences in differences between project and control areas. It also contained an elaborate section on social empowerment, participation in groups, and actual as well as hypothetical borrowing capacity. The issues to be addressed are, first, to what extent the project succeeded in improving the governance structure of the community organizations involved;, second to what extent women have been empowered to overcome social barriers that have traditionally stymied their economic advancement, and finally to what extent the project has led to an increase in levels of income and productivity. We use simple t-tests of differences in differences to assess whether areas or groups (women) targeted by the project have advanced significantly more than others. For such differences to translate into significant improvements for the poor, it is necessary that the program is able to target poorer segments in the overall population or those who are organized in self-help groups. Participation regressions indeed confirm that, by focusing on the poorest areas and by aiming to include poorer parts of the population, the project has been able to significantly expand the range of households organized in self-help groups and to target support for institutional strengthening towards the most needy. Comparison between pre-existing groups in intervention and control areas points towards significantly different rates of improvements in terms of group management and internal controls (e.g. members being fined for non-attendance, internal bookkeeping being of high quality). These, together with the federated structure, appear to have allowed groups in intervention areas to significantly expand the availability of credit to members and to access loans by other financial institutions. Second-tier institutions in self help group federations were able to take on completely new activities (e.g. taking over distribution of subsidized food grains from "fair price shops" which were had often remained out of the reach of the poor) that significantly improved participants' ability to smooth consumption. This is supported by evidence from the household level suggesting that, even though the incidence of shocks was higher for households in treatment areas than outside, households were able to deal with such shocks more easily than they had been able to in the past. The hypothesis that the improvement in access to credit can be attributed to the project is supported by the finding that the unambiguous and significant increase in the amount which women in areas eligible for the project as compared to those that were not, were able to borrow both from the formal and the informal sector is not matched by a commensurate increase in credit availability for men. To the contrary, credit access for men was higher in areas not eligible for the project (marginally significant) as compared to areas that were eligible. The logic of the project to use improved access to resources to empower women and overcome social barriers is corroborated by the fact that the change in the share of women who receive high respect in their family and who were not subject to domestic violence was indeed significantly lower in control than in intervention areas where women also have significantly higher participation in family matters relating to income generating activities, debt and savings, as well as family planning and the number of children. In fact, the improvements in women's participation seem to transcend the realm of the family and extent to the community level: the change in the share of women who always know of or participate in village assemblies, who are aware of other types of community institutions, and who are able to freely interact with government officials and villagers of other caste or religion is significantly higher in intervention than in control villages. While all of this suggests that the project has not only improved access to credit and risk diversification but also significantly increased women's empowerment, these significant effects were, however, not matched by increased beneficiary savings, possibly because the resources generated by productive activities initiated under the project are yet to mature. To explore this, a closer look at the extent to which the project has increased access of the poor to resources and/or enabled them to use these resources more effectively. Even though productivity of resource use is similar between areas eligible and non-eligible for the project, there is clear evidence that the project has helped to significantly expand the share of households who own productive assets. The key challenge to ensure sustainability and replicability of the intervention is thus to match the rather impressive performance in terms of social empowerment with an equally significant transfer of technical skills that would, by facilitating more productive use of such assets, put participants economic basis on a stronger footing. The ability to use the federated structure to provide effective technical assistance and to liaise with line ministries to ensure that services are available to the poor, the feasibility of which has been demonstrated in a number of individual cases, is likely to be a key issue in doing so.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Adjustment Costs, Firm Responses, and Labor Supply Elasticities: Evidence from Danish Tax Records

We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. In this model, micro elasticities are smaller than macro elasticities because they do not account for adjustment costs and firm responses. We present evidence supporting three predictions of the model by analyzing bunching at kinks using the universe of tax records in Denmark. First, larger kinks generate larger taxable income elasticities because they are more likely to overcome search costs. Second, kinks that apply to a larger group of workers generate larger elasticities because they induce changes in hours constraints. Third, firms tailor job offers to match workers.aggregate tax preferences in equilibrium. Calibrating our model to match these empirical findings, we obtain a lower bound on the intensive-margin macro elasticity of 0:34, an order of magnitude larger than the estimates obtained using standard microeconometric methods for wage earners in our data.

Between militant democracy and citizen vigilantism: Using citizens’ assemblies to keep parties democratic

The essential role of parties in democracies makes it important to keep them democratic. This article argues for sortition-based citizens’ assemblies (CAs) organized in and by civil society to formulate democratic standards for political parties to follow, to evaluate them individually and to criticize them publicly if they do not. This is a third and potentially complementary way to keeping parties democratic, placed between militant democracy on the one hand and citizen vigilantism on the other. Militant democracy is challenged by the fact that few democratically problematic parties are ostensibly anti-democratic and therefore likely to fall under the legal criteria for issuing party bans and other legal sanctions. Militant democratic measures are also likely to be ineffective and are vulnerable to abuse. Citizen vigilantism, whereby active democratic citizens take on the responsibility for protecting democracy, deals better with the ambiguous nature of democratically problematic parties but suffers from a lack of democratic authorization and clear standards of critique. While not perfect, the proposed model remedies many of the shortcomings of both approaches. Contributing to an emerging literature on CAs as instruments in the protection of democracy, the article evaluates the model’s normative justifiability, feasibility and likely effectiveness

Consumers’ attitudes and intentions toward consuming functional foods in Norway

Source at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2019.103827. © 2019 The Authors.This study investigates antecedents of consumers’ attitudes and intentions to eating functional foods in a representative sample of Norwegian consumers (N = 810). The theory of planned behavior (TPB), with an extension of self-efficacy and descriptive norms and, as well, hedonic and utilitarian eating values, is used as a conceptual framework. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to test the hypothesized relationships. The findings differed significantly between the basic and extended model, particularly for the perceived behavioral control (PBC) constructs. Perceived control over behavior was insignificantly related to intention and consumption frequency in the basic model and significantly negatively related in the extended model. The inclusion of self-efficacy, conceptualized as confidence in the ability to consume functional foods regularly, proved to be the most important explanatory factor of intention. Descriptive and injunctive norms were both significant and relatively strong predictors of intention. However, injunctive norms lost explanatory power when descriptive norms were included in the structural model. The strong influence of attitude on intention also diminished in the extended model. Utilitarian eating values clearly outperformed hedonic eating values as a basis for explaining consumer attitude toward eating functional foods. Whereas utilitarian eating values were strongly and positively associated with participants’ attitude toward the consumption of functional foods, hedonic eating values were less strongly and negatively related to attitude. Thus, the food industry needs to improve the hedonic value of functional foods to commercially succeed

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Er friheden taget ud af friskolen?

The article investigates the last 15 years’ changes in the Danish law regarding private schools and asks to what extent the ideological and pedagogical freedom of the private schools have become more restricted. It traces the changes back to general concerns with integration of cultural and religious minorities and with the academic quality of schools, the latter in light of the international competitiveness of Danish society. e article nds that the freedom of the schools has become more limited and discusses whether the e orts to limit their freedom go beyond what is legitimate from a liberal democratic point of view. e article nds that it is legitimate for a liberal democratic state to presuppose ability for political autonomy among its citizens, but it is controversial for the state to demand that schools instill speci c values and loyalties into their students.

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