Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the impact of the Child Support Grant (CSG) implemented in South Africa on the labor supply of the parents of beneficiary children. The aim is to assess whether the program improved or lessened gender inequality in the labor market. Using data from a national panel survey and applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that exploits an expansion in eligibility due to a discontinuous change in age eligibility, the results show that the CSG had a negative effect on the probability of parents of beneficiary children being employed and mixed effects on the participation in the labor force, with substantial heterogeneity by gender and by other individual and household characteristics. Overall, the evaluation suggests that the program provided support to members of vulnerable households in coping with the constraints of the South African labor market, but it did not reshape existing gender inequalities.     

Cash transfer programs and agricultural production: the case of Malawi

Cash transfer programs are increasingly utilized to combat poverty and hunger while building the human capital of future generations; however, they have been faulted by some for failing to build the productive capacity of current generations. This article analyzes the impact of the Malawi Social Cash Transfer Scheme on agricultural production. The results show strong increases in ownership of productive agricultural assets, in time devoted to household farms, and in food types consumed from own production, coupled with a sharp decrease in ganyu labor, which is often used as a coping mechanism once food stores have been depleted. These results are most likely achieved by helping farmers overcome credit and liquidity constraints. This research shows that cash transfer programs can help the capacity of extremely poor farm households to expand agriculture production even if the goal of the program is focusing on other dimensions of poverty.     

Repositioning Global Staff Transfers: A Learning Perspective

In this article, we challenge the prevailing view that global staff transfers are a necessary cost of doing business globally by contending that such deployment is integral to successful strategic implementation. We use three scenarios—learning from failure, failure to learn, and lost opportunities—to illustrate how awareness of the consequences of decisions related to international staffing can facilitate their efficacy. Learning awareness therefore can lead to improved policies and outcomes for the management of global staff transfers and demonstrate the value HRM brings to the implementation process. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Trajectories of social protection in Africa

Social protection in contemporary Africa is the product of several strands of social policy, from European social security systems to humanitarian relief interventions. Contributory social security mechanisms such as unemployment insurance and pensions were imported to Africa during the colonial period, but cover only a minority of formally employed workers. Food aid alleviates hunger but does not resolve problems of chronic food insecurity. Cash transfers are being promoted as an alternative to food aid, but have been criticised for being ineffective against price inflation and underwriting neoliberal economic policies. Some programmes link social transfers to public works employment and microfinance, with the aim of ‘graduating’ participants off social protection. This article argues instead for a ‘social contract’ approach – recognising the right to social protection, empowering passive beneficiaries to become entitled claimants, and introducing social audits to hold duty-bearers accountable for effective and equitable delivery of citizen-driven social protection policies.     

The poverty of solidarity: the size and structure of informal income smoothing among worker households in Helsinki, 1928

Abstract

Informal income smoothing by households before the post-Second World War expansion in public welfare has gained attention in the history of poverty and social insurance. Little direct empirical evidence has been available. Finnish household budgets from 1928 with intra-year panel data on informal transactions enable analysis of the use of savings, loans and informal assistance to counter income variation by worker families in Helsinki. Income shares of transfers were small compared with labour-based methods of supplementing the earnings of the surveyed male breadwinner families. Within the year, however, the combined use of assistance, credit, and savings accounts compensated on average 36% of income fluctuations, while means such as added workers or taking in lodgers appeared ineffective on the short run. Informal assistance mattered for the poorest households, but provided inferior coverage compared with that attained through credit and savings by more affluent workers. Income inequality was therefore replicated as risk-management inequality.     

Welfare distribution of collective in-kind transfers in education: an application to the extended schools programme

In this study, we employ the distributional characteristics approach to analyse the welfare distribution of the Extended Schools Programme, a social programme that fights inequality in Northern Ireland’s public schools. Our main result is that increasing funding to schools as their size increases penalizes the most deprived students. This is because the school size, although related to the educational supply, does not reflect the distribution of deprivation within schools. Thus, although in the Northern Irish context the largest welfare gains are possible if funds are redistributed among middle-size schools, our general result indicates an excessive support of small-size schools at the expenses of large-size schools.     

改革转移支付制度:基于公共服务均等化的分析

我国分税制改革以来,转移支付制度发挥了其应有的作用,但转移支付制度需要进一步改革。基于公共服务均等化要求,应强化我国转移支付地区间横向均衡功能,同时转移支付支付制度改革应作为规范政府间财政关系改革整体中的一个部分协调进行;应依据性质对转移支付归类,一类为用于解决纵向和横向不均衡问题的均衡性转移支付,另一类为解决外溢性等问题的专项转移支付。     

Accounting for the Changing Role of Family Income in Determining College Entry

In this paper, I analyze the determinants of college enrolment and the changes in these determinants over time. I propose a quantitative life‐cycle model with college enrolment. Altruistic parents provide financial support to their children. Using counterfactual experiments, I find that 24 percent of all households are financially constrained in their college decision. Constraints become more severe over time. I show that my model is consistent with a narrow college enrolment gap between students from rich and poor families, as previously reported in the empirical literature. The estimation of enrolment gaps is a popular reduced‐form approach for measuring the fraction of constrained households. My results suggest that these reduced‐form estimates are misleading, and that a structural model of parental transfers is needed to correctly identify constrained households. Further, I show that parental transfers are an important driver behind the changing role of family income as a determinant of college entry, a fact that is well documented for the US economy.     

Intergenerational Transfers and Asset Inequality in Japan: Empirical Evidence from New Survey Data

This paper quantitatively examines the impact of intergenerational transfers on asset inequality among Japanese households. We estimate an intergenerational asset transfer function with various control variables, using a unique micro dataset taken from a survey conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute, Cabinet Office. Employing three different models, a Tobit model, an interval regression model and an ordered probit model, to ensure that our results are independent of the specific econometric approach used, we investigate whether asset transfers received are correlated with households’ financial strength. We find that higher income households are likely to receive larger asset transfers. However, the contribution of intergenerational transfers to asset inequality appears to be small.