Spousal Wealth and Fathers’ Involvement in Childcare in Uganda

ABSTRACT

The redistribution of household work is considered essential for effectively empowering women. This study examines the extent to which fathers’ evaluation of their wealth in relation to their wives’ influences fathers’ willingness to participate in childcare, a domain traditionally gender ascribed to wives. Data were gathered from a mothers’ survey and a fathers’ survey, each with a sample of 200, conducted in a rural and an urban district in Uganda in 2008. The study compares mean scores for perception and practice indices across three wealth categories: “wife is wealthier than husband,” “husband is wealthier than wife,” and “shared or equal wealth.” Data show that fathers are more likely to engage in childcare when husbands and wives share or have equal wealth than when there are wealth differences between spouses. The results suggest that policy should focus on raising women's economic endowment as well as public education that encourages progressive perceptions of gender roles.     

Do young women trade jobs for marriage? A skeptical view

This paper takes a skeptical view of the theory that the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation from 1985 to 1990 can be explained by the fact that there are fewer women now in their early twenties than there are men in their late twenties so that women currently have more bargaining power in the marriage market than men do.The paper argues that the assumption behind this theory, that for women marriage and employment are substitutes, is outmoded. It also contends that the theory leaves out the importance of full-time schooling as an activity alternative to employment and that in fact the increase in full-time schooling among young women has been much greater than the slight decrease in their labor-force participation.Several questions are raised about the statistical test of the theory and also about the reasons why the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation and featured the marriage market theory as an explanation for this purported new trend.     

Welfare as We [Don't] Know It: A Review and Feminist Critique of Welfare Reform Research in the United States

Reform of the United States welfare system in 1996 drastically changed welfare receipt for low-income lone mothers. This paper explores the effects of these changes on lone mothers by summarizing empirical work on caseload reduction, labor force participation, income, poverty, material hardship, and family formation. While it appears that the economic status of many lone mothers improved during the economic expansion in the late 1990s, many lone mothers continued to experience poverty and material hardship. Building on the work of feminist scholars from both the US and other countries, this paper goes on to critique mainstream research on welfare reform. It identifies a particularly feminist approach to welfare reform research, stresses its advantages over mainstream research, and speculates about why there is comparatively less feminist research to date. The paper concludes by calling for more structural analyses of poverty and of lone motherhood itself.     

Temporal variation of capture of anti‐poverty programs: rural public works and food for work programs in rural India

Using National Sample Survey data for rural India we examine the incidence of capture in two workfare programs in rural India: the Rural Public Works and the Food for Work Programs for 1993–1994 and 2004–2005 respectively. We discover a high degree of program capture among the general population. Among the traditionally backward groups in Indian rural society – but with considerable variation in their living standards – there appears to be a higher degree of capture among SC (Scheduled Castes), than among ST (Scheduled Tribes). Targeting among SC worsened over time. There was an increase in capture by the fourth quintile (of household per capita expenditure) of SC, ST and landowners. This may be reflective of a varying degree of collusion between the elite and the program implementing agencies (e.g. village councils) over time. Thus, potential benefits of workfare get undermined. We also provide evidence to suggest that income‐based targeting could outperform social group based targeting.     

Linkages between poverty and income inequality of urban–rural sector: a time series analysis of India’s urban-based aspirations from 1951 to 1994

This study examines the impact of urban and rural development on poverty and inequality in India before economic reform. The methodology comprises two dimensions. Modern time series methods are used to uncover the dynamic patterns of urban–rural poverty and income inequality. A machine-learning algorithm is used to determine the causal structure among the development indicators. Our results show that reductions in rural poverty appear to be a more effective in reducing both urban and rural poverty, although the costs of achieving these reductions have not been considered.     

风雅的养成——园林画中的古代女性教育

园林作为居住空间的特殊品类,是传统社会重要的女性教育空间,在园林画中多有体现。以传世的园林绘画为考察对象,结合文献史料,从女性的自然常识教育、劳动技能教育和文化艺术教育3个方面探讨园林空间对于古代女性健康成长与人格完善的作用。可以发现,园林空间在古代女性教育中占有特殊地位,它是女性认识自然世界的窗口、学习生活技能的场所,以及提高文化和艺术造诣的环境。     

Poverty dynamics in rural China revisited: do assets matter?

This paper uses an asset-based approach to examine poverty dynamics in rural China over the period 1989–2006. The analysis documents a significant structural component in the poverty dynamics of households. The lack of profitable agricultural asset accumulation plays an unneglectable role in causing households to be trapped in persistent poverty. The escape from poverty is increasingly dominated by stochastic upward mobility rather than by structural movement in terms of asset accumulation. This could threaten the prospect of poverty reduction in rural China. It is argued that future reform and policy-making should pay more attention to building households’ asset base.     

Structure of Financial Savings During Indian Economic Reforms

This paper conducts nonparametric tests to examine whether data on financial savings in India can be rationalized in terms of a utility function of a representative economic agent. The nonparametric test has an advantage over its parametric counterpart in that it does not assume the existence of a utility function per se and checks whether the representative consumer’s demand structure can at all be rationalized by a utility function. Our test results of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the weak separability hypothesis suggest that data on financial savings in India are consistent with the existence of a utility function for a representative individual with a sub-preference where contractual savings (insurance and provident funds) can be separated out. This result could facilitate the construction of a suitable financial aggregate using these assets.     

Risk Pooling in the Presence of Moral Hazard

The size of an insurance pool that minimizes average risk per policy is derived for cases in which moral hazard offsets the benefits of pooling.