Measuring Women's Quality of Life: A Discussion of Alternative Approaches

This paper reports our experiences with the application of a number of alternative approaches to a study of women's economic circumstances and quality of life in a typical western city. The important work of, especially, Martha Nussbaum on the capabilities approach to evaluations of “quality of life” has highlighted pitfalls associated with the use of a narrow informational base in studies of women's lives and has emphasized the value of qualitative methods in these evaluations. However, to date, most discussions of the relevance of plural approaches to studies of women's lives have been conducted in the context of developing countries. This paper contributes a practical, current example of the relevance of such approaches to assessments of the lives of women in western countries as well. The research findings reported in the paper also cast further light on the importance of several, related themes in the literature on the capabilities approach, namely the importance of understanding how women's aspirations and expectations change with their economic and social experiences; and the importance of appreciating the social uses of language and how this affects the way in which women describe their lives.     

Culture and the Labor Market

This paper explores the relationship between culture and labor market behavior. An attempt is made to clarify, from an economic perspective, the meaning of culture; to discuss the importance of cultural studies in the economic analysis of the labor market; and to outline the major theoretical issues that are associated with adopting a cultural perspective on economic behavior in the labor market.     

Community empowerment in vogue or vain?

Community is in vogue. But what does it mean and what could it mean, particularly for the residents of inner city areas and peripheral estates faced with poverty and deprivation and cut off from mainstream economic opportunities? This paper examines the concept of community drawing upon work recently undertaken on community involvement in City Challenge (Docklands Consultative Committee and Barrow Cadbury Trust, 1994). We ask the question, has urban policy really engaged with urban communities, and if not, how could it do so?

Urban policy has zigzagged from one set of initiatives to another. Whilst policy has been moulded over time to reflect differing government ideologies seeking to account for the root of the urban malaise, essentially many of Britain's inner cities are still facing the same deep-seated socio-economic problems, identified in the government's 1977 White Paper, A Policy for the Inner Cities.

Community involvement in these initiatives has had a chequered history. First, it was a starting point for tackling deprivation in the Urban Priority Areas, and then incorporated into the Community Development Projects of the early 1970s. In the 1980s urban communities reverted to a role as spectators to property-led regeneration. In the 1990s, the word “community” is being extensively employed in the urban debate.     

New development: Faith,community organizing and migration—the case of ‘regularization’

When civil society organizations pool their muscle, it is amazing what they can achieve. The London Citizens ‘Strangers into Citizens’ campaign has put the idea of a conditional amnesty for illegal immigrants on the political table—and won powerful backers, including the Mayor of London and the Catholic Church.     

Labour Supply and the Risk of Divorce: An Analysis of Australian Data

This article examines the possible consequences of rising divorce risks for the pattern of married women's labour supply in the Australian labour market. An extension of Becker's (1965) model of time allocation is used to inform an empirical analysis of this issue based on the 1997 Negotiating the Life Course Survey data. The empirical analysis in the article features a model that controls for the possibility of an endogenous relationship between women's involvement in paid work and the risk of divorce. Results show a significant positive relationship between the risk of divorce and the probability that a woman will be involved in full‐time work.     

Crossing the Great Divide: Ostrom’s Coproduction and the Economics of Aged Care

As the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom has attracted the interest of many feminist economists. Best known for her work on common pool resources, Ostrom made numerous theoretical and methodological contributions to economics, many of which are useful for feminist economists. This paper explores Ostrom’s work on coproduction: the active participation of individuals who receive a good or service in the production process. A particular focus is on how Ostrom’s model of coproduction might be applied and extended to capture the characteristics and circumstances of aged care. Data from interviews with women employed in Australia’s aged-care sector are used to inform a discussion of coproduction in aged care and the institutional supports necessary for successful outcomes. Key issues include the skills and resourcing of aged-care workers, and their authority to negotiate care practice with care recipients under current governance arrangements.     

Agricultural sustainability of small-scale farms in Lacluta,Timor Leste

Despite the trend of dwindling productivity, tribal people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) still practise shifting cultivation as a dominant hill farming system to support their livelihood. Drawing on an empirical study in Khagrachari district of the CHT, this research examined how far the production from present shifting cultivation supports the tribal people's livelihood and what alternative livelihood strategies they have adopted for subsistence by using data on input/output and income/expenditures, and analysing current government policies. The findings showed that productivity declined markedly, yields were almost equal to input values and farmers experienced food shortages for at least two to six months in a year. To make a living, farmers have adopted new occupations such as wage labour, animal husbandry, cultivation of annual monocrops and extraction and selling of forest products. Policy analysis indicates that previous policies were unable to reduce shifting cultivation intensity or improve tribal people's livelihoods or the region's forest resources. Reorientation of government policies, easy access to institutional support and the active participation of local people in development intervention are of the utmost importance in order to find alternative land uses for sustainable hill farming, to improve the farmer's living standards and to conserve forests and protect watersheds.