Accident Compensation Reform

The aim of the article is to provide a survey of the major issues involved in the reform of accident Compensation schemes. The article outlines the economic and social pressures for reform of existing accident compensation schemes, discusses the major reform issues and raises the major challenges facing the reform process. The article focuses on the experience of the Victorian Government in developing and implementing its reform of workers compensation (Workcare) and on its proposed reform of the existing compulsory third party motor accidents scheme to illustrate the key issues.     

Informal Child Support Contributions in Black Female-Headed Families

Key reforms to child support enforcement have aimed at increasing formal child support awards, levels and receipts. However, the role of child support contributions outside the formal child support system has been largely ignored. This study draws critical attention to these informal child support contributions, with chief focus on informal child support receipts of Black mothers. The study finds that Black mothers are significantly more likely to receive informal cash and in-kind child support contributions relative to other mothers, especially when non-resident fathers are also Black.     

W. Arthur Lewis in Retrospect

This paper reviews several themes from the writings of W. Arthur Lewis, both the first black Nobel Laureate in Economics and the first from a developing country, and examines them from the perspective of two to five decades of hindsight. The paper emphasizes three main interrelated aspects; economic growth, economic dualism, and “the evolution of the economic order”—the forces that drive the prices of goods and relative incomes across countries. Lewis’s messages still resonate today, as he foresaw the rise of industrial exports from developing countries—and also that it would not end the large gaps among nations’ standards of living. The paper both documents these rises and asks whether one could have predicted it from information available in the 1960s, or whether additional prescience was necessary.     

The gender pay gap and son preference: evidence from India

This study explores the role of the gender pay gap in explaining the downward trend in son preference in India. This hypothesis is based on the underlying theory that parents allocate more resources to male children because the expected returns are higher for male relative to female children. However, rising relative earnings of women in India may increase the expected returns to investing in girls, and ultimately help to lower son preference in general. Using data from the 2005–2006 National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) and the 2004 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International (IPUMS-International), we construct a gender pay gap measure from exogenous labor demand to identify the effect on reported son preference among men and women. Regression results confirm that reducing the gender pay gap helps lower son preference among men and women.