Poverty in Transition: An Ethnographic Critique of Household Surveys in Post-Soviet Central Asia

Post-Soviet transitions have prompted a search for new policy tools and methods of data collection. The shift from universal welfare provision under the Soviet system to targeted assistance and poverty monitoring has stimulated a new interest in the measurement of living standards and poverty lines. This has promoted the use of quantitative techniques and sample surveys (household surveys, in particular) as privileged tools for the collection of policy-relevant information. This paper contends that survey techniques have particular limitations as research tools in an environment where local level case studies are scarce and where a host of new socio-economic processes are creating fundamental shifts in the landscape of social provision, redistribution and employment. These limitations are illustrated by drawing upon a household survey conducted by the author in four villages from two regions in Uzbekistan, Andijan and Kashkadarya, between October 1997 and August 1998. The ambiguities surrounding five basic concepts, those of household, employment, access to land, income and expenditure are discussed in detail, as are the changes in their contents and meanings in the context of transition. The gender differentiated outcomes of current changes and their possible implications are highlighted throughout the text. The conclusion suggests that Uzbekistan finds itself at an uneasy juncture where the policies deployed to ‘cushion’ the social costs of transition may reach the limits of their sustainability. A more contextually sensitive approach to the mechanisms that generate new forms of vulnerability and the use of qualitative and longitudinal methodologies are essential to an adequate monitoring of further changes.     

The Hidden Consequences of Credit: An Illustration from Rural Indonesia

Interest in rural financial development has been booming, but often with a blind eye to the broader consequences. Very few studies have tackled the unintended economic, social and ecological outcomes of ordinary indebtedness, the inevitable other side of credit. This article explores some of the main ‘hidden’ side‐effects of credit/debt relations, with special reference to the Indonesian plantation sector. I argue that widespread credit/debt relations are not only an important factor behind capital, land and labour control; they also generate constraints that foster market discipline and contribute to undermine traditional community bonds as well as environmental conditions. More generally, credit/debt relations represent a powerful mechanism of social selection that has, in the long run, crucially shaped the trajectory of capitalism at the household, firm and government levels.     

Constructing Poverty Trends in Uganda: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

In late 1999, apparently contradictory pictures of what was happening to poverty in Uganda emerged from the Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) and the household survey. This article analyses certain conceptual and methodological characteristics of the PPA and the pictures of poverty trends arising from it, with a view to dispelling confusion and to better understanding the relationship between these and the pictures emerging from survey data. It argues that the apparently contradictory visions, when explored carefully, are found to be compatible, and concludes that deeper and less oppositional understandings of the purpose of PPAs vis‐à‐vis surveys for poverty assessment are an important and timely contribution to current research and knowledge about poverty.     

Ageing,Poverty and the Role of a Social Pension in Vietnam

Using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey in 2004, this article seeks to quantify the potential role and impacts of a social pension scheme for reducing elderly poverty in Vietnam. The authors simulate changes in the poverty rate, poverty gap and poverty severity of the elderly in the counterfactual situation that such a scheme had been introduced to Vietnam in the past. They consider a number of categorical targeting groups of elderly people along with various transfer parameters to assess the impacts of the scheme on social welfare. They conclude that, depending on the characteristics of the social pension, there would be beneficial poverty reductions, but also large leakages to the non‐poor people. For a variety of measures, the results suggest that targeting the elderly in rural areas might be the most effective use of limited resources. Simulations for different budgetary constraints show that, even with limited budgeting, a social pension scheme would significantly reduce poverty incidence for the elderly. Furthermore, for a given programme cost, combining lower benefits with lower eligibility requirements is more effective at reducing poverty than providing larger benefits to a more limited group of recipients.     

Fixing the Hole in the Bucket: Household Poverty Dynamics in the Peruvian Andes

Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty will require simultaneous action on two separate fronts: helping poor people escape from poverty, and stemming the flow of people into poverty. This article examines forty Peruvian communities, and finds that descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of them. Escape and descent are asymmetric in terms of reasons: while one set of reasons is responsible for escapes from poverty, another and different set of reasons is associated with descent. Making progress in poverty reduction will require measures to accelerate escapes whilst at the same time slowing down descents. The article looks at the different policies which will be required to serve these two separate purposes.     

Assessing Poverty and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from West Bengal

Recent interest in poverty and poverty relief has included debates that have moved beyond narrow concerns of consumption and income generation. Sen's research on entitlements and capabilities revolutionized approaches to poverty in the 1980s, and his work has itself been open to critical appraisals that have stressed empowerment and vulnerability as issues of equal importance. Some of these theoretical debates are briefly reviewed here, after which the frameworks for analysis that they suggest are applied to the study of rural poverty in West Bengal. The two tasks that the paper then sets itself are to illustrate the empirical value of broader conceptualizations of poverty, and to highlight the methodological difficulties that they raise.     

Negotiated Environmental Governance in The Netherlands: Logic and Illustration

The Dutch consensus oriented model of negotiated environmental governance enjoys increasing popularity within the European Union because of its seemingly effective way of dealing with environmental problems. A closer look at the model does not reveal any better performance than European average. The article theoretically explains the strengths and weaknesses of the Dutch model as an iterative policy model in which three different modes of governance — competitive, cooperative, and authoritative — interact and compete to achieve effective efficient and legitimate policy results. The argument is empirically illustrated with findings of energy saving policies in the Netherlands .     

Vietnam's Coastal Communities: An Assessment of Poverty

A Vietnamese geographer examines factors leading to the persistence of poverty in the coastal regions of Vietnam, against the backdrop of the country's overall recent success in poverty amelioration. After reviewing the spatial pattern of poverty for Vietnam as a whole, based on current government statistics, the author contrasts the situation in the country's interior relative to coastal locations, based on a detailed survey of over 200 households in Khanhhoa Province, located in south-central Vietnam. The changing labor market conditions in East Asia are discussed briefly in light of continued poverty reduction in the country. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D31, I31, O15, P20. 4 figures, 5 tables, 33 references.     

The Nonjurors and the Counter Enlightenment: Some Illustration

The article argues, firstly, that in view of the relationship between Protestantism and the English Enlightenment it is in distinctively non-Protestant religious thought, within or without the Church of England, that the central themes of the English Counter Enlightenment are to be sought. The writings of the Nonjurors can and should therefore be seen as possessing a wider significance than that derived from the history of theology. They constitute an important part of the Enlightenment/Counter Enlightenment debates, and this flows naturally from the position they occupy in relation to the Catholic and Reformation traditions. The study exemplifies this view with reference to the writers of the Usager movement. There is, in the second part, a statement of the fundamental theological causes of the Usager schism. The third part displays the significance of these concerns to the Enlightenment/Counter Enlightenment debates and in particular to the central matter of these debates — the epistemological and institutional location of authority.     

Structural Adjustment and Poverty Alleviation: An Interpretative Survey

There are few simple generalizations about the effects of adjustment programmes on poverty. There remain many data and methodological problems, and outcomes are complex and varied. Poverty groups often are harmed by adjustment programmes, especially the urban working poor, but there has been a tendency to over-emphasize negative outcomes. There are many other influences on poverty. In the long term, adjustment is essential to the eradication of poverty. The principal responsibility for achieving anti-poverty objectives must lie with national governments but they do not always display much concern with the poor. However, the international financial institutions must share the responsibility and could do more to design structural adjustment programmes within a cost-minimizing framework. The principal policy tasks are to formulate a long-term anti-poverty strategy and ensure that adjustment policies are consistent with that, without detracting from the imperative of adapting the economy to changing circumstances.     

奴隶劳动在两河流域家庭农业中的重要作用——以两件分家泥板文书为例

本文分析了乌尔第三王朝和古巴比伦时期的两件分家文书.文件表明在古代两河流域的家庭生产资料中,奴隶作为动产的主要部分在家庭的农业生产和生活中占有极其重要的地位,许多家庭在生产劳动中大量使用男女奴隶劳动力,说明古代两河流域文明是建立在奴隶制社会上的农业文明,古代两河流域社会是奴隶制社会.     

The Archaeology of Poverty and the Poverty of Archaeology

In this Editor’s Introduction to this Special Contribution, I explore some central issues surrounding the archaeology of poverty and ponder why it has taken historical archaeologists so long to “discover” poverty as a research topic.     

Household pottery disposal in the Maya highlands: An ethnoarchaeological interpretation

Depositional theory concerns the relationship between depositional behavior and material culture. The ethnoarchaeologist has the opportunity to study this relationship in ongoing communities. Some understanding of the content and spatial patterning of discarded material culture, in terms of the predictability of and major behavioral factors contributing to different disposal patterns, is of particular interest to the archaeologist, who must base most sociocultural interpretations on artifact assemblages composed primarily of discarded items. In terms of the Maya household, pottery disposal can be viewed as an evolutionary process, composed of sequentially derived assemblages. These assemblages comprise a use and reuse assemblage (i.e., the basic household inventory), a disposal assemblage, an abandonment assemblage, and finally an archaeological assemblage. Variability in the behavioral factors that affect assemblage change can significantly alter the spatial patterning and condition of the vessels in the pottery inventory of a given household unit. Emphasis is placed on the possible confusion of depositional patterning within household activity areas, and the nature of distinguishable feature-related, disposal patterns within household compounds.