A Grassroots Developmental Strategy for Africa: Towns as Agents of Growth Through Financial Credit

Since independence, governmental leaders in Africa have not pursued the policy option of making towns, represented as incorporated units, borrowers of commercial credit. To improve the quality of life among rural populations, governments in Africa should pursue the development strategy of making financial credit available to the towns located in those communities, because there is a high distribution of managerial expertise and material resources among the population. This article considers how African governments may adopt a development strategy that will encourage towns to borrow financial credit to engage in various economic and social activities, just like private companies. If these activities become viable, they may be a useful start in reversing the deterioration in economic and social well-being that several rural communities in Africa have suffered.     

The "Moral Hazards" of Microfinance: Restructuring Rural Credit in India

Abstract:  This paper explores how economic ideas are produced, how they travel, and how they are contested, in complex and contingent ways, in particular places. It stems from events that took place in coastal Andhra Pradesh, India, where I conducted fieldwork on microfinance programs during 2007. I begin by tracing how the practices of microfinance—and the ideas and rationalities underpinning them—have been increasingly globalized as a development tool since the 1970s. I then move on to describe the proliferation of various microfinance programs across Andhra Pradesh over the last decade. In the closing section, I consider the implications of a recent protest that took place against commercial microfinance institutions in the region.     

The Impact of Microfinance on Decision‐Making Agency: Evidence from South India

Evaluations of the effects of microfinance programmes on women's empowerment generate mixed results. While some are supportive of microfinance's ability to induce a process of economic, social and political empowerment, others are more sceptical and even point to a deterioration of women's overall well‐being. Against this background, development scholars and practitioners have sought to distil some of the ingredients that might increase the likelihood of empowerment or at least reduce adverse effects. This article formally tests the impact of some of the suggested changes in programme features on one particular dimension of empowerment: decision‐making agency. Using household survey data from South India, the author explores the importance of the borrower's gender and the lending technology for intra‐household decision‐making processes. It is shown that direct bank–borrower credit delivery does not challenge the existing decision‐making patterns, regardless of whether men or women receive the credit. These findings change when credit is combined with financial and social group intermediation. Women's group membership seriously shifts overall decision‐making patterns from norm‐guided behaviour and male decision‐making to more joint and female decision‐making. Longer‐term group membership and more intensive training and group meetings strengthen these patterns.     

The Effects of Beneficiary Targeting on Public Support for Social Policies

We assess the tendency for the public to use group‐centric policy evaluations with evidence from a survey experiment concerning two issues within the social policy domain, health care and aid to cities. By randomly varying target group identity within each issue and using both negatively and positively regarded groups our evidence shows that differences exist in the tendency for members of the public to use group‐centric heuristics. Group‐centric evaluations are related to party identification and political ideology. Across both issues conservatives and Republicans are more likely than liberals or Democrats to adopt a group‐centric heuristic. Partisan and ideological differences suggest that established theories miss the mark by emphasizing how universal policy designs are preferred to designs that target unpopular groups.     

The Macro‐Regional Scale of Silver Production in Iberia During the First Millennium BC in the Context of Mediterranean Contacts

The extraction of silver has traditionally been considered as one of the main incentives for the Phoenician expansion throughout the Mediterranean and their settlement in Iberia. In this paper, we approach the organization of silver production in Iberia during the Early Iron Age through the study of the evidence of production currently available and the development of Lead Isotope Analysis (LIA). Previous results (Hunt 2003; Stos Gale 2001; Kassianidou 1992) are considered in the light of new data. The extraction of silver from complex minerals noticeably intensifies in south‐west Iberia. Imports of exogenous lead, needed for the extraction of silver from these complex minerals, are evident. Supplies of lead come in from other regions of Iberia, such as Gádor, Cartagena/Mazarrón, Linares or even the mining district of Molar‐Belmunt‐Falset (MBF) in Catalonia. This picture reveals that the organization of silver production was much more complex than initially thought, with the articulation of an exchange network of raw materials at a macro‐territorial scale embracing almost all Iberia. The socioeconomic implications that control of these networks of lead distribution could have had are also discussed.     

A Study of the Sewn‐Plank Boats of Goa,India

The study of traditional boats has enhanced our knowledge of the maritime past. Traditional boats are both river‐ and sea‐worthy. They have been used in rivers for transporting cargo to inland ports from ships anchored at sea, and have often been used in naval warfare. In this paper an attempt has been made to study the sewn‐plank boats of Goa, their building techniques and other features in order to understand their quality and how they were used in the past for an inland river‐transport system. © 2011 The Authors     

The Evaluation of Regional Innovation and Cluster Policies: Towards a Participatory Approach

The objective of this article is to provide a reply to the following question: What is the most suitable way of tackling evaluation of new regional policies? Regional development has moved today to new arenas. Here, we are discussing learning communities and regions that are able to adapt themselves to the new competitive conditions. SMEs policies at the regional level have also changed. New regional policies devote much of their attention to networks of inter-firm and inter-institutional cooperation - clusters - and to regional innovation systems. As a consequence, evaluation methodologies are also changing looking for more creative ways of assessing the impact of these new policies. In our opinion, participatory evaluation seems to be more appropriate to the specific characteristics of new regional policies and more suitable for sorting out the problems posed by their evaluation. In addition, under this approach, evaluation can turn into a useful tool to mobilize communities for regional action , empower local agents and enhance learning capacity.     

Trees of the Essential Economic Structures: A Qualitative Input‐Output Method*

Abstract. The structure of an economy in the framework of the Input‐Output (IO) model is defined by the set of industries within, together with the set of existing links between those industries, the latter determined by the demand and supply of intermediate goods exerted by the producers. Such a structure can be characterized by a subset of those connections between industries, regarded as the essential substructure, whose analysis allows learning some of the fundamental features of the system at large. This paper presents a qualitative method to find that essential productive structure, employing endogenous IO information only. Furthermore, the proposed method has been used to compare two such structures, namely, the United States and Mexico. Results assign structural positions to each sector in each system and describe the way industries influence one another in each economy. As expected, those results confirm that these economies are structurally different, despite existing similarities.     

The Neoliberal Seduction: Governing‐at‐a‐Distance,Community Development and the Battle over Financial Services Provision in Australia

This paper is concerned with understanding the reasons for the apparent success of neoliberalism: why the model of the ‘entrepreneurial, self‐reliant community’ has been adopted so widely and readily across Australia. It does this through an analysis of two events in the restructuring of financial services provision in regional Australia during the 1990s and 2000s: the John Laws/Australian Bankers’ Association ‘cash for comment’ affair, and the rise of ‘alternative’ financial service providers in the wake of the major trading banks’ financial service withdrawal programmes of the 1990s. This analysis is conducted using the conceptual toolkit of the governmentality literature. In this context, the paper explores the notion of translation — how authorities, agencies, etc., exert control over distant entities, whether these entities be branch staff or a far‐flung consumer market. In examining the often fragile character of ‘governing‐at‐a‐distance’ in modern forms of rule, it is argued that some recent advances in the ‘geography of power’ have much to offer in highlighting both the important roles played by space and scale in the execution of power in its various guises and the ways in which resistance to the more regressive features of neoliberal philosophy and policy may best focus.     

Non‐Market Institutions in Economic Development: The Role of the Third Sector

In an article published in this journal in 2005, Dorward et al. argued that non‐market institutions are particularly effective in addressing market failures in the high‐transaction cost institutional environment which is often characteristic of low‐income countries. This comment develops additional theoretical underpinnings of this argument by exploring differences in the capacity for addressing market failure of for‐profit firms, on the one hand, and third sector organizations representing a major type of non‐market institutions, on the other. It is argued that while for‐profit firms address market failures by facilitating market exchange, third sector organizations do so by replacing exchange with self‐sufficiency. This recourse to self‐sufficiency is reflected in the important role of third sector organizations in economic development in low‐income countries.     

W Function: A New Distance‐Based Measure of Spatial Distribution of Economic Activities

Distance‐based methods are applied in various fields of research. In this paper, a new relative distance‐based method, the W function, is introduced. This method contributes to the assessment of spatial patterns of economic activities using the stochastic Monte Carlo simulation, and supplements the typology of distance‐based methods recently drawn up by Marcon and Puech. The capability of the W function is compared with results from the Kd and the recently defined m function methods, which are widely used for monitoring the spatial distribution of economic activities by considering several theoretical and empirical examples. The W function appears to provide more precise estimations of the density of economic activities compared to the m and Kd functions, particularly in cases of complex patterns such as double clustered distribution. It also appears to provide a more accurate evaluation of dispersion.     

The Effectiveness of Jobs Reservation: Caste,Religion and Economic Status in India

This article investigates the effect of jobs reservation on improving the economic opportunities of persons belonging to India's Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). Using employment data from the 55^th NSS round, the authors estimate the probabilities of different social groups in India being in one of three categories of economic status: own account workers; regular salaried or wage workers; casual wage labourers. These probabilities are then used to decompose the difference between a group X and forward caste Hindus in the proportions of their members in regular salaried or wage employment. This decomposition allows us to distinguish between two forms of difference between group X and forward caste Hindus: ‘attribute’ differences and ‘coefficient’ differences. The authors measure the effects of positive discrimination in raising the proportions of ST/SC persons in regular salaried employment, and the discriminatory bias against Muslims who do not benefit from such policies. They conclude that the boost provided by jobs reservation policies was around 5 percentage points. They also conclude that an alternative and more effective way of raising the proportion of men from the SC/ST groups in regular salaried or wage employment would be to improve their employment‐related attributes.     

Soft Transport Policies and Ground‐Level Ozone: An Evaluation of the “Clear the Air Challenge” in Salt Lake City

In recent years, communities have begun to implement both “soft” and mandatory policies designed to address worsening air quality. Voluntary or soft transportation policies have included air quality alert systems that encourage people not to drive on days when the air quality index is above a specified threshold and public education/action campaigns that focus on reducing automobile related travel. In this article, we evaluate the effectiveness of one such soft policy, the Clear the Air Challenge (CAC), in reducing ground‐level ozone during the Wasatch Front's summer ozone season. Using daily ozone data and color‐coded daily air quality designations from 2006 through 2012, we estimate a range of nonequivalent control group models. In only one of the models does the CAC generate a statistically significant but small reduction in ground‐level ozone. Future research should assess the full range of costs and benefits to the public associated with such soft transport policies.     

Celebrating the prophet: religious nationalism and the politics of Milad‐un‐Nabi festivals in India

The traditional honoring of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed (Milad‐un‐Nabi) has shifted in numerous Indian cities from private prayer and ritual meals in the home to grand public festivals that bear resemblances to Hindu religious processions. In 2010 in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, large‐scale Milad‐un‐Nabi festivals became implicated in Hindu–Muslim nationalist riots that erupted weeks later at the commencement of a Hindu festival for Hanuman Jayanthi. This paper explores the political production of Muslim ethno‐nationalism and the intra‐community debates over the legitimacy and piety of Milad‐un‐Nabi celebrations. It argues that Milad‐un‐Nabi as a public performance is a (re)invented tradition that is part of the struggle for material, political and symbolic goods of the nation‐state. It is shaped by local party politics and history of anti‐Muslim discrimination. However, as the festivals highlight community divisions and religious ambiguities, they ultimately reveal the fragility of ethnic groups.