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.     

Hierarchical Integration: The Dollar Economy and the Rupee Economy

While contemporary globalization makes the world more interconnected, it also reworks and builds on existing cleavages and uneven development. This is an under‐researched dimension of the emerging twenty‐first century international division of labour. The core question is whether new developments (associated with exports, offshoring and outsourcing) spin off to the majority in the countryside and the urban poor. This article examines the relationship between the dollar economy and the rupee economy in India. It documents the ways in which inequality is built into and sustains India's development. The authors discuss other instances of multi‐speed economies and analytics that seek to come to grips with these relations, from combined and uneven development to global value chains. They present three ways of capturing contemporary inequality: asymmetric inclusion, enlargement‐and‐containment and hierarchical integration, each of which captures different dimensions of inequality.     

Are the Economies of Canada and the United States Integrated? Evidence from Cointegration Analysis

In recognition of his contributions to the development of the method of cointegration analysis for analyzing nonstationary time series, late Sir Clive William John Granger (September 4, 1934–May 27, 2009) was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2003. Since then, this method has become a dominant paradigm in empirical economic research. However, this method is not without critics. This article is one in a series to point out some inconsistent arguments used in the development of the method of cointegration analysis. To illustrate by example, we apply the method of time series cointegration analysis and present statistical evidence that supports the proposition that the economies of Canada and the United States are integrated. We conclude this article by laying out a foundation to formally criticize the method of cointegration analysis in subsequent research.     

‘Man can’t give birth,woman can't fish’: gender dynamics in the small-scale fisheries of Bangladesh

Going beyond the myths prevalent in the socio-cultural embeddedness of rural Bangladesh, this article examines the diverse visible and invisible roles of fisherwomen in small-scale fisheries. This research considered two ethnic groups situated in two different ecosystems: the floodplain freshwater ecosystem is represented by new-entrant Muslim fishers ‘Maimal’ and the coastal ecosystem is represented by caste-based Hindu fishers ‘Jaladas’. From the basic ontological worldview of human dignity, moral individualism, and the social recognition of women’s rights, we argue that fisherwomen’s roles need to be recognized, focused, and valued to develop a horizontal understanding that is a prerequisite to the process of democratization, and the proper functioning of a just society. In the rural societies, a host of attributes, such as the deep-rooted socio-cultural constructions of the motherly myth, extreme tolerance, family teaching, religious antagonism, poverty, lack of education, internalization of a subordinate position, lack of supportive institutions, and fear of loss of societal patronage, profoundly undermine the capacity of women to aspire and raise their voice. Fisherwomen are accrued an inferior social position although they perform unique roles in the areas of childcare, household upkeep, livelihoods, and psycho-social support for the seafaring fishers. Conducive to the ecotone of marine fisheries, this article also portrays how a rigid patriarchal form of society is seasonally transformed to matrifocality when fishermen are away for fishing for half the year.     

Queering the pitch: race,class, gender and nation in the Indo-Australian encounter

Recent cricket contests between Australia and India offer a fascinating theatre to examine issues of race, class, nation, and gender. I chart their protean character as they are performed and deployed in these encounters. Instead of exploring relations between already extant and singular entities called “India” or “Australia,” it might be more useful to see the performative practices of those situated at different loci of enunciation by which those categories are momentarily congealed and given meaning or content. While there is a surfeit of charged cricketing encounters between the two nations, I focus on two in this essay: (a) Rahul Dravid's speech at the annual Bradman Oration in 20111, and (b) what has come to be called ‘Monkeygate’ – a bitter and acrimonious cricket test match between India and Australia in 2007 played in Sydney.     

Parks and People: Livelihood Issues in National Parks Management in Thailand and Madagascar

In many countries, the transformation by the state of increasing areas of land and aquatic resources into strictly protected areas has included a total restriction on the use of park resources by the local people, causing poverty and social conflict, and in some cases further environmental deterioration. This essay examines the forms of management in national parks in developing countries in general, and in Thailand and Madagascar in particular.     

Examining the Structure of Opportunity and Social Mobility in India: Who Becomes an Engineer?

Rising inequality alongside rapid economic growth reinforces the need to examine patterns of social mobility in India. Are children from less well‐off sections also able to rise to higher‐paying positions, newly created by the growing economy, or are these positions mainly accessible to established elites? Powered in particular by the software industry, no sector has grown as fast as engineering in India. Examining the social origins of students at a range of engineering colleges, including higher‐ and lower‐ranked ones, provides a useful lens for understanding how the new opportunities have availed different social segments. These results provide some grounds for optimism: women, scheduled castes, and sons and daughters of agriculturists have improved upon historical trends. However, the rural–urban divide remains deep: the more rural one is, the lower are one's chances of getting into any engineering college. Multiple simultaneous handicaps — being poor and rural or scheduled caste and rural — reduce these chances to virtually zero. Improving education quality together with better information provision and more accessible career advice are critical for making opportunity more equitable.