Surviving in Contemporary Kerala: Reflections from Recent Research in a Fisher Village

This article is based on mixed‐method field research in Adimalathura, a coastal village in south Kerala, India, which has been identified as one of the poorest communities in the area. Although this fishing community has been facing severe ecological challenges, including massive resource depletion, it has been able to put up stiff resistance to impending dispossession in the face of a large port project actively promoted by the government, most major political parties and globalized capital. This article traces the history of public action and work in Adimalathura since the early 20th century, and reflects on its significance in the context of the present resistance. It examines the role of women in bolstering the community in times of severe challenges to men's livelihoods, and highlights the importance of women's provisioning work. Ultimately, the author cautions against exaggerating community strength and the capacities of the women even when they are able to utilize available resources competently.     

Inequality,Growth, Poverty and Lunar Eclipses: Policy and Arithmetic

Alleviating poverty, mitigating inequality and achieving growth are all acknowledged goals of development, whatever the degree of success with which these goals might have been addressed in various economies of the world. Apart from questions of resolve and genuine commitment, what makes it hard to engage with these goals is that the pursuit of any one of them does not necessarily secure the ends of either or both of the other two. Such engagement requires a measure of conceptual clarity, an identification of normative priorities, and the deployment of carefully crafted policies that accommodate trade-offs among competing goals. In particular, policies such as the single-minded pursuit of growth as a panacea for all the difficulties of development appear to be misguided, and based on a faulty application of deductive reasoning to past experience. These issues are addressed here by attending to some elementary arithmetic revolving around the measurement of money-metric poverty and inequality, and the decomposition of poverty changes into effects attributable to growth and distributional changes.     

How Risk Perceptions Influence Evacuations from Hurricanes and Compliance with Government Directives

In this study we present evidence supporting the view that people's perceived risk of hurricane‐related hazards can be reduced to a single seriousness score that spans different hurricane‐induced risk types and that compliant behavior with official advisories is strongly dependent on whether one perceives a high risk with respect to any type of hurricane‐related hazards. Our analysis suggests that people are less sensitive to risk type than they are to the general seriousness of the risks. Using this single seriousness score, representing a composite risk measure, emergency managers can be informed about the severity of the public's risk perceptions to impending hurricane hazards and might better craft their public directives in ways that minimize disruptive evacuations and achieve greater compliance with government directives.     

THE ROLE OF DEFENSE CUTS IN THE CALIFORNIA RECESSION COMPUTABLE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODELS AND INTERSTATE FACTOR MOBILITY*

ABSTRACT. This study develops a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of California to examine the impact of recent defense cuts on the state's economy. The study demonstrates use of a CGE model to examine the sensitivity of regional economy models to assumptions about factor migration. Model variants include input-output and closed economy models as limiting cases. The results show that the California economy is sensitive to defense cuts. The multiplier relating the impact of defense cuts to state product ranges from one to almost five, depending on the degree of interstate factor mobility.