Farm productivity and rural poverty in India

Armed with new data, we return to an old question from the pages of this journal: to what extent do India's rural poor share in agricultural growth? Combining data from 24 household sample surveys spanning 35 years with other sources, we estimate a model of the joint determination of consumption‐poverty measures, agricultural wages, and food prices. We find that higher farm productivity brought both absolute and relative gains to poor rural households. A large share of the gains was via wages and prices, though these effects took time. The benefits to the poor were not confined to those near the poverty line.     

Alleviating rural poverty through agricultural growth

The article examines the role of agricultural GDP growth in alleviating rural poverty in LDCs. Cross‐sectional regression analysis indicates that GDP growth by itself takes a very long time to reduce poverty significantly. It suggests that decreases in land concentration could have a more immediate impact on reducing rural poverty; the budgetary and other costs of implementing such changes are not, however, considered. The preferred approach is a combination of equitable growth and redistributive measures.     

Production,prices and poverty in rural India

This paper challenges the view that increases in agricultural production have reduced poverty in rural India. Rural poverty is related directly to the consumer price index number for agricultural labourers, and inversely to agricultural production. The underlying time trend term indicates a residual rising trend in rural poverty after accounting for the influence of these two factors. There are plausible, though conjectural, reasons for believing that to a significant extent, the price factor as well as the variables implicit in the time trend term both derive their strength, if not their existence, from the nature of the growth processes which have generated the observed growth in agricultural production. These results contradict Ahluwalia's earlier conclusions, even though they are themselves based on essentially the same data set.     

The impact of the gender composition of households on inequality and poverty: a comparison across Russia and Eastern Europe

This study compares poverty and income distribution among gender subgroups in Russia and four East European countries—Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Poland—in 2000. Does the gender poverty gap exist in these countries and if yes, how big is it? How much does the level of gender inequality contribute to explaining the level of aggregate inequality and poverty within each country? To what extent may the differences emerging in cross-country comparisons of poverty and inequality be explained by differences in the gender composition of households, e.g., the prevalence of female-dominated households? These are the questions I seek to answer in this paper.Equivalent expenditure is adopted as a measure of economic welfare of households with different gender ratios. The gender gap is defined as the degree of distance between the economic welfare of households dominated by women and households dominated by men. Headcount poverty and average poverty shortfalls are calculated using relative poverty lines. Inequality is measured by Gini and Theil L coefficients.     

Rural poverty and agricultural performance in India

This paper examines time series evidence on rural poverty over the past two decades. The time series shows that the incidence of poverty fluctuates in response to variations in real agricultural output per head, but there is no significant time trend. There is a statistically significant inverse relationship between rural poverty and agricultural performance for India as a whole, suggesting that agricultural growth by itself tends to reduce the incidence of poverty. The analysis for individual states presents a somewhat different picture. The inverse relationship between output per head and rural poverty is observed in several states but there is also evidence that there are processes at work which tend to increase the incidence of poverty, independently of variations in agricultural output per head.     

俄罗斯的精英政治

当代俄罗斯的政体是新权威主义下的宪政民主体制。它的特点是在俄罗斯的政治实践中逐步形成了一种保持宪政民主政体形式并实行总统统一领导的权力体制和管理方式。但＂梅普组合＂的出现不得不让人们重新深入审视和分析俄罗斯的这种政治体制。这是一种以个人威望为基础的总统集中管理模式,又恰恰是政局稳定和国家安定的关键。当今的俄罗斯政治仍然是精英政治。     

Global poverty and orthodox security

This article examines the way in which the discourses of security and development have merged in the past decade as an important strand of global governance. It shows why this merging of discourses has occurred and assesses whether the newly embedded security-development discourse provides adequate conceptual tools for understanding the causes of global poverty. It concludes by setting out three paths that emerge from this security-development discourse and suggests that the ontological and epistemological claims at the heart of this understanding of International Relations and global poverty serve to reinforce global hierarchies of social power and privilege.     

Federalism and democratization in Russia

The scholarly literature on democratic transitions has largely ignored developments at the local level and the relationship between federalism and democracy. In this work I examine the development of federalism in Russia and I assess the impact of Russia's highly asymmetrical form of federalism on democratisation. The study shows that federalism far from promoting democracy has allowed authoritarianism to flourish in many of Russia's eighty nine regions and republics. Federalism and democratization in Russia exist in contradiction rather than harmony. In a vicious circle, authoritarianism at the centre has been nourished by authoritarianism in the region and vice versa. “Elective dictatorships” and “delegative democracies” are now well entrenched in many republics, and mini-presidential systems are firmly established in a majority of the regions.