a migrant ethic of care? negotiating care and caring among migrant workers in London's low-pay economy

A care deficit is clearly evident in global cities such as London and is attributable to an ageing population, the increased employment of native-born women, prevalent gender ideologies that continue to exempt men from much reproductive work, as well as the failure of the state to provide viable alternatives. However, while it is now acknowledged that migrant women, and to a lesser extent, migrant men, step in to provide care in cities such as London, there is less research on how this shapes the nature, politics and ethics of care. Drawing upon empirical research with low-paid migrant workers employed as domiciliary care providers in London, this paper explores the emergence of a distinct migrant ethic of care that is critically shaped by the caring work that migrant women and men perform.     

Fertility and the household's economic status: A natural experiment using Indian micro data

We model fertility as endogenous to the family's economic status because poor households choose to have large families in the absence of adequate social insurance. Because of a strong son preference in India, having two girls first can proxy an exogenous increase in fertility, and is therefore a good instrument for fertility in determining poverty of rural households. The 1993–1994 Indian Quinquennial Survey data shows that even though poverty rates are comparable, 74 per cent of two-girl families have a third child compared to 63 per cent of other families. Fertility significantly positively affects poverty when treated as exogenous, but vanishes once endogenised. These results are robust to omitting states with skewed sex ratios and to proxying economic status by expenditures.