The Impact of Microfinance on Factors Empowering Women: Differences in Regional and Delivery Mechanisms in India’s SHG Programme

Abstract

We examine how the impact on women’s empowerment varies with respect to the location and type of group linkage of the respondent. Using household survey data from five states in India, we correct for selection bias to estimate a structural equation model. Our results reveal that in the southern states of India empowerment of women takes place through economic factors. For the other states, we find a significant correlation between women’s empowerment and autonomy in women’s decision-making and network, communication and political participation respectively. We do not, however, find any differential causal impact of different delivery methods (linkage models).     

ADOPTION,SECRECY AND THE SPECTRE OF THE TRUE MOTHER IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AUSTRALIA

Adoption was legalised in Australia in the 1920s, but not widely embraced before the Second World War. During the 1950s, a series of court cases in which birth mothers challenged the validity of the adoption of their children, threatened the viability of this new social policy. This paper argues that the 1960s tightening of secrecy provisions should be understood in the context of these challenges which reopened debates around the status of adoptive motherhood. By listening for the voice of relinquishing mothers, it challenges the view they were complicit in the process which deprived them of claims to maternal status.     

State lotteries: Explaining their popularity

This article provides a detailed explanation for the adoption of state lotteries as revenue measures. It focuses on Texas for examples. Relying on a previously published set of evaluative criteria for revenue sources, the authors explain why, despite generally negative treatment of state lotteries by revenue experts, lotteries are favored by legislatures and publics in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia. As revenue matters rather than general policy matters, lotteries are politically expedient and have sufficiently large yields to overshadow shortcomings noted by experts and critics: regressivity, high administrative costs, instability, lower than anticipated yields, and potential negative social consequences. This look at policy-maker and public evaluation of state lotteries explains their widespread utilitization.     

Jumping Together: A Fatal Suicide Pact

In suicide pact, two or more victims mutually agree and execute to end their lives together by predetermined method, preferably by hanging, drowning, gunshot, or poisoning. The victims are usually spouses, lovers, or friends, and the reasons behind such steps are various. In this reported suicide pact, husband–wife duo jumped from the terrace of a 12‐meter‐high building with their wrist bound to each other. Although they jumped together, the injury patterns were completely different. The man landed on head sustaining mainly craniocerebral injuries, and the wife landed on feet sustaining long bone injuries. They left a suicide note pointing out sudden demise of their only child as the reason for the suicide, and it was signed by both of them. Jumping from a height in suicide pact has not been reported in the scientific literature yet.