How social capital enables or restricts the livelihoods of poor peri-urban farmers in Mexico

Poor farmers in peri-urban territories are subjected to the gradual transmutation of their livelihoods while they try to escape from poverty and adapt to an increasingly urban environment. Social capital seems to influence the outcomes of such livelihoods, and might expand chances and choices to improve poverty status, but also to follow their own paths. This article explores the mechanisms through which this capital enables or restricts such livelihoods in two peripheral municipalities in Mexico. The findings highlight the importance of informal institutional and non-institutional mechanisms in regulating access to, and distribution of, resources in peri-urban territories.     

Enhancing Smallholder Access to Agricultural Machinery Services: Lessons from Bangladesh

Resource poor smallholders in developing countries often lack access to capital goods such as farm machinery. Enabling adequate access through machinery services can thereby significantly contribute to food security and farm incomes. At the core of the service provision model is the lead farmer, who makes the initial investment in agricultural machinery, and provides services to others on a fee-for-service basis. Profiling the lead farmers can thereby provide important lessons and scaling implications. The present paper provides a case study of Bangladesh, using primary data to characterise the lead farmers. General education, credit availability and risk taking attitude play significant roles in whether or not a farm household will be a lead farmer in Bangladesh.     

On Diarrhoea in Adolescents and School Toilets:Insights from an Indian Village School Study

The economics literature on the determinants of diarrhoea focuses on infants; but what about school going adolescents? Our survey in an Indian village school affirms that sanitation, defecation practices at home and school, and the degree of crowding of living space at home are all significant determinants of diarrhoeal incidence for adolescents. Usage of toilets at school varies as a function of gender and existence of a toilet in student’s home. Access to toilets is not sufficient to guarantee their usage. To eliminate open defecation: toilets installation, behavioural change, and sustainable mechanisms to maintain school toilets seem necessary.     

The Cost of Empowerment: Multiple Sources of Women’s Debt in Rural India

Abstract

Poor women borrow from multiple sources. This study examines whether the source of debt matters for women’s role in household financial decisions. Drawing on a household survey from rural Tamil Nadu, we categorise women’s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into ‘planned loans’ and ‘instant loans’. We find that ‘instant loans’ support women’s bargaining power in various types of household financial decisions, whereas ‘planned loans’ have no impact. This surprising result is better understood when the nature of ‘instant loans’ is examined – these are frequently usurious, involve coercive enforcement methods and are considered socially debasing. Hence women who use them perform a convenient role for their households and in return gain some negotiating power.     

Drones and the uninsurable security subjects

This paper engages with the security dynamics underlying the use of drones and their impact on security subjects – individuals and groups that are the ultimate recipients of specific security policies, regardless of whether these have beneficial effects on them. Using Mark Duffield’s distinction between the insured Global North and the non-insured Global South, this paper discusses how drones generate a radical dissociation between the intervener and the intervened that ultimately produces new security environments at the margins of the international system. These new security environments are defined by the articulation between space, technologies and bodies: bodies of invisible subjects; bodies that are uninsurable.     

Policy Diffusion,Policy Learning and Local Politics: Macroprudential Policy in Hungary and Slovakia*

This article explains why certain Central and Eastern European states adopted macroprudential policies of local design that went beyond what European Union and International Monetary Fund authorities had recommended after the global financial crisis. We argue that macroprudential policies increase state control not only because of their inherent normative view on the inefficiency of markets, but also because governments use macroprudential policy to enhance state power. We show that macroprudential tools have often been used to satisfy local policymakers’ own agendas: financial nationalism in Hungary and protectionism in Slovakia.     

International Migration: Pacifier or Trigger for Military Conflicts?

Whereas the impact of trade relations on conflict has been studied extensively, this is not the case for the impact of international migration. The latter might influence the size of expected costs and benefits, and hence the likelihood of military conflict between countries. In this paper, we discuss the channels through which bilateral migration can affect the prevalence of interstate military conflict. We then estimate migration’s impact on conflict using bilateral panel data between 1960–2000. We find evidence of a positive and robust impact of South-North and South-South migration on the occurrence of conflict. These effects are even larger when we control for potential endogeneity using a GMM approach.