查看更多>>摘要：Given the ongoing debate on the relationship between institutions and entrepreneurship, this study aims to better understand the joint effects of two country-level formal institutions, government effectiveness and political freedom, and whether the informal institution of religiosity moderates this relationship. To achieve this goal, the current study used multiple datasets, including the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), World Governance Indicators (WGIs), and the WIN-Gallup International Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism. The data cover 85 countries from 2010 to 2017. The results suggest that the rate of entrepreneurial activity across nations is shaped by the interplay between formal and informal institutions. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
查看更多>>摘要：Rural poverty poses a significant developmental challenge in Kenya. Using a panel survey in rural Kenya and qualitative material from focus groups and life history interviews from the regions of Makueni and Vihiga, we investigate the changing role of how agriculture and farming practices have contributed to sustained escapes from poverty since 2000. In this study we analyse environmental, social and personal structures that facilitate conversion of agricultural strategies that enable poverty escapes in the context of climate change. Our study identifies that agriculture still forms an essential aspect of Kenyan house-holds' economic and social wellbeing. However, the study results indicate that links between accumula-tion of assets and poverty escapes are ambiguous, poor households find it problematic to convert agricultural strategies into a profit, and climate change shocks further exasperate these difficulties. We argue that constraints in conversion structures, such as limited infrastructure, and in conversion pro-cesses such as ongoing difficulties in land procurement and inheritance, unsustainable farming practices and continued lack of knowledge on climate-smart agriculture affect not only poverty escapes, but also the ability to adapt to and mitigate against environmental shocks. Development of conversion processes to improve existing conversion structures should be at the core of public interventions that seek to sus-tainably reduce poverty amidst climate change in rural Kenya. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
查看更多>>摘要：Both policymakers and scholars have suggested that informal land tenure contributes to the perpetuation of illicit drug crop cultivation and, conversely, that land formalization programs serve counternarcotics aims. This article examines some of the key causal mechanisms said to underlie the posited relationship between land tenure (in)formality and the cultivation of crops used for illicit drug production. Our anal-ysis is grounded in the context of Puerto Asis, Colombia - one of the most important coca-producing municipalities in a country that produces the majority of the world's cocaine. The case study is based on extensive fieldwork in Puerto Asis, including in-depth interviews with peasants who cultivate(d) coca, community leaders and local officials. We found: (i) that informal and semiformal institutions provide a basic level of land tenure security for both those with and without state-recognized property titles; (ii) that peasants invest considerable amounts of money and labor in their farms and community infrastruc-tures, despite lacking formal land titles; (iii) that coca cultivation itself is a comparatively costly invest-ment, with eighteen months minimum before payback; (iv) that peasants' access to credit is not conditioned on them having a formal land title; (v) that bank loans do not make people less dependent on coca cultivation; and that (vi) farmers find it difficult to survive with legal livelihoods and thus per-manently exit the coca economy for a long list of reasons, which are not addressed via land titling and registration programs. These findings are contrary to popular policy narratives. We conclude that formal titles are an important tool for Colombian peasant farmers to defend their land against powerful external actors but will not necessarily serve the purposes commonly presented in the literature on illicit drugs. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Medina, Gabriel da SilvaPokorny, BennoCampbell, Bruce
12页
查看更多>>摘要：Amazonian communities can greatly benefit from the forest resources they hold by setting up community-governed management systems that reflect their interests and capacities. But, to tap this potential, communities face three major challenges: to develop the systems, to enforce them, and to have their systems acknowledged by the wider society. To better understand under which circumstances com-munities succeed in mastering these three challenges, this study carried out in-depth research of four communities in the Bolivian, Brazilian, and Peruvian Amazon that demonstrated promising governance systems for the management of their natural resources. Our analysis revealed that the studied commu-nities started to develop regulatory systems when attempting to restrict access by external players to resources of local value. In circumstances of conflicts with external players, such as logging companies, commercial fishermen, or cattle ranchers, the communities became organized to enforce their systems. Where the communities' representative organizations formed alliances with more powerful partners who could assist them, such as environmental organizations, they had their systems acknowledged. These findings suggest that autonomous relationships with external players (in contrast to dependent paternalistic relationships) can support communities' development. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
查看更多>>摘要：Economic shocks are commonly linked with domestic violence. This paper looks at how India's workfare program mediates the effect of income shocks on domestic violence. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) guarantees 100 days of employment to rural households and acts as a form of insurance. Using the phased implementation of MGNREGS across districts in India from 2006 to 2008, I employ a difference-in-differences strategy to show that the introduction of the MGNREGS mitigates the effect of adverse rainfall shocks on officially reported domestic violence crimes at the district level by 8 to 22 percent. Using complementary household data from the India Human Development Survey, I explore the mediating effect of the MGNREGS on rainfall shocks and possible increases in women's empowerment. There are positive effects of participating in the scheme on women's freedom of mobility but inconclusive evidence on women's say in household decisions. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Boruchowicz, CynthiaParker, Susan W.Robbins, Lindsay
13页
查看更多>>摘要：Studying how the pandemic affects the education and work of adolescents is a critical question with long lasting implications for well-being of the next generation, particularly in the developing world. The Covid-19 pandemic by mid-March 2020 had led to the closing of most educational institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the region has been one of the worst hit by the pandemic (Sanmarchi et al., 2021). This paper uses the Mexican National Occupation and Employment Survey (ENOE) to provide evidence on the pandemic's effects on school and work of youth. We measure changes in the time use of adolescents comparing patterns just before the pandemic (January to March 2020) with those at the beginning of the following school year (September 2020), controlling for pre pandemic trends and potential seasonality. Our study finds a sharp reduction in the probability of being engaged in studies during the previous week for youth age 12 to 18 during the pandemic, as well as a reduction of about 30 percent in total hours spent on studies for those who report spending at least one hour on studies in the previous week. Time in work in general shows fewer changes than in time dedicated to studies, with some reductions in the probability of working outside the home for older youth, and a small increase in the number of hours dedicated to work inside the household. Our results overall are suggestive of an important decrease in youth who are engaged with school, who may be at particular risk for abandoning school permanently. It also suggests that even for those who remain engaged, there is a reduction on time spent studying likely to lead to a decrease in learning. Policies to combat potential dropout and negative effects on learning of the pandemic are urgently needed. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Bolch, Kimberly B.Ceriani, LidiaLopez-Calva, Luis F.
23页
查看更多>>摘要：The Addis Ababa Action Agenda stresses the importance of effective resource mobilization and use of domestic resources to pursue sustainable development. The first Sustainable Development Goal is to eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere by 2030. This paper explores how feasible it would be for developing countries to achieve the goal of eradicating poverty using only domestic resources, given their current tax base and political equilibrium. To answer this question, we propose two new met-rics: a Poverty Eradication Capacity Index and a Political Influence Concentration Index. The first metric looks at the "arithmetics" of the issue, and uses an accounting approach to assess whether the existing tax base is rich enough to end poverty through monetary redistribution. The second metric looks at the "politics" of the issue, and approximates the degree to which political power is concentrated among the rich-fol-lowing the notion that a high concentration of power would likely hinder the effective implementation of fiscal policies (in terms of both revenue collection and social spending). We calculate these two metrics using data for over 120 developing countries, and find that: (i) a large proportion of countries simply do not have an affluent enough tax base to finance their own poverty eradication through redistribution; (ii) countries with the same arithmetic capacity to mobilize resources for poverty eradication differ widely in terms of the political feasibility of such policies; and (iii) a higher capacity for poverty eradication and a lower concentration of political influence is associated with a higher collection of tax revenue as a share of GDP. These results suggest that countries facing binding arithmetic and/or political constraints may need to complement domestic resources with foreign aid in the short-term. Such financial flows, how-ever, should be designed to support the reduction of these constraints in the long-term. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
查看更多>>摘要：Nowadays, public health and sustainable development go hand in hand towards the renovated percep-tion of the former. Indeed, "ensuring healthy lives and promoting the well-being for all at all ages", which established one of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), seeks to ensure that this conception is not only reinforced, but also that saving lives takes into account the physical, mental, and social well-being of populations whose "development meets the needs of the present without com-promising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Accordingly, it is useful to interpret and convey information pertaining to this multidimensional concept in a way that encapsulates all its facets. Since this can be achieved through a composite indicator (CI), we propose a sustainable public health index framework, based on the 13 targets of the UN's SDG 3 between 2016 and 2020. For this rea-son, using the popular CI-generating 'Benefit-of-the-Doubt' approach while considering desirable and undesirable indicators, we apply this framework to 181 World Health Organization Member States. We show that, from 2016 to 2020, less than 28% of them remained efficient and the European Region clearly dominated the remaining regions, which tended to decrease their performance, on average. Finally, we also reveal the global efforts towards improving the Proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel and the Density of medical doctors per 10,000 population, and the failure in achieving an acceptable Neonatal mortality rate, Under-five mortality rate, and a Number of people requiring interven-tions against neglected tropical diseases. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
查看更多>>摘要：The expansion of Latin America's palm oil frontier has spurred an explosion of interest in the social and environmental impacts of palm oil production. Researchers have been particularly focused on the effec-tiveness of global sustainability certification standards in addressing induced vulnerabilities. Only a small fraction of this research, however, analyzes how the local institutionalization of global standards has shaped national and sub-national structures of environmental governance, or regional conceptualizations of authority. It also fails to examine how the entrenchment of global standards has reworked local social relations inhering within formal and informal palm oil governing arrangements. To address these gaps, this paper draws on the case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Ecuador to answer the following research questions: 1) How does the local introduction and institutionalization of RSPO standards (re)shape national and sub-national environmental governance structures and relations? 2) How do RSPO standards reconfigure long-standing notions of power and authority? Drawing on extended fieldwork, the paper finds that the introduction of RSPO standards has prompted three major shifts in domestic palm oil governance. These shifts are: 1) technicalization of community-company relations, 2) hybridization of governance coalitions 3) regionalization of governance efforts. Taken together, these transformations point to an emerging transnational hybrid governance regime that blends public laws with private guidelines to reach national and international sustainability objectives. The regime has enabled the emergence of new palm governance authorities in the sector yet at the same time, it has rein-scribed the uneven power relations of palm oil governance. The study concludes that future research and policy efforts must go beyond simply evaluating RSPO standards in local spaces, and instead aim to improve the social relations that exist within agro-commodity chains in order to make the governance of sustainable palm oil more socially-inclusive and just. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
查看更多>>摘要：Although progress has been made in addressing hunger and poor diets in African cities, many urban residents still suffer from food insecurity, and there is large heterogeneity within cities. We examine spatial variations in hunger and dietary quality using a representative study of 983 households and 440 food retailers in a South African secondary city. Substantial variation existed both between and within urban neighborhoods: high-income neighborhoods were not free of hunger, and low-income neighborhoods varied in diet quality according to individual characteristics. After controlling for income and gender, individual characteristics including access to consumer technologies for food transportation and storage, and informal food assistance from neighbors, were protective against hunger and poor quality diets. Results suggest that meaningful variations exist at smaller geographic units than the city-level or neighborhood-level statistics typically reported in food security research. Average socioeconomic status of neighborhoods may not be a sufficient proxy for their food insecurity, as poor areas vary substantially in their food access options and food choices. Precision estimates of hunger and poor diets are needed to target interventions at those neighborhoods and those households with the greatest need, and to tailor interventions for the specific and different needs of urban residents within neighborhoods. (c) 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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