How do Rural Labour Markets Respond to Shocks?
By Ralitza Dimova
The occupational portfolio choice of small farmers in rural environments is among the most high profile areas of research and policy debate in development economics. One key focus area is the choice between relatively risk-free – though less profitable – activities such as subsistence farming and higher-risk and higher return activities like livestock and cash crop production. The consensus is that relatively asset-poor and risk-averse households are likely to opt for subsistence farming and out of higher value cash crop alternatives, thus potentially going down the slope of further destitution. By contrast, off-farm (especially non-agricultural) labour market opportunities tend to be seen as an escape route for farmers out of poverty, especially in the event of shocks. However, most of the related literature highlights lack of availability of such opportunities for households that have failed to reach a certain wealth and education threshold. In both cases, the policy advice is in favour of asset reallocation from relatively wealthier to relatively asset poor households.
‘Rising Powers’, Responsible Consumption, and Standards
By Development @ Manchester,
Two journal articles involving Manchester Rising Powers research have been included in a free online article collection featuring the most downloaded articles published in Routledge Social Sciences journals in 2014.
The links between employment and development
By Ralitza Dimova
Approximately 200 million people around the world are actively looking for work; if they formed their own country, it would be the fifth largest in the world.[i] [ii] Developing countries account for more than half of these people. The number of those who neither work nor look for work in these countries is in the hundred millions, while among those working, the majority hold occupations in farming, small household enterprises or in casual or seasonal day labour. Their labour productivity is between 10 and 40% of that in advanced economies.
Development in 2015
By David Hulme,
As we enter 2015, Professor David Hulme looks ahead to the next twelve months in international development as the Millennium Development Goals come to an end and plans take shape for the next phase.
Dispatch from Lima: Seven Trends We Spotted at UN Climate Talks
By Lauren Gifford and Jonas Bruun
Two veterans of UN climate talks cut through the jargon and tell us what’s new and trending at this year’s summit in Lima, Peru.
(Photo: cancilleriadeperu / Flickr)
Paths to development: Is there a Bangladesh surprise?
By
Bangladesh’s economy has recorded remarkable economic performance in the new millennium, though its per capita income has remained low. Even more spectacular has been the steady improvement in its levels of many social development outcomes. Popular commentaries have drawn comparisons with India and Pakistan in highlighting the significance of Bangladesh’s development achievements. This phenomenon has been termed as the “Bangladesh conundrum,” and has received extensive coverage in international media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal.
Swimming Alone? The Role of Social Capital for Enhancing Climate Resilience in Bangladesh
By Joanne Jordan
Social capital is becoming increasingly recognised as having a key role in enhancing resilience to climate stress. Joanne Jordan, Lecturer in Climate Change and Development at IDPM, considers in a paper recently published in Climate and Development, the relative importance of different types of social capital for enhancing resilience, by exploring how relationships of exchange and reciprocity influence responses to climate stress in South-west Bangladesh. Specifically, she identifies four types of social capital-based support (with monetary support as a subset) and the interlinkages among the types (and processes) of social capital with diverse effects on resilience to climate stress.
Policies for youth employment: What can we learn from Lord Sugar’s The Apprentice?
By Nicola Banks
The Apprentice is one of my TV highlights. Watching through open fingers as Lord Alan Sugar tries to find his next business partner amongst a bunch of hapless contestants makes one thing very clear: No amount of self-belief can make you a successful entrepreneur. Enthusiasm can’t make up for a lack of customer awareness or critical business skills…watching James ‘Multiple Business Owner’ Hill singing The Wheels on the Bus while his tour customers groaned and threw tomatoes (not literally) is one of countless comedic illustrations of this.
Band Aid Thirty, the IMF and the call to trust the doctor!
By Tanja Müller
Of course something was to happen for the 3oth anniversary of Band Aid, and the recent Ebola epidemic provided an opportunity too good to miss for self-obsessed Geldof and company! I will not engage here with the wider critique of the Band Aid approach to ‘Africa’, and have in fact done so in a blog long before the Band Aid 30 announcement and recording.
Band Aid 30: ‘Buy the song. Stop the virus’. Just don’t ask how.
By Róisín Read
Since Bob Geldof announced he was re-recording ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ the media has seized upon the opportunity to report on every minutiae of celebrity involvement. From whether the BBC would excuse Rita Ora from The Voice (they did), to Adele’s non-involvement (she made a donation to Oxfam instead), to Damon Albarn questioning western ideas of charity, to Fuse ODG’s discomfort with the negative portrayal of Africa, the media has seize upon each new titbit, eager to stir up a storm.
I am not intending to add to the multitude of voices challenging Band Aid for its portrayal of Africa, musical quality, or even the tax records of those involvement (though I share many of these concerns). My concern here is more mundane: how will the money be spent? Or more accurately why no one seems concerned by the lack of information about how the money will be spent.
At first I just tried to ignore Band Aid, but that proved impossible. Every time I turned on the news, listened to the radio or looked at a news website, I encountered articles and features aplenty telling me that Band Aid was raising money to fight Ebola in West Africa. The first couple of times I heard or read this I let it go, but with Bob Geldof’s interview on the Today programme that changed. I waited, listening for that all important question: how would the money be spent? It never came and my #bandaidrage began to simmer.
That morning, I endeavoured to find out. After an hour of searching, the best information available was from the terms and conditions section of the Band Aid 30 website (slogan: ‘Buy the song. Stop the virus’) telling me that ‘All proceeds from the Band Aid 30 competition will be donated to the intervention and prevention of the spread of Ebola’, and on the donations page more helpful information that ‘This year the Band Aid Trust will administer funds from #BandAid30 towards efforts to fight the spread of Ebola and to care for its victims’. Leaving aside the confused reference to proceeds being part of a ‘competition’, I am still in the dark about how the money raised will actually be spent.
The Band Aid Trust’s mandate is apparently the ‘relief of hunger and poverty in Ethiopia and the neighbourhood thereof’. Only a very generous interpretation of this mandate would allow for the fighting of Ebola in West Africa to be included. Furthermore, from the information on the website, there is no commitment that the money will be spent in or even on West Africa.
So, why aren’t the media and the Band Aid buying public asking how the money will be spent? I’ve only encountered two such instances, Laura Seay on The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and Nigerian musician Breeze interviewed on Radio 4’s The World Tonight. The DEC Ebola Crisis Appeal makes clear which organisations it will pass the donated funds onto, people can look into those organisations and make an informed decision about whether they want to contribute to those activities. With Band Aid, they do not have this option. We don’t even have an idea of the timeframe in which the funds will be spent.
This is blind giving at its very worst. Band Aid has replaced the act of giving to an organisation in support of a cause with a transaction. We have been told in no uncertain terms by Geldof, that it doesn’t matter whether we like the song, we should just buy it anyway. It seems it doesn’t matter if we don’t know how the money will be spent either. The problem with this is that it suggests the act of giving is what matters, when actually it is the outcome that counts.
I think Breeze summed it up pretty well on Radio 4’s The World Tonight:
Breeze: ‘We don’t actually know if the funds that are going to be raised, are going to actually go to the right places. Are they going to get to the organisations that are on the ground, that are actually doing all the hard work in the countries?’
Ritula Shah: ‘We have to hope that that’s the intention’
Breeze: ‘Well, this is it. We have to hope and that’s part of the problem, there’s no transparency’.
My #bandaidrage isn’t just at Bob Geldof and the Band Aid Trust. It’s at the media and the public who seem unconcerned about a huge fundraising exercise with no concrete information about how the money will be spent. As a fundraising initiative #BandAid30 has proved very successful. We have to hope that its spending of that money will be successful too.
This post was originally published at: http://www.blog.hcri.ac.uk/?p=1219