Suchergebnisse

India's 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Work is provided in public works projects at the stipulated minimum wage. This study asks: Are the conditions stipulated by the Act met in practice? How much impact on poverty do the earnings from the scheme have? Why might that impact fall short of its potential? How can the scheme bridge that gap? The bulk of the study focuses on the scheme's performance in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where one would hope that a scheme such as this would help reduce poverty. The study finds that the scheme is falling well short of its potential impact on poverty in Bihar. Analysis of the study's survey data points to a number of reasons. Workers are not getting all the work they want, and they are not getting the full wages due. And participation in the scheme is far from costless to them. Many report that they had to give up some other income-earning activity when they took up work. The unmet demand for work is the single most important policy-relevant factor in accounting for the gap between actual performance and the scheme's potential impact on poverty. The study finds that there is very low public awareness of what needs to be done to obtain work. The study uses a randomized control trial of an awareness intervention—a specially designed fictional movie—to show how knowledge of rights and processes can be enhanced, as a key step toward better performance. While the movie was effective in raising awareness, it had little discernible effect on actions such as seeking employment when needed. This suggests that supply-side constraints must also be addressed, in addition to raising public awareness. A number of specific supply-side constraints to work provision are identified, including poor implementation capacity, weak financial management and monitoring systems.

Collection of four articles on the concept, measurement and monitoring of poverty, the limited impact of the rapid rate of growth in Bangladesh agriculture on the distribution of income or alleviating poverty in the rural areas of this country, critique of some official estimates which show a dramatic decline in poverty in Bangladesh in the 1980s and analysis of a remarkable change that has occurred in the structure of the labour force in the rural areas of this country and the relationship of this change to the recent trends in poverty. (DÜI-Sen)

Enhält Rezensionen u.a. von: Attacking poverty : what makes growth pro-poor / Ed.: Michael Krakowski. - Baden-Baden : Nomos, 2004

In a global environment of increasing species extinctions and decreasing availability of funds with which to combat the causes of biodiversity loss, maximising the efficiency of conservation efforts is crucial. The only way to ensure maximum return on conservation investment is to incorporate the cost, benefit and likelihood of success of conservation actions into decision-making in a systematic and objective way. Here we report on the application of a Project Prioritization Protocol (PPP), first implemented by the New Zealand Government, to target and prioritize investment in threatened species in New South Wales, Australia, under the state's new Saving our Species program. Detailed management prescriptions for 368 threatened species were developed via an expert elicitation process, and were then prioritized using quantitative data on benefit, likelihood of success and implementation cost, and a simple cost-efficiency equation. We discuss the outcomes that have been realized even in the early stages of the program; including the efficient development of planning resources made available to all potential threatened species investors and the demonstration of a transparent and objective approach to threatened species management that will significantly increase the probability of meeting an objective to secure the greatest number of threatened species from extinction.