Suchergebnisse

Are adverse sex ratios in India largely due to intra-household discrimination of females? Received wisdom holds that the answer is 'yes'. We have two reasons to doubt this. First, we show that poverty is associated with better, not worse, sex ratios in India. Second, we quantify the number of missing women in India due to its actual sex ratio at birth and find that it is considerably larger than the number due to excess postnatal female mortality. We estimate that between 25 and 40 per cent of missing women as conventionally computed is due to excess postnatal female mortality. Our findings taken together suggest that the masculinity of the birth ratio is positively associated with socio-economic status. Factors that may account for this association include parental lifestyle and disease, a higher incidence of sex-selective abortions among richer groups, and a sex-neutral reduction in foetal wastage as maternal well-being improves. None of these factors reflect female discrimination within the household, and 'missing women' is, therefore, potentially seriously biased as an indicator of the lethal consequences of intra-household discrimination.

AbstractRecent literature reports that foreign aid contributes to economic growth when economic policies are good. This paper claims that aid can contribute not just to growth but also to pro‐poor growth, through increasing the responsiveness of social indicators to economic growth. The empirical evidence we present is in favour of this claim, suggesting that both aid itself and a recipient government's budget share allocated to social services tend to increase the (absolute) size of the income elasticity of poverty and infant mortality, and that, moreover, aid tends to increase this budget share. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In the aftermath of civil war or violent internal conflict, one of the key peacebuilding challenges is the reconciliation of former enemies who are members of the same small-scale societies. A failure of social reintegration may contribute to what is known as a conflict trap. To detect lingering hostile attitudes among a community's various factions is crucial, but the approaches adopted in previous studies tend to focus on the impact of conflict on one or other aggregated indicator of social cohesion rather than on how violence-affected individuals regard and act towards their fellow community members. Here we demonstrate the value of concentrating on this latter dyadic component of social interactions and we use behavioural experiments and a social tie survey to assess, in an appropriately disaggregated manner, social cohesion in a post-conflict setting in northern Uganda. Whereas in self-reported surveys, ex-combatants appear to be well-connected, active members of their communities, the experiments unveil the continued reluctance of other community members to share or cooperate with them; fewer resources are committed to ex-combatants than to others, which is statistically significant. The dyadic nature of our analysis allows us to detect which groups are more prone to discriminate against ex-combatants, which may help facilitate targeted interventions.