World Development Perspectives最新文献

In 2021, the Government of Ghana sparked controversy by introducing the Electronic Transactions Levy (E-Levy) as part of an aggressive programme of revenue mobilisation in response to the debt-induced economic crisis that swept through the Global South in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper contributes to the literature on the politics of economic crisis by demonstrating the consequences of prioritising revenue mobilisation over social protection during times of economic shocks. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a range of respondents, we argue that the outrage triggered by the introduction of the E-levy was rooted in longstanding grievances against the lack of reciprocity in citizen-state relations and an apparent breakdown of the fiscal contract. The tax provoked denunciatory narratives of economic mismanagement and government insensitivity, thereby underscoring the crisis of political legtimacy in Ghana. By ‘loosening the safety net’ and ‘tightening the tax net’ at a time when the country was battling an economic crisis and still grappling with the fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government created the conditions that exacerbated the already fraught citizen-state relations. Given the low tax morale, citizens are actively adopting various strategies to avoid paying the tax, including reverting to the use of cash and reducing the value and frequency of transactions.

Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the levels of GDP per capita that currently characterise high-income countries. However, this would require increasing total global output and resource use several times over, dramatically exacerbating ecological breakdown. Furthermore, universal convergence along these lines is unlikely within the imperialist structure of the existing world economy. Here we demonstrate that this dilemma can be resolved with a different approach, rooted in recent needs-based analyses of poverty and development. Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production should be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries. With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large increases in total global throughput and output. Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to provision public services, to deploy efficient technology, and to build sovereign industrial capacity in the global South.

Despite the importance of traders in Agricultural Value Chains (AVCs), empirical evidence about the interaction and networking between them and farmers in producing countries is scant. The role of traders in general, and exporters in particular, in championing sustainability goals and enhancing the resilience of AVCs is rarely addressed in the literature, as they are usually depicted as unproductive and predatory brokers that increase price gaps between farmers and consumers. This paper focuses on the case of the coffee sector in Colombia and the governance mechanisms in the segment Farmers − Export Companies (ECs) for the adoption of Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSSs) oriented to spur environmental, economic, and social sustainability practices in AVCs. By conducting semi-structured interviews and Process Net-Maps, an innovative method for analyzing governance challenges in agriculture, four governance schemes between farmers and ECs were identified, entailing different degrees of centralization and support provided by the EC. Each scheme was the result of the type of supplier available in coffee growing zones (individual farmers, informal groups of farmers, coffee grower associations, or a mix of these suppliers known as ‘baskets’) and the level of trust among actors. The paper hypothesizes that hybrid forms of coordination in the segment ranging from markets to vertical integration, the combination of different procurement strategies, a phenomenon known as plural forms, and complex incentive structures to adopt sustainability practices enhance both the implementation of sustainability approaches and resilience.

The objective of this paper is to review an existing tool for geographic targeting of food and nutrition security interventions, take stock of the latest methodological advances, and propose three extensions to help inform food system transformation policies in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Whereas the first extension pursues a broader and more comprehensive perspective, the second and third extensions aim to accommodate the dynamic nature of food systems and the need of policymakers to analyze trade-offs between competing interventions. Compared to other (potential) food system methods, the main added value of the proposed tool resides in its flexible but integrated analytical framework combined with its focus on sub-national areas, both which allow for the design of discretionary regional policies in challenging data environments. Drawing on key lessons from fourteen African country applications, the analytical and policy relevance of this spatial tool is illustrated and areas of further research and improvement are discussed.

We investigate long-term outcomes related to social mobility and their determinants for low-income Brazilian households. More precisely, the first cohorts of beneficiaries of the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program Bolsa Família (BFP); children aged between 7 and 16 in 2005, who are tracked for over a decade, until 2019. We use individual-level administrative data to analyze our two indicators of social mobility: (i) future emancipation from federal government social programs, and (ii) access to the formal labor market. We observe that formerly vulnerable children, beneficiaries of the CCT, find themselves in better socioeconomic conditions in adulthood. While 64 % of them, aged between 21 and 30 years in 2019, were no longer beneficiaries of federal government social programs, 45 % accessed the formal labor market at least once between 2015 and 2019. We also compare the characteristics of the formal employment they access with those of non-BFP beneficiaries during the same period. They have worse employment conditions, although better than informal positions typical of their parents. Furthermore, we investigate the association between local sociodemographic characteristics and individual social mobility. We find significant territorial heterogeneity associated with differences in better health and education infrastructures, and local economic activity.

Research on how the COVID-19 lockdown affected gender-based violence (GBV) focused largely on the negative effects of the lockdown on GBV. Using a multinomial probit model, this paper assessed the effects of the lockdown on GBV and the determinants of these effects in Northern Uganda. The results show that the lockdown reduced and increased GBV in some cases, but it had negligible effects in other cases. These effects were determined by many factors depending on how they related to economic and food insecurity. Household heads with higher education levels experienced job losses and increased GBV, but those with savings had less food insecurity and GBV. Members of VSLA that were disrupted by the lockdown faced severe economic insecurity, but members of the undisrupted VSLA experienced less economic security and GBV. Households with many earning members suffered more job losses and increased GBV, but those having own houses faced no rent burden and less GBV. Farm households experienced less effects of the lockdown and no change in GBV. Rural households and those far from the main road experienced less stringent lockdowns and GBV, but those that faced financial constraints had more GBV cases. Farm households had less severe food insecurity and GBV. Household heads earning wages and salary had lower household sizes and GBV cases. The paper implies a need for pandemic mitigation measures to balance their health benefits with socio-economic costs, overcome economic insecurity, and consider socio-economic differences. GBV was viewed as a uniform entity, but future studies need to explore the effects of pandemics on different forms of GBV.

Many farmers in developing countries lack the knowledge to solve farming challenges, so improving their access to information is believed to address this issue. Prior research has primarily focused on analysing social networks but has overlooked the role of supply chain networks, which farmers depend on for production, marketing, and financial matters. This study aims at understanding the role of supply chain actors in the information networks of farmer organisations in developing countries. Multiple case studies were conducted in two farmer organisations in Indonesia, one small and the other large. This study included both quantitative data gathered through surveys and qualitative information obtained from FGD. This study found that the majority of farmer organisation members rely on their peers within social networks to acquire agricultural production-related information. Within supply chain networks, farmers depend on local traders for market and financial information, despite the asymmetric information in their relationships. In addition, local production input shops are the primary sources for agricultural production-related information. Agricultural extension agents mainly contribute to disseminating information regarding government programmes. This study also indicates that a small farmer organisation has a closer relationship with its farmer members in terms of information sharing. Meanwhile, a large farmer organisation provides its members with a wider range of information from external sources while still maintaining the closed relationships between members through sub-organisations. The findings suggest that the government should focus on enhancing the knowledge of local supply chain actors in order to efficiently disseminate information to farmers.

In the Amazon, invited multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) have been organised by governments to engage civil society with policy and decision making. Given the unequal histories of access to resources in the region, in contexts where mainstream politics have failed to include local people and rights concerns in environmental decision-making, there is much optimism regarding the potential for collaboration in invited MSFs. Yet, questions remain on whether they are more than bureaucratic steps organised to legitimise pre-approved government decisions. The article presents comparative insight from interviews with 208 organisers, participants, and nonparticipant stakeholders to four invited MSFs that were legally required decision-making spaces for land and resource use planning in jurisdictions of the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon. Although the same type of forum was selected in each country, research revealed different processes and outcomes based on how organisers framed their challenges and solutions. This impacted who was invited to participate, and under what terms, including the knowledge they were able to bring to the process. Examining their processes, the article examines challenges in the conception and implementation of forums and the possibility of refocusing MSF activities to better support the inclusion of civil society perspectives in policy and decision making.

This study investigates the effects of microfinance on entrepreneurial activity and household welfare among women borrowers in rural Pakistan. Using survey data from 463 clients of multiple microfinance institutions and propensity score matching methods, we find that women who invest their loans in microenterprises experience significantly higher income, clothing expenditures, poverty scores, and income diversification compared to those who use loans for other purposes. However, we do not observe increases in health and education spending or reductions in child labour among entrepreneurial borrowers. The results highlight the potential for microfinance to stimulate women’s entrepreneurship and improve economic conditions in rural Pakistani households, but also underscore the limitations in promoting human capital investment. We discuss implications for enhancing microfinance interventions to support holistic welfare improvements for women entrepreneurs in Pakistan and beyond.

By 2035, the International Energy Agency predicts that $48 trillion will need invested to meet global energy needs, with at least half of these amounts needed to be funneled into renewable electricity sources and energy efficiency efforts. The energy transition is an important dimension of a global climate change mitigation strategy. Using open data on transnational mining deals from the Land Matrix Initiative, we display the current transnational mining network with patterns of concentration and new forms of dependencies between investing and target countries. Using different global development metrics, we also characterize the context within which the mining network is embedded in. Beyond geopolitical concerns and the reconfiguration of power relations in international arenas, the energy transition raises issues of environmental justice. In this study, we clearly display distributive injustices with inequitable distribution of costs, with target countries supporting most of the social and environmental costs of resource extraction in areas marked by land and food insecurity and instability in terms of governance.