Search results for " poverty"
showing 10 items of 283 documents
Higher education in the fight against poverty from the capabilities approach: The case of Spain
2017
Abstract This article describes relative poverty in Spain in relation to the other States in the European Union, following the European indicator AROPE. The official data provided by the National Statistical Institute of Spain and by Eurostat, refer to the year 2014 (the last one for which definitive data are available is 2015). Given the relative poverty of Spanish population, the failure of conventional economic theories, which conceive social development as GDP growth, is clear, and it is argued in favour of the human capabilities approach as a more adequate option for development, from a theoretical-practical point of view, for the reduction and/or eradication of poverty, as well as the…
Income Inequality and Technology Diffusion: Evidence from Developing Countries*
2011
We study the effect of within-country income inequality on the diffusion of mobile phones using data on market penetration in a sample of developing countries from 1985 to 1998. Mobile phones are an example of international technology, originating in industrialized countries and diffusing worldwide. We find that income inequality, as measured by the income share of the highest earning deciles, has a positive effect on the early diffusion of mobile phones and that the estimated effect becomes greater when a measure of agricultural endowments is used as an instrument. The instrumental variable results are robust to weak instruments. Our findings suggest that the diffusion of new technologies …
Are private schools more efficient than public schools ? Evidence from Tanzania
2001
International audience; Beginning in the mid-1980s, there has been an explosive growth of private secondary schools in Tanzania. By easing constraints on private operators, the government has clearly found an effective way in the context of right public budget constraints to cope with the excess demand for this level of schooling. But has the policy also led to efficient operations in terms of student learning ? In this paper, we attempt to shed light on this issue by comparing the efficiency of four types of schools that make up the majority of schools in the country : Government and Community schools in the public sector, and Chirstian and Wazazi schools in the private sector. Using longi…
Small business and entrepreneurship: their role in economic and social development
2017
Since the 1980s, small business owners and entrepreneurs have been receiving greater recognition as drivers of economic growth. Recently, several studies (Forsman 2011; McKeever, Anderson, and Jack...
Implementing a Negative Income Tax. Net Cost, Poverty and Inequality Effects
2019
The main aim of this paper is to propose a financially viable alternative to the current Spanish system of social protection: A Negative Income Tax (NIT) unifying in a single mechanism the system of public benefits and income tax. We analyse the main characteristics of the NIT and simulate several NIT proposals for Spain, using the Living Conditions Survey. These proposals are distinct in that they do not suppose an additional cost in the tax-benefit system. The results of our simulations indicate a radical improvement in the indicators of poverty and inequality, especially extreme poverty, and also a redistribution of income from the elderly to families with children.
The importance of consecutive spells of poverty: a path-dependent index of longitudinal poverty
2011
In this paper we propose a new index of individual poverty in the longitudinal perspective, taking into account the way poverty and non-poverty spells follow one another along individual life courses. The Poverty Persistence Index (PPI) is based on all the pairwise distances between the waves of poverty. The PPI is normalized and it assigns a higher degree of (longitudinal) poverty to people who experience poverty in consecutive, rather than separated, periods, for whom the distances from the poverty line are larger along time and moreover, when the worst years are consecutive and/or recent. We also propose an aggregate index of persistence in poverty (APPI) in order to measure the distribu…
How do Banking Crises Impact on Income Inequality?
2012
We show that banking crises have an important effect on income distribution: inequality increases before banking crisis episodes and sharply declines afterwards. We also find that, while a large government size does not per se seem to reduce inequality, a rise in financial depth (i.e. better access to credit provided by the banking sector) contributes to a more equal distribution of income.
Does one size fit all? The impact of cognitive skills on economic growth
2016
Les Documents de Travail de l'IREDU, n°2016-1; This paper tests for heterogeneous effects of cognitive skills on economic growth across countries. Using a new extended dataset on cognitive skills and controlling for potential endogeneity, we find that the magnitude of the effect is about 60 per cent higher for low-income countries compared to high-income countries, and it more than doubles when low TFP countries are compared to high TFP countries. There are also marked differences across geographic regions. Using data on the share of the population with advanced and minimum skill levels, our results also indicate that high-income countries should focus on increasing the number of high skill…
Local development through social and territorial innovation: an exploratory case study
2017
This investigation aims to examine innovation in a selected successful Portuguese social venture (The Cooperative Terra Chã) and to analyse the extent to which innovative social ventures are able to contributeto local development. Specifically, the paper highlights the activities developed by the social organization in response to the needs of particular (micro) segments of society and illustrates which key factors triggered thesuccess of the examined social initiative. A case study methodology is used to describe the distinctive characteristics and strategies pursued by the managers of the social venture and to establish the links between the opportunities for social innovation and the ter…
Fiscal adjustments, labour market flexibility and unemployment
2014
Using a panel of 17 countries for 1978-2009, we find that tax-driven consolidations increase unemployment by 0.25 percentage points. Labour market flexibility mitigates this: a one-point rise in the flexibility index reduces youth (long-term) unemployment by 0.6-0.7 (1.8-2.2) percentage points.