Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the functioning of the household economy and family labour supply over a five‐year period among a panel sample of poor households in Madras using an event history methodology. The research focused on the key role women play in sustaining poor households despite constrained labour market choices. Women's earnings from daily self‐employed work activities provided a substantial and steady component to total household income which tended to fluctuate with the earnings and family pool contribution of casually employed males. As economic stress events hit the family over time, women helped by increasing earnings, adding on secondary jobs, utilizing their earning status to obtain loans from a variety of sources, sacrificing their subsidized business loan for family debt repayment, and foregoing personal expenditures and leisure. At the same time women also managed the increasingly more difficult tasks of fulfilling basic needs of the household such as food, fuel and water collection, sanitation and childcare with less resources of time. Development policies must reflect the fact that women are central to individual family survival and as a whole they are key actors in the adjustment process to the crises in employment occurring in the local and national economy.

AbstractThis study analyses the incidence, frequency, costs and subsequent coping strategies of economic stress events which disrupt the household economy among poor self‐employed women organized by SEWA, a grassroots development NGO. An analysis of the determinants of stress levels reveals that women who were members in SEWA for longer periods, who held savings accounts in SEWA Bank and who provided greater earnings share to total family income had fewer stresses. The analysis underscores the positive effect of programs in financial service, social security, co‐operative and trade union activities. The findings lend support to arguments in favour of the efficacy of credit‐plus rather than minimalist creict programmes for poor women. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACTUsing an expanded shift share technique to impute international trade‐related industrial job change, the extent to which structural changes in trade and defense spending appear to explain state economic performance differentials is explored. The findings show there is limited support for the "trade perimeter" argument, but strong support for the hypothesized relationship between military procurement spending and state trade performance. To the extent that defense commitments, especially to private sector procurement and R & D, have operated as an informal industrial policy, particularly by guaranteeing strong domestic sales, they have enabled a significant number of states peripheral to the traditional industrial heartland to build a strong international trade posture. The conclusion offers observations on the economic development implications of these findings.