Nature Of Inequality Research Articles

An Empirical Inquiry into Per Capita Convergence of Indian States

The topic of growth convergence (or the lack of it) has always been one of the most important economic phenomena for Indian states. This study undertakes more than 3 decades of data for Indian states from the 1980s and traces convergence of state-level per capita income; breaking the data down into the subperiods based on time and levels of income using panel unit root tests. The results show no discernible evidence of convergence across the states, especially after post-liberalization. However, taking into account control variables for capital expenditure, development expenditure, and fiscal deficit, we find significant evidence for convergence of state-level per capita GDP. This indicates that the nature of inequality across states is not structural in nature and can be reduced through active policy interventions.

Behind the Seven Veils of Inequality. What if it's all about the Struggle within just One Half of the Population over just One Half of the National Income?

ABSTRACTThis article addresses three main issues: why there is such a huge diversity of disposable income inequality across the world, why there is such a deterioration of market inequality among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and why inequality seems to move in ‘waves’. There are many underlying questions: does diversity reflect a variety of fundamentals, or a multiplicity of power structures and choice? Is rising market inequality the product of somehow ‘exogenous’ factors (e.g., r>g), or of complex interactions between political settlements and market failures? How do we get through the veils obscuring these interactions and distorting our vision of the often self‐constructed nature of inequality? Has neoliberal globalization broadened the scope for ‘distributional failures’ by, for example, triggering a process of ‘reverse catching‐up’ in the OECD, so that highly unequal middle‐income countries like those in Latin America now embody the shape of things to come? Are we all converging towards features such as mobile élites creaming off the rewards of economic growth, and ‘magic realist’ politics that lack self‐respect if not originality? Should I say, ‘Welcome to the Third World’? In this paper I also develop a new approach for examining and measuring inequality (distance from distributive targets), and a new concept of ‘distributional waves’. The article concludes that, to understand current distributive dynamics, what matters is to comprehend the forces determining the share of the rich — and, in terms of growth, what they choose to do with it (and how they are allowed do it).

Nutrition status and inequality among children in different geographical regions of Maharashtra, India

IntroductionNutritional status is influenced by the complex social, biological, environmental and cultural factors that are highly interrelated. Despite being a demographically and economically developed state, Maharashtra has a high prevalence rate of child malnutrition with alarming figures. There is uneven development in different geographical regions. AimThis paper assesses the extent of nutritional status and inequalities among children in different regions of Maharashtra. Data and MethodsThis study utilizes data from the fourth Round of the National Family Health Survey (2015–16), the large-scale survey on demography and health recently conducted. Simple chi-square test was conducted to test the association and, further binary logistic regression analysis was done by adjusting various socio-economic and demographic characteristics. Additionally, to deal with the inequality aspect, concentration curve, concentration index, and decomposition analysis techniques were used to access and measure the degree of socio-economic inequality in geographical regions of Maharashtra. ResultsThe result shows that household aspect wealth quintile, religion caste/tribe, mother education, child ever born and different regions of Maharashtra were the main factors contributing to poor child malnutrition. Rural area has the highest percentage of underweight (40%) children followed by stunted (38%) and wasted (26%) respectively. Almost half of the children are underweight whose mother has no education, with 45% of stunted and 26% wasted children. Nandurbar district of North-Maharashtra regions has a prevalence of underweight (56.17 per 100) and stunted (47.38 per 100) children while Gadchiroli district of Vidarbha region has highest prevalence of wasted (46.59 per 100) children respectively. DiscussionDue to lack of proper development, poor awareness about keeping up and improving the dietary benefit of nourishment and absence of cleanliness and sanitation as compared with other social groups. ConclusionsThe aim of this paper was to explore the geographical variations in malnutrition in Maharashtra. The present study plentifully uncovers that, as far as child nutrition is concerned, the Scheduled Tribes groups seems to be socially excluded among all the social classes. Economic growth has played a definite role in reducing child nutrition, but it is not primarily responsible for the significant decline. As per the results, we have seen that among rich and poor inequalities exists and were highly significantly different regions of Maharashtra. RecommadationsThe paper calls for state and regions specific strategies which are needed to be designed and executed on a priority basis, keeping in view the keeping in view the idea of disparity or the nature of inequality in childhood malnutrition in the state and its differential characteristics across the regions.

訂正：不等式の性格についての一考察―基本認識論モデルの探求―

訂正：不等式の性格についての一考察―基本認識論モデルの探求―

In Political Seas: Engaging with Political Ecology in the Ocean and Coastal Environment

The world’s oceans and coasts are awash in a sea of politics. The marine environment is increasingly busy, changing, and a site of degradation, marginalization, injustice, contestation and conflict over declining resources and occupied spaces at local to global scales. Themes of political ecology, such as power and politics, narratives and knowledge, scale and history, environmental justice and equity, are thus salient issues to understand in ocean and coastal governance and management. This subject review examines research on these themes of political ecology in the ocean and coastal environment and reflects on how the insights gained might be applied to governance and management. Political ecology provides important insights into: the influence of power in ocean management and governance processes; the manner in which narratives, knowledge, and scale are used to legitimize and shape policies and management efforts; the effects of historical trajectories on present circumstances, options, and practices; and the nature of inequities and environmental injustices that can occur in the marine environment. Moreover, ocean and coastal researchers, practitioners, and decision makers ought to engage with the political processes and injustices occurring in the ocean. Moving from critical insights to constructive engagements will ensure that political ecology helps to plant seeds of hope in the Anthropocene ocean.

"The Whole Feminist Taking-Your-Clothes-off-Thing": Negotiating the Critique of Gender Inequality in UK Music Industries

This article considers the critique of inequality, exploitation and exclusion in contemporary UK music industries, in light of the latter’s growing internal concerns over work-based gender relations. The creative sector’s persistent inequalities are at odds with its professed liberal, egalitarian, meritocratic values and attitudes. Yet, within music’s industrial production cultures, a dismissive postfeminist sensibility has come under pressure through a reflexive critical moment of popular feminist discourse, expressed in trade press critique, between 2013 and the present moment. Drawing from a study of intermediary work in UK major record labels, the article takes a pragmatist approach to documenting and theorizing this critique – alongside institutional mechanisms, like company policies and corporate PR, that respond to it – in terms of growing industrial reflexivity. Tensions over the representation of work, the nature of inequality, intergenerational and epistemic injustice emerge as key themes, with implications for critical research on popular music industries.

Income inequality in uptake of voluntary versus organised breast cancer screening: evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

BackgroundThis paper measures income-related inequality in uptake of breast cancer screening among women before and after a policy change to extend the screening programme to women aged 65 to 70. Prior to programme expansion women aged 50 to 64 were invited for screening under the national cancer screening programme in England and Wales whereas women in the 65 to 70 age cohort could elect to be screened by personally organising a screen. This will give a deeper insight into the nature of inequality in screening and the impact of policies aimed at widening the access related to age on inequality of uptake.MethodsTaking advantage of this natural experiment, inequality is quantified across the different age cohorts and time periods with the use of concentration indices (CI). Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, information on screening attendance, equivalised household income and age was taken for the three years prior to the programme expansion and the three years immediately following the policy change.ResultsResults show that following the expansion, inequality significantly reduced for the 50-64 age group, prior to the expansion there was a pro-rich inequality in screening uptake. There is also evidence of a reduction in income inequality in screening uptake among those aged 65 to 70 and an increase in the number of women attending screening from this older age cohort.ConclusionsThis indicates that an organised breast screening programme is likely to reduce income related inequality over a screening programme where women must organise their own screen. This is important when breast screening is one of the main methods used to detect breast cancer at an earlier stage which improves outcomes for women and reduces treatment costs.

Populism is Not in the Air (but maybe it should be)

AbstractAnalogies between the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and populist leaders in Latin America are an emblematic case of misleading comparative analysis. They hide the ideological core of Trumpism, which undermines collective action and its emblematic institution, organized labor, dismantling the protections it attained during the twentieth century. In particular, references to Argentina's Juan Perón obscure Trump's emphasis on individual economic freedom, property rights, and the naturalization of inequality, values engrained in American political thinking. They also distort the populist legacies in Latin America. Populist leaders in the postwar years challenged liberal democratic thinking by posing that social rights and collective prerogatives for excluded groups should prevail over individual citizenship in order to expand political democracy. That legacy is not only alien to Trumpism; it might also be the main weapon to fight against it.

African American Ebonics: Discourse & Discursive Practice—A Chicago Case Study of Historical Oppression

ABSTRACTThe nature of inequality within African American communities is a well-studied phenomenon that continues to yield new insights into how human beings interact in broad terms. Work relations, housing inequity, occupational unevenness to discourse following the end of the “Race Era,” racism, and inequality have all encouraged numerous discussions about African Americans. The literature addressing African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and racial inequality does not focus on the way in which the use of dialect within AAVE reveals critical issues of power and oppression. In other words, scholars have not used dialect as a means of tracing historical oppression. Using principles of critical discourse analysis as a lens, this article outlines the way in which African American English as a communicative event gives insight into the socioeconomic, historical, cultural, and political context in which people and communities are situated. Using the Northern city of Chicago as a case study, I demonstrate that Blacks in the largest city in the Midwest use a rural Southern style dialect in the speech performance of AAVE because of historical social isolation and a legacy of segregation. The way in which people speak illumines a vast interconnectivity of history, culture, and politics.

Does Inequality Stifle Human Capital Accumulation?

Using evidence on elite presence, land inequality, literacy, and primary schooling in pre-colonial, colonial, and South Korea, I show that inequality may help or check human capital accumulation depending on the nature of inequality and the type of learning. Little affected by the imposition of Japanese rule, structural inequality based on pre-colonial social order stifled literacy in colonial Korea. Fostered by the economic growth under Japanese rule, market-driven inequality promoted literacy. Both types of inequality checked primary schooling, except that traditional elites financially supported new schools. The post-colonial demise of land tenancy advanced literacy more by destroying the pre-colonial social order than by improving income inequality.

The Nature of Inequality: A Search for the Reference Epistemological Model

The Nature of Inequality: A Search for the Reference Epistemological Model

Assessment of mobility inequalities and income data collection. Methodological issues and a case study (Douala, Cameroon)

In order to understand the scale and nature of inequalities in intra-urban mobility we need reliable income data, but this is generally difficult to collect in household surveys. The methodological approaches that are employed to overcome difficulties in income data collection may affect the relative position of individuals and households within the income distribution and our estimates of mobility inequalities. In the context of a case study of Douala, this paper evaluates how the way income data is collected affects its accuracy and therefore the measurement of daily mobility inequalities. Simplified data collection tends to minimise the scale of inequalities as it misrepresents the income distribution. The error is greater in remote zones. Shortcomings in the statistical apparatus with regard to income data thus blur our perception of mobility inequalities and impede investigation of the links between daily travel, poverty and social exclusion.

Why and how inequality matters.

In this article, I share some thoughts about how we might extend the study of mental health inequalities by drawing from key insights in sociology and sociological social psychology about the nature of inequality and the processes through which it is produced, maintained, and resisted. I suggest several questions from sociological research on stratification that could help us understand unexpected patterns of mental health inequalities. I also advocate for the analysis of "generic" social psychological processes through which inequalities are produced, maintained, and resisted within proximate social environments. I consider the role of two such processes--status/devaluation processes and identity processes--in mental health inequalities. I then discuss how we can strengthen connections across subfields of the sociology of mental health by applying status and identity theories to two areas of research: (1) help-seeking and (2) the effects of mental health problems on social attainments.

Racial Classification and the Race-Wage Gap in Brazil: Evidence from Administrative and Survey Data

Because race in Brazil is highly subjective, the racial classification of workers in any sort of survey requires careful consideration by survey administrators and those who would use the data for analysis. This paper provides an examination of how race is reported in administrative and survey settings, how the differences between the two affect measures of racial wage gaps and what conventional earnings decomposition can tell us about reporting differences and the nature of inequality in Brazil. I show that estimates derived from administrative data smaller wage gaps, driven by racial bias; estimates from survey data yield much larger wage gaps, driven not just by racial bias, but also by differences in observable worker characteristics. In addition to providing a warning about the importance of data source selection, these results provide a range of possible values for the race-wage gap, and its components, in Brazil that vary with assumptions on the nature of Brazilian racial identity.

Some feminist contributions to community social psychology

This article analyzes the contributions of feminist debate about intersectionality of social categories for Community Social Psychology in Brazil. This was set up as dedicated to theoretical analyze the social inequalities that characterize contemporary societies and propose methodological processes of intervention for questioning and processing of these realities. We discuss how the emergence of new actors and demands on public space, as distinct from the 60/70, is required to understand the oppression from various power systems such as gender, race and sexuality. We conclude that intersectional analysis should consider different levels of relationships between categories, the history of the same differential and common aspects of different systems of power as naturalization of inequality, the relationship between public and private relationship between equality and difference. Analyses based on intersectionality can contribute to processes of social intervention that considers the complexity of contemporary societies.

«Структура» социального неравенства современного мира: проблемы измерения

In the age of globalization, vanishing borders between the countries and the growth of mobility comparative analysis of the societies social structure and the nature of inequality becomes especially timely. This article presents a detailed analysis of the structure and depth of the countries inequality, as well as those of separate groups of countries in a more complex system of parameters. On the basis of the available data the authors attempt to test the hypothesis of the connection of inequality not only with the income level, but also with the imputed income per capita. The authors go beyond the standard instruments of measuring the inequality by income and offer their own modification of the decile exponent of inequality by imputed per capita GDP.

Regional Differences of Child Under-Nutrition in Bangladesh

Despite recent progress shown by some of the indicators of Millennium DevelopmentGoals in Bangladesh, the nutritional status among all children of the country is notso satisfactory. Growing evidence suggest that there exist regional differences in childunder-nutrition in Bangladesh. The present article is an attempt to identify the regionaldifferences of child under-nutrition across six divisions of Bangladesh and to understandsome of the determinants of under-nutrition using DHS-2007 Bangladesh dat. This datafocus on under-nutrition and some of the determinants related to household, child andmother. A multivariate model was employed to study the regional differences of undernutritionstatus among children. Across the divisions, a variation of under-nutrition isobserved among the children. The prevalence of under-nutrition is statistically significantin poor households. Economics status, mothers’ education, children’s age, number of familymembers and duration of breastfeeding are important determinants of under-nutritionacross divisions. Child under-nutrition in Bangladesh is still a concern for the householdwith poor economic status. The article calls for improvement of the economic status of thehouseholds across divisions keeping in view the nature of inequality in childhood undernutritionin the country and its differential characteristics across the divisions.

Labour Market Restructuring and South Africa's Rural Homeland Communitiesin the 1980s

ABSTRACT Given South Africa's history, rural communities in the periphery have always been the poorest of the poor with a long-run dependence on migrant remittances. In the 1980s there were vigorous debates about the importance of agricultural activities yet these analyses assumed that the nature of the interaction between these rural communities and the broader structures of South Africa's economy remained tied to long-range, unskilled migrant labour. While there was an expansion of migrant labour to the gold mines in the 1970s, there were other changes taking place in the South African labour market too. There was a capital deepening process within the manufacturing, mining and agriculture sectors leading to an increasing demand for skilled and some categories of semi-skilled labour and a sharply decreasing demand for unskilled labour. In addition, there was some spatial restructuring of South African industry and ‘self-governing’ or even ‘independence’ homelands spawned large public bureaucracies. Using empirical evidence from the 1980s this paper shows that these changes led to increasing participation of rural communities in regional and local labour markets. There was increased wage labour and weekly commuting and a number of these jobs were semi-skilled. These developments changed the nature of inequality and socioeconomic differentiation within rural communities. Those who were able to make adjustments to take advantage of restructured labour markets were notably better off relative to those who were not in a position to do this.

Introduction: American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places

This special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal brings together a set of essays that integrate two seemingly disparate intellectual trends in the humanities and social sciences. On the one hand, there is Philip Deloria’s work about American Indians in “unexpected places.”1 On the other hand, there is the work of linguistic anthropology. Deloria’s writings have been integral to the growing corpus of critical approaches to the study of Native peoples, including the ways in which representational practices of the past continue to resonate and the ways in which (de)colonization of indigenous histories and structural (in)equities are intertwined.2 We say “seemingly disparate” because this line of scholarship, including Deloria’s work, is concerned with the naturalization of inequalities, the ways in which expectations about Native American peoples have led to a denial of coevalness.3 However, there is also a tradition in linguistic anthropology that has sought to understand the ways in which linguistic inequalities are naturalized and circulated. Our intervention is to place linguistic anthropology in a meaningful dialogue with contemporary indigenous studies. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places challenged the representational “expectations” and “anomalies” of American Indians in history and popular culture. Deloria called for examining why certain imageries and practices have been

Land inequality and conflict intensity

This paper investigates the impact of land inequality on conflict intensity. A fundamental distinction with the existing literature lies in the nature of inequality under consideration. We investigate how land inequality across landlords only influences the intensity of the fight against a rebel group comprised of landless individuals. We show that conflict intensity is non-monotonic in land inequality. In particular, the most severe conflicts occur for intermediate land inequality levels. Moreover, a Pareto improving—and thus voluntary—transfer of land from the smaller to the larger landlord may exist.