Patterns Of Inequality Research Articles

The relationship between students’ socio-demographics and the probability of grade repetition in Brazilian primary education: is it decreasing over time?

This article aims at a better understanding of the Brazilian education system’s performance concerning the quality and equity over the decade 2007–2017. It examines the extent to which students’ sociodemographic characteristics are related to schooling trajectory without failure in primary education and how such relationships have changed over time. Multilevel logistic models are applied to cross-sectional student assessment data (Prova Brasil), considering the hierarchical structure of four levels. The total number of students covered is 12.4 million. The results suggest a pattern of educational inequity marked by socioeconomically disadvantaged status, gender, and self-declared race/ethnicity. The analyses show that the gender gap increased and the differentials by socioeconomic status and race/skin colour decreased over the decade. The estimates also suggest that the effect of school socioeconomic composition was reduced, but the effect of the proportion of repeating students per school on the individual probability of success was reinforced. In addition, the probability of students’ success varies randomly across schools, municipalities, and states, and such educational disparities across states are increasing over time.

Socioeconomic and residence-based related inequality in childhood vaccination in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Benin.

Childhood vaccination remains a cost-effective strategy that has expedited the control and elimination of numerous diseases. Although coverage of new vaccines in low- and middle-income countries increased exponentially in the last two decades, progress on expanding routine vaccination services to reach all children remains low, and coverage levels in many countries remains inadequate. This study aimed to examine the pattern of wealth and residence-based related inequality in vaccination coverage through an equity lens. We used data from the 2017-2018 Benin Demographic and Health Survey. Statistical and econometrics modeling were used to investigate factors associated with childhood vaccination. The Wagstaff decomposition analysis was used to disentangle the concentration index. A total of 1993 children were included, with 17% in the wealthiest quintile and 63% were living in rural areas. Findings showed that wealth is positively and significantly associated with vaccination coverage, particularly, for middle-wealth households. A secondary or higher education level of women and partners increased the odds of vaccination compared to no education (p < 0.05). Women with more antenatal care visits, with multiple births, attending postnatal care and delivery in a health facility had increased vaccination coverage (p < 0.01). Inequalities in vaccination coverage are more prominent in rural areas; and are explained by wealth, education, and antenatal care visits. Inequality in child vaccination varies according to socioeconomic and sociodemographic characteristics and is of interest to health policy. To mitigate inequalities in child vaccination coverage, policymakers should strengthen the availability and accessibility of vaccination and implement educational programs dedicated to vulnerable groups in rural areas.

Researchers on ice? How the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Antarctic researchers

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic and pandemic-related measures have impacted the lives and work-related activities of Antarctic researchers. To explore these impacts, we designed, piloted and disseminated an online survey in English, Russian, Spanish and Chinese in late 2020 and early 2021. The survey explored how the pandemic affected the productivity of Antarctic researchers, their career prospects and their mental wellbeing. Findings exposed patterns of inequities. For instance, of the 406 unique responses to the survey, women appeared to have been affected more adversely than men, especially in relation to mental health, and early-career researchers were disadvantaged more than their mid- or late-career colleagues. Overall, a third of the research participants reported at least one major negative impact from the pandemic on their mental health. Approximately half of the participants also mentioned that the COVID-19 pandemic had some positive effects, especially in terms of the advantages that working from home brought and opportunities to attend events, network or benefit from training workshops online. We conclude with a series of recommendations for science administrators and policymakers to mitigate the most serious adverse impacts of the pandemic on Antarctic research communities, with implications for other contexts where scientific activities are conducted under extreme circumstances.

Inequality Dynamics in Urban Manipur, India: A Decomposition Analysis.

The high pace of urbanization in Manipur being confined to the valley regions has attracted much attention to researchers to explore the intra-state dynamics of urban inequality in the state. This study examines the role of spatial factors in determining consumption inequality in the state, especially in urban areas considering the unit-level National Sample Survey data from different rounds. Also, the Regression-Based Inequality Decomposition is estimated to understand the role played by relevant household characteristics in explaining the inequality patterns in urban Manipur. The study observes an increasing trend of Gini coefficient for the overall state despite its slow per-capita growth. While Gini measures of consumption have an overall increasing trend in the economy between 1993 and 2011, and inequality level in rural areas is greater than in urban areas in 2011-2012. This is in contrast to the overall Indian phenomenon. Also, the state per capita income is 43% lower than the all-India average in 2019-2020 at 2011-2012 prices. Within-component (both within-district and within-sector) is the major contributor to overall consumption inequality. The decomposition-based regression analysis shows that most of the estimated regression coefficients are statistically significant. Factors like age, possession of land, and regular salary earner in a household contribute to enhancing the level of total inequality of the average MPCE. This paper suggests that in order to avoid the negative consequences of rising consumption inequality in Manipur, a justiciable land redistribution policy, improving the level of education, and creating employment opportunities are necessary.

Inequalities in Violent Death across Income Levels among Young Males and Females in Countries of the Americas.

Violent deaths (i.e., those due to road traffic injury, homicide, and suicide) are among the most important causes of premature and preventable mortality in young people. This study aimed at exploring inequalities in violent death across income levels between males and females aged 10 to 24 years from the Americas in 2015, the SDG baseline year. In a cross-sectional ecological study design, eleven standard summary measures of health inequality were calculated separately for males and females and for each cause of violent death, using age-adjusted mortality rates and average income per capita for 17 countries, which accounted for 87.9% of the target population. Premature mortality due to road traffic injury and homicide showed a pro-poor inequality pattern, whereas premature mortality due to suicide showed a pro-rich inequality pattern. These inequalities were statistically significant (p < 0.001), particularly concentrated among young males, and dominated by homicide. The ample array of summary measures of health inequality tended to generate convergent results. Significant inequalities in violent death among young people seems to be in place across countries of the Americas, and they seem to be socially determined by both income and gender. These findings shed light on the epidemiology of violent death in young people and can inform priorities for regional public health action. However, further investigation is needed to confirm inequality patterns and to explore underlying mechanisms, age- and sex-specific vulnerabilities, and gender-based drivers of such inequalities.

Children’s centres, parenting, and education in a post-pandemic world

ABSTRACTThe Covid-19 pandemic has been an acutely challenging time for families and parents of young children. Periods of lockdown, and the economic and social dislocation associated with the pandemic, will have far-reaching consequences for children’s education, life chances and social relationships. This article extends our understanding of these issues by drawing on extensive qualitative data from a study that investigated the work of children’s centres across a major UK city during the pandemic. Empirically, the article extends research on the interconnections between parenting, the early years, and the pandemic by outlining the interlocking range of problems facing families who used children’s centres. These include social isolation, domestic violence, poverty and destitution associated with unemployment and changes to Universal Credit, food insecurity and mental health. This constellation of factors reflects not only the impact of the pandemic but also enduring and entrenched patterns of inequalities. The data provides a starting point for the more conceptual and normative part of the article. Drawing on scholars such as E.O Wright and Michelle Jackson, we consider the scale and scope of the social, economic and political transformations required to build an education system that can support the needs of all.

White psychodrama

White psychodrama

"I Came Here, and it Got Worse Day by Day": Examining the Intersections Between Migrant Precarity and Family Violence Among Women with Insecure Migration Status in Australia.

While understanding the diversity of women's lived experiences is a key focus area in the international feminist literature on family violence, research with migrant women in Australia remains limited. This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of intersectional feminist scholarship that examines how immigration or "migration status" impacts the dynamics of migrant women's experiences of family violence. The article examines precarity in relation to migrant women's lives in Australia and focuses on the ways that their specific circumstances contribute to and are compounded by the experience of family violence. It also considers how precarity functions as a structural condition that has implications in terms of various forms or patterns of inequality that can heighten women's vulnerability to violence and undermine their efforts to ensure their safety and survival.

Regional Drinking Water Supply in Pakistan: Regional Disparity, Inequality, and Development Pattern

This article explores the regional disparities in water supply coverage in Pakistan in the context of intraregional development patterns. We applied the Gini index, Esteban and Ray index, and Moran’s I to measure regional development patterns in terms of inequality, polarization, and spatial concentration and build an integrated framework combining them with other widely accepted factors to understand regional differences in water coverage quantitatively. Our results show that improved water (tap and pump water) is more widely supplied in Pakistan with lower inequality but higher spatial concentration than tap water supply coverage, although the patterns differ by urban–rural divisions and provinces. Western regions with smaller populations tend to have higher tap water coverage, and eastern regions with large populations are more covered by improved water. The regression models show various mechanisms of improved water and tap water coverage. Both are related to local economic conditions but tap water coverage is more related to local environmental conditions, and improved water is more related to local demographic conditions. Strong and dense population centers decrease improved water coverage but promote tap water coverage. Urban planners and policymakers should address polycentric regional development to fulfill various development targets and improve regional equity of drinking water coverage in terms of accessibility, availability, and quality.

The elephant in the med: Postcoloniality and European security assistance practices

ABSTRACT This article explores an enormous elephant in the Mediterranean space: European security assistance’s impact on the continuation of a global postcolonial order. We identify three core practices of security assistance that provides for postcolonial readings: externally producing ‘the problem’ and designing ‘the solutions’ to be tackled; linking the ‘provider’ and ‘recipients’ in material dependencies; and contestation as ‘thin’ adjustments rather than ‘thick’ resistance. Contrary to claims of functionalism, what we observe in contemporary European security assistance practice is consistent with postcolonial logics that produce distinct subjectivities and reproduce patterns of inequalities. European states – whether former colonial powers or not –use security assistance to structure the world in hierarchical ways. We argue that security assistance is not primarily about strategic effects but principally about signalling superiority and reproducing dependencies and colonizing/colonised mentalities. Moreover, security assistance practices reveal the need for security assistance – i.e. European SA presence often gets entangled with insecurity, and as such, security assistance practice makes the need for security assistance visible – a self-producing evidentiality that is as taken out of the colonial playbook. The paper explores constitutive processes at work by drawing on insights from British, French, Italian and Swedish approaches to security assistance in Libya and Lebanon.

Socioeconomic position and eye health outcomes: identifying inequality in rapid population-based surveys

ObjectiveMonitoring health outcomes disaggregated by socioeconomic position (SEP) is crucial to ensure no one is left behind in efforts to achieve universal health coverage. In eye health planning, rapid population...

Blacks in Niagara Falls: Leaders and Community Development, 1850–1985

Michael B. Boston's ambitious book, Blacks in Niagara Falls, complements a growing list of community studies of African American migration, leadership, protest, and community formation in a northern city. Although Boston fails to offer an engaging thesis, he demonstrates that, despite their small population, Black people, who resided in Niagara Falls since the antebellum era, fought vigorously for equal rights. The city's Black population, which numbered only 344 in 1900, established community institutions, a local newspaper, churches, and an energetic leadership class. Black Niagarans regarded themselves as part of the broader struggle for full equality in the United States. Niagara's Black community expanded significantly during World War II, mirroring the migration pattern of hundreds of urban communities, as Black wartime migrants sought greater freedom and employment in wartime defense industries. Boston reconstructs the journey of several migrants to Niagara Falls and details the expanded employment opportunities that awaited them. Boston argues that the growing population of Black migrants to Niagara Falls accelerated existing patterns of racial inequality and exacerbated the schisms within Black leadership. Most Black Niagarans were unskilled laborers, following the familiar pattern of Black wartime migration to other northern cities. Nevertheless, the expanding Black middle and professional class dominated the community's leadership by the 1950s and early 1960s, and these leaders served as liaisons between the Black and white community. Residential concentration and housing discrimination also grew more intense as the Black population expanded. Although Niagara Falls never developed a ghetto, Black people were concentrated in several residential areas with limited access to better housing. Niagara Falls's schools also achieved little racial balance, and two public schools had Black enrollments of 80 percent and 99 percent as late as 1968. Attempts to achieve a semblance of racial balance in public schools through bussing were vehemently opposed by most white parents. Niagara Falls resembled a moderate southern city such as Greensboro, North Carolina, which expressed support for integrating its public schools following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 but failed to fully integrate them for three decades.

Commentary on The Right to Higher Education

Martin’s argument for the right to higher education is an exercise in ideal theory, which specifically distances itself from the familiar failings of compulsory education. I argue that even using sufficientarian criteria for admission to higher education would perpetuate non-ideal patterns of inequality and that reasonable forms of selectivity would still limit access to autonomy-promoting higher education. Martin’s case should prompt us to think about arbitrary divisions between compulsory and post-compulsory education in an autonomy-oriented system.

Within-Country Inequality in COVID-19 Vaccination Coverage: A Scoping Review of Academic Literature.

Since December 2020, COVID-19 vaccines have become increasingly available to populations around the globe. A growing body of research has characterised inequalities in COVID-19 vaccination coverage. This scoping review aims to locate, select and assess research articles that report on within-country inequalities in COVID-19 vaccination coverage, and to provide a preliminary overview of inequality trends for selected dimensions of inequality. We applied a systematic search strategy across electronic databases with no language or date restrictions. Our inclusion criteria specified research articles or reports that analysed inequality in COVID-19 vaccination coverage according to one or more socioeconomic, demographic or geographic dimension of inequality. We developed a data extraction template to compile findings. The scoping review was carried out using the PRISMA-ScR checklist. A total of 167 articles met our inclusion criteria, of which half (n = 83) were conducted in the United States. Articles focused on vaccine initiation, full vaccination and/or receipt of booster. Diverse dimensions of inequality were explored, most frequently relating to age (n = 127 articles), race/ethnicity (n = 117 articles) and sex/gender (n = 103 articles). Preliminary assessments of inequality trends showed higher coverage among older population groups, with mixed findings for sex/gender. Global research efforts should be expanded across settings to understand patterns of inequality and strengthen equity in vaccine policies, planning and implementation.

Historical Patterns of Inequality and Productivity around Financial Crises

AbstractTo understand the determinants of financial crises, previous research focused on developments closely related to financial markets. In contrast, this paper considers changes originating in the real economy as drivers of financial instability. To this end, I assemble a novel data set of long‐run measures of income inequality, productivity, and other macrofinancial indicators for advanced economies. I find that rising top income inequality and low productivity growth are robust predictors of crises, and their slow‐moving trend components largely explain these relations. Moreover, recessions that are preceded by such developments are deeper than recessions without such ex ante trends.

Food and Inequality

The production, consumption, materiality, and meanings of food are critical topics for sociological research on inequality, although they have not always been recognized as such. This article describes how food is implicated in the production of inequalities across scales and sites. It begins by considering how the global food system is inextricably imbricated with structures of power that create and sustain patterns of inequality, especially in regard to land and labor. It then reviews the literature on food access and food insecurity, not only as determinants of health but as lived experiences shaped by local food environments, intersectional identities, and the social meanings of food. Lastly, it considers how the food justice and food sovereignty movements challenge the inequalities and injustices engendered by the global industrial food system. The conclusions highlight how sociological research on food and inequality is essential to understanding the contexts and consequences of contemporary policy initiatives.

What are the sources of contraceptives for married and unmarried adolescents: Health services or friends? Analysis of 59 low- and middle-income countries.

Despite the efforts to promote universal coverage for family planning, inequalities are still high in several countries. Our aim was to identify which sources of contraceptives women mostly rely on in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We also explored the different sources according to age and marital status. We used data from national health surveys carried out in 59 LMICs since 2010. Among all sexually active women at reproductive age, we explored inequalities in demand for family planning satisfied by modern methods (mDFPS) and in the source of modern contraceptives according to women's age, classified as: 15-19, 20-34, or 35-49 years of age. Among adolescents, mDFPS and source of method were explored by marital status, classified as married or in union and not married nor in a union. mDFPS was lower among adolescents than among adult women in 28 of the 59 countries. The lowest levels of mDFPS among adolescents were identified in Albania (6.1%) and Chad (8.2%). According to adolescents' marital status, the pattern of inequalities in mDFPS varied widely between regions, with married and unmarried adolescents showing similar levels of coverage in Latin America and the Caribbean, higher coverage among unmarried adolescents in Africa, and lower coverage among unmarried adolescents in Asia. Public and private health services were the main sources, with a lower share of the public sector among adolescents in almost all countries. The proportion of adolescents who obtained their contraceptives in the public sector was lower among unmarried girls than married ones in 31 of the 38 countries with data. Friends or relatives were a more significant source of contraceptives among unmarried compared to married adolescents in all regions. Our findings indicate lower levels of mDFPS and lower use of the public sector by adolescents, especially unmarried girls. More attention is needed to provide high-quality and affordable family planning services for adolescents, especially for those who are not married.

Rent price control – yet another great equalizer of economic inequalities? Evidence from a century of historical data

The long-run U-shaped patterns of economic inequality are standardly explained by basic economic trends (Piketty’s r &gt; g), taxation policies or ‘great levellers’ such as catastrophes. This article argues that housing policy, and particularly rent control, is a neglected explanatory factor in understanding macro inequality. We hypothesize that rent control could decrease overall housing wealth, lower incomes of generally richer landlords and increase disposable incomes of generally poorer tenants. Using original long-run data for up to 16 countries (1900–2016), we show that rent controls lowered wealth-to-income ratios, top income shares, Gini coefficients, rents and rental expenditure. Overall, rent controls need to be strict in order to have tangible effects, and only the stricter historical rent controls did significantly reduce inequalities. The study argues that housing policies should generally receive more attention in understanding economic inequalities.

State Categories, Bureaucracies of Displacement, and Possibilities from the Margins.

In this presidential address, I argue for the importance of state-created categories and classification systems that determine eligibility for tangible and intangible resources. Through classification systems based on rules and regulations that reflect powerful interests and ideologies, bureaucracies maintain entrenched inequality systems that include, exclude, and neglect. I propose adopting a critical perspective when using formalized categories in our work, which would acknowledge the constructed nature of those categories, their naturalization through everyday practices, and their misalignments with lived experiences. This lens can reveal the systemic structures that engender both enduring patterns of inequality and state classification systems, and reframe questions about the people the state sorts into the categories we use. I end with a brief discussion of the benefits that can accrue from expanding our theoretical repertoires by including knowledge produced in the Global South.

The Spatial Pattern of Deprivations and Inequalities: The Case of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Addis Ababa is a metropolitan area faced with the challenges of Ethiopia’s urbanization, such as poverty, unemployment, informal settlements, an acute housing shortage, and environmental hazards. Yet, the non-practicality of area-based policy using the Multiple Deprivation Index (MDI) exacerbates the polarization of poverty and spatial inequality to create a divided city. The study developed the MDI for 2007 and 2016. The study’s objective was to justify the area-based policy by analyzing the overlaps of deprivations based on the relationship of pertinent indicators and components, the spatial pattern of inequality and deprivations, and the relationship of deprivation with population size and density. The findings of the study were triangulated and validated with the deductive theoretical, empirical, and SDG frameworks to replicate external validity. The research design included both descriptive and correlational methods. The inductively derived pattern using PCA (principal component analysis) and LISA (local spatial association index) of MDI components revealed spatial inequality and poverty polarization. The index of concentrated poverty was revealed by global spatial autocorrelation. The statistical and spatial trend analysis revealed concentrated poverty, especially in the inner-city slums and the peri-urban informal settlements. Most of the findings conformed to deductive theoretical and SDG frameworks, while the analysis of MDI indicators and components revealed additional slum indicators and the relevance of integrating other SDG indicators with SDG 11 for realizing sustainable urbanization. Due to spatial inequality, patterns of concentrated poverty, a large, deprived population, and easing future urbanization challenges, the study rationalized area-based policy for reducing inequality and poverty polarization.