Safe credit to the poor: The role of anti‐usury policies

Usury regulations focus both on explicit recommendations, such as disclosure statements in lending acts or interest rate caps, and on incentives for the formal banking sector to reach the poor. Considerable attention is also devoted to adequate sanctions for the practice of usury. We propose a theoretical model to investigate where to direct reforms to curb usury. Our primary policy implication is the convenience of polarizing the allocation of public resources in either legal safeguards for formal lenders or sanction enforcement against usurers. Furthermore, we demonstrate that in developing countries such policy interventions may backfire when borrowers' higher wealth implies increasing inequality in its distribution. Therefore, countries undertaking reforms against predatory lending should be aware of their growth path during transition.     

A value‐driven approach to health care

Redefining Healthcare: Creating Value‐Based Competition on Results, by Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth O. Teisberg. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006. 506 pp., $35.00 cloth.     

Eighteen‐Month‐Olds,but not 14‐Month‐Olds,Use Social Context to Bind Action Sequences

We demonstrate that 18‐month‐olds, but not 14‐month‐olds, can anticipate others' actions based on an interpretation of shared goals that bind together individual actions into a collaborative sequence. After viewing a sequence of actions performed by two people who socially interact, 18‐month‐olds bound together the socially engaged actors' actions such that they later expected the actors to share the same final goal. Eighteen‐month‐olds who saw nonsocially engaged actors did not have this expectation and neither did 14‐month‐olds when viewing either socially or nonsocially engaged actors. The results are discussed in light of the possibility that experience in collaborations could be necessary for understanding collaboration from a third‐person perspective.     

The daughter‐in‐law questions remittances: changes in the gender of remittances among Indian migrants to Australia

In this article, I present a cross‐generational analysis of the gendered meanings and politics surrounding monetary remittances. Indian female migrants to Australia, who contribute significantly to household incomes, have recently started to question the sources and directions of remittances. This happens when the woman's earnings are sent, without consultation, to the husband's parents for luxuries, while the family in Australia is struggling. Women in paid work also want to send their earnings to their own parents, particularly if there is financial need. Remittances have become a testing ground for the traditional belief that the husband and his family own the money in the patrilineal marital household. It is possible to interpret male control of remittances without consultation as a form of financial abuse of the wife in the sending household. The article draws on two qualitative studies on five decades of Indian migration to Australia covering 203 people from 112 families.     

The upside‐down roots of a transnational advocacy network: applying an ‘organizational ecology’ approach to the anti‐GMO network

In this article, I examine a transnational advocacy network opposed to the introduction of genetically modified crops and supportive of organic agriculture in India. I argue that this network illustrates some of the consequences of ‘upward oriented linkages’, in which professional NGO brokers focus on constructing relationships with other professional or elite partner bodies such as donor organizations, global retailers and the English language media. The ‘upside‐down’ tree that results has roots pointing upwards to global partners and to domestic elite actors but is less responsive, and less tightly bound, to mass organizations and to its purported non‐elite constituency of marginal farmers. I make this case through a methodological approach I term ‘organizational ecology’ in which I explore the idea of NGO based advocacy organizations as filling ‘niches’ in the larger political ecology of rural India and within this ‘ecology’ forming symbiotic connections to other organizations.     

14‐month‐olds exploit verbs’ syntactic contexts to build expectations about novel words

During their second year of life, infants develop a rudimentary understanding of grammatical categories based on their knowledge and use of frequent function words. The current study inquired whether, at only 14 months of age, infants can track co‐occurrence patterns between function words and content words (e.g., determiners can precede nouns, and pronouns can precede verbs), and use these previously encountered syntactic contexts to build expectations about which function words can co‐occur with novel words. Using a habituation paradigm, French‐learning 14‐month‐olds were presented with utterances containing two novel words preceded by function words (either two determiners in the Novel Nouns condition or two pronouns in the Novel Verbs conditions). We found that at test, infants looked longer during trials in which the novel words occurred in an unexpected syntactic context (following a pronoun for infants in the Novel Nouns condition and following a determiner for infants in the pooled analysis of the three Novel Verbs conditions). Hence, our results confirm previous findings on infants’ sensitivity to noun contexts and most importantly demonstrate that their sensitivity to the co‐occurrence of verbs with pronouns begins much earlier than previously understood.     

“I Try Not to Depend on Anyone but Me”: Welfare‐Reliant Women's Perspectives on Self‐Sufficiency,Work, and Marriage*

Welfare reformers sought to reduce “dependency,” or reliance on state‐supported cash benefits and deployed a discourse of “self‐sufficiency” to promote the legitimacy of efforts to remove welfare recipients from publicly funded cash assistance through either wage labor or marriage. We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare‐reliant women to examine what self‐sufficiency means to them and their perspectives on how work and marriage affect their ability to be self‐sufficient. Grounded theory analysis revealed that for these women, self‐sufficiency means formal independence from both the state (i.e., Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) and men (i.e., marriage). Although they value marriage as an institution and would ideally marry, they do not consider marriage to be a likely route to self‐sufficiency given the pool of men available to them. Rather, they embrace their own market‐based wage labor as the means by which they can attain some measure of independence. Taking our lead from the women in this study, we challenge the emphasis on marriage in current welfare policy. We argue that employment training that results in better jobs for women and men and work supports that make low‐wage work pay are clearly the appropriate direction for policy aimed at the welfare‐reliant and working poor.     

Grandparents on the move: a multilevel framework analysis to understand diversity in zero‐generation care arrangements in Switzerland

Among the various forms of transnational grandparenting is the engagement of the so‐called zero generation – the transnationally mobile parents of adult migrants – in caring for their grandchildren abroad. It constitutes a distinct kind of intergenerational solidarity within transnational families. By taking migrant families in Switzerland as a case in point, in this article we attempt to broaden the existing research by adopting a comparative, qualitative approach towards understanding the commonalities and differences of childcare organization involving grandparental support in European and non‐European transnational families. By taking into account the main objective and the temporality of grandparents' visits in Switzerland, we identify six different types of childcare arrangements. While these arrangements are shaped by the discriminatory Swiss migration regime, several other institutional, familial, and individual factors help to promote or impede them, or to change their dynamics. Thus, we introduce an innovative, multi‐level, analytical approach towards studying the various ways in which the parents of adult migrants of different nationalities take part in the transnational circulation of care.