An Agricultural Wealth Index for Multidimensional Wealth Assessments

Social scientists have increasingly used asset‐based wealth scores, like the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) wealth index, to assess economic disparities. However, current indices primarily capture wealth in globalized market economies, thus ignoring other forms of prosperity, such as success in agricultural activities. Using a simple extension to the standard estimation of the DHS wealth index, we describe procedures for estimating an agricultural wealth index (AWI) that complements market‐based wealth indices by capturing household success in agricultural activities. We apply this procedure to household data from 129 DHS surveys from over 40 countries with sufficient land and livestock data to estimate a reliable and consistent AWI. We assess the construct validity of the AWI using benchmarks of growth in both adults and children. This alternative measure of wealth provides new opportunities for understanding the causes and consequences of wealth inequality, and how success along different dimensions of wealth creates different social opportunities and constraints for health and well‐being.     

The Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database

The Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database provides the foundations for new comparative and longitudinal research on the causes behind, and the consequences of, welfare states and social citizenship rights. The SPIN database is oriented towards analyses of institutions as manifested in social policy legislation. To date, SPIN covers 40 countries, of which several have data on core social policy programmes from 1930. There are currently six data modules in SPIN, covering different social policy areas. The following research note describes the theoretical and conceptual basis of the SPIN project, as well as the data it contains.     

A Factor Analysis Approach Toward Reconciling Community Vulnerability and Resilience Indices for Natural Hazards

The concepts of vulnerability and resilience help explain why natural hazards of similar type and magnitude can have disparate impacts on varying communities. Numerous frameworks have been developed to measure these concepts, but a clear and consistent method of comparing them is lacking. Here, we develop a data-driven approach for reconciling a popular class of frameworks known as vulnerability and resilience indices. In particular, we conduct an exploratory factor analysis on a comprehensive set of variables from established indices measuring community vulnerability and resilience at the U.S. county level. The resulting factor model suggests that 50 of the 130 analyzed variables effectively load onto five dimensions: wealth, poverty, agencies per capita, elderly populations, and non–English-speaking populations. Additionally, the factor structure establishes an objective and intuitive schema for relating the constituent elements of vulnerability and resilience indices, in turn affording researchers a flexible yet robust baseline for validating and expanding upon current approaches.     

Mapping social work education in the West Africa region: Movements toward indigenization in 12 countries’ training programs

This article presents the results of a systematic mapping of social work training programs in countries throughout West Africa, a region historically under‐represented in global discussions of the social welfare workforce. The research illuminates how social workers and related professionals are trained to engage in social work practice in a number of West African countries. The research was conducted in two phases. In the initial phase, the research team collected documents from 12 West African countries and conducted phone interviews with relevant individuals. The second phase included field research in five West African countries ? Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal ? where the research team conducted semi‐structured interviews and group discussions with 253 individuals. Framed by indigenization theory, this study describes social service training institutes in West Africa and highlights the varying degrees to which programs have been adapted to indigenous and endogenous realities in the postcolonial era.     

Public-Private Organizations Behaviour: the Paradoxes in the Implementation of Ghana’s Health Insurance Scheme

Public Organization Review - Organizations public or private have their interests to pursue in public policies. Individuals in organizations are driven by visions and missions of their...     

Can Capitalism Solve Its Own Rural Problems? Japanese Lessons for the World Bank's Vision of Rural-Led Development

Recent research and policy advice by international development organizations have, by their own account, sought to reverse a prior neglect of conditions in agriculture and rural areas. In pursuit of this, they have developed a vision of dynamic but incremental development in rural areas, anchored in a smallholder-based and economically diversified market economy. This vision, articulated in the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report and continuing to animate research and policy advice today, presents itself as a solution to persistent poverty in the world's least developed countries. This paper adopts a historical sociological lens to use the case of Japan, in the period from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twentieth, to assess how realistic this vision is. This analysis shows that the lessons of Japan's experience are chastening for this vision of rural development. The mechanisms of growth in Japan were remarkably similar to those advertised by the World Bank's vision. However, its rural economic dynamism was based on deep socioeconomic inequalities and brought improved material conditions and greater economic security to agricultural households only with excruciating slowness, if at all. Rather than demonstrating the potential of incremental, market-oriented rural development to offer a path towards widespread poverty reduction, Japan instead serves as a warning of this development model's limitations.     

Make way for the wealthy? Autonomous vehicles,markets in mobility,and social justice

ABSTRACT

The development of a ‘mobility as a service’ model for accessing urban transport via autonomous vehicles may be expected to have far-reaching implications for the economics of road transport. In particular, it would offer a new opportunity to price access to the roads in accordance with the principles of the free market. Once people are paying for mobility on the roads on a ‘per trip’ basis, it will be possible to offer different levels of access – and service – at different prices. According to hegemonic ideas in the transport planning and economics literature the introduction of such a ‘market in mobility’ would be an economically efficient way of allocating access to the scarce good of space on the roads. In this paper we draw attention to a number of ethical and political challenges to the appropriateness of the use of such a pricing mechanism in the context of urban mobility.