Equity and Development – serie

Despite India’s record of rapid economic growth and poverty reduction over recent decades, rising inequality in the country has been a subject of concern among policy makers, academics, and activists alike.Poverty and Social Exclusion in India focuses on social exclusion, which has its roots in India’s historical divisions along lines of caste, tribe, and the excluded sex, that is, women. These inequalities are more structural in nature and have kept entire groups trapped, unable to take advantage of opportunities that economic growth offers. Culturally rooted systems perpetuate inequality, and, rather than a culture of poverty that afflicts disadvantaged groups, it is, in fact, these inequality traps that prevent these groups from breaking out. Combining rigorous quantitative research with a discussion of these underlying processes, this book finds that exclusion can be explained by inequality in opportunities, inequality in access to markets, and inequality in voice and agency.This report will be of interest to policy makers, development practitioners, social scientists, and academics working to foster equality in India.

This book presents the key findings from a new poverty assessment for Vietnam, led jointly by the World Bank and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS). It takes a fresh look at the lives of poor men, women, and children, and explores the constraints and opportunities they face today in rising out of poverty. The book aims to do three things.First, it proposes revisions to Vietnam’s poverty monitoring system—via better data, updated welfare aggregates, and new poverty lines—to bring these more in line with economic and social conditions in present-day Vietnam. Second, it revisits the stylised facts about deprivation and poverty in Vietnam, and develops an updated profile and diagnostic of poverty using data from the most recent Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS 2010), complemented by new qualitative field studies. Third, it aims to forge a consensus around some of the key challenges for reducing extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity over the next decade, including changing regional patterns of poverty and wealth, high and persistent poverty among ethnic minorities, substantial and increasing vulnerability, and rising inequality in outcomes and opportunities.

India's 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Work is provided in public works projects at the stipulated minimum wage.This study asks: Are the conditions stipulated by the Act met in practise? How much impact on poverty do the earnings from the scheme have? Why might that impact fall short of its potential? How can the scheme bridge that gap? The bulk of the study focuses on the scheme's performance in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where one would hope that a scheme such as this would help reduce poverty.The study finds that the scheme is falling well short of its potential impact on poverty in Bihar. Analysis of the study's survey data points to a number of reasons. Workers are not getting all the work they want, they are not getting the full wages due and participation in the scheme is far from costless to them. Many report that they had to give up some other income-earning activity when they took up work. The unmet demand for work is the single most important policy-relevant factor in accounting for the gap between actual performance and the scheme's potential impact on poverty.The study finds that there is very low public awareness of what needs to be done to obtain work. The study uses a randomised control trial of an awareness intervention - a specially designed fictional movie - to show how knowledge of rights and processes can be enhanced, as a key step toward better performance. While the movie was effective in raising awareness, it had little discernible effect on actions such as seeking employment when needed.This suggests that supply-side constraints must also be addressed in addition to raising public awareness. A number of specific supply-side constraints to work provision are identified, including poor implementation capacity, weak financial management and monitoring systems.

Deliberation is the process by which a group of people, each with equal voice, can - via a process of discussion and debate - reach an agreement.Deliberation and Development attempts to do two things. First, it rethinks the role of deliberation in development and shows that it has potential well beyond a narrow focus on participatory projects. Deliberation, if properly instituted, has the potential to have a transformative effect on many if not all aspects of development, and especially in addressing problems of collective action, coordination and entrenched inequality. This has broad implications both at the global and local level.Second, the book demonstrates that taking deliberation seriously calls for a different approach to both research and policy design and requires a much greater emphasis on the process by which decisions are made, rather than an exclusive focus on the outcomes. Deliberation and Development contributes to a broader literature to understand the role of communicative process in development.