The aim of this study was to examine women in management positions in the Brazilian labor market, focusing on perception of their working condition but also challenges in a culture dominated by machismo and stereotypes. The data was conducted from a qualitative approach with a mix of snowball and convenience sample, by interviewing eight women with staff responsibilities in a wide range of sectors and branches. The result section revealed that the Brazilian society is characterized by a conservative approach and machismo, which create barriers for women to enter higher positions such as management.The combination of women being associated with household, caregiving and motherhood together with being submissive to men, reduces the chances to establish themselves in the labor market. However, the majority of the female leaders stated differences between male and female leadership, based on traditional ways of being leaders due to stereotypes.Although there are several aspects that create obstacles for women, there was one that stood out from the others, the sector they were employers in. Half of the participants worked in the private sector and the remaining half in the public one. Wishing for a life with family and improved working conditions could be achieved in the public sector and was highly unlikely in the private sector. These obstacles that women have to face and overcome make it hard to balance a career with a personal life.

The concept of aspiration is central to current policy debates about educational and social inequality in the UK. Although aspirations have long been of interest to social scientists there is still uncertainty about how much aspirations influence outcomes and the factors that shape educational and occupational aspirations. I contribute to this policy debate and area of study by examining in detail the mechanisms that shape aspirations and the meaning that young people attach to them. It is often claimed that disadvantaged young people suffer from 'poverty of aspirations'. Contrary to such claims, my findings show that the vast majority of students hold high aspirations for pursuing further academic qualifications, including those from highly disadvantaged backgrounds. I therefore question the grounds for treating 'poverty of aspirations' as a major social problem that should be tackled through interventions designed to raise them. In this mixed methods study I draw on both quantitative and qualitative sources of data. The quantitative data is from the Effective Provision Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education project (EPPSE). I examine the factors that are predictive of students holding high aspirations at the age of 14. The qualitative data I draw on is from twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with 16-18 years old from a sixth form college in East London. I contribute to the literature by showing in detail how aspirations are shaped by individual, family, school and neighbourhood level processes. In particular, I also show how important family life is in shaping aspirations and that in order to understand aspirations we should focus on the meaning young people attach to them. My findings suggest that our current models of aspirations are in need of refinement because they underestimate how high the aspirations of young people are and therefore struggle to explain how they are related to students' social backgrounds.

In spite of educational expansion, a considerable number of individuals are not able to participate in upper secondary and higher education in Mexico. The main purpose of this thesis is to examine the factors influencing individuals’ opportunities to make higher educational transitions in Mexico. These transitions are: participation in upper secondary education, completion of upper secondary education and progression to higher education. A parallel objective is to investigate the predictors of persons’ institutional location in the upper secondary level. It is argued that the majority of the international studies in the field of educational transitions, as well as most of the studies conducted for Mexico in this area, have focused on examining the chances of entering an educational level but less attention has been paid on examining the opportunities of concluding a given level of education. This dissertation explores the chances of completing upper secondary education and it incorporates school dropouts in the analysis of educational transitions. Another important purpose is to conduct interdisciplinary theoretical work. A theoretical framework composed of the capability approach, sociocultural reproduction theory and contemporary sociological perspectives on inequalities in education is used to operationalize key concepts and to provide possible explanations of persons’ decisions to participate in upper secondary and higher education. From the capability approach, human agency, preferences and rationality have influence on educational decision-making. From Bourdieu’s sociocultural reproduction theory, educational choices are not freely made because they are determined by cultural and socioeconomic constraints. Furthermore, drawing on the integrative theoretical framework several hypotheses are formulated and some of them are empirically tested using national survey data for Mexico: The School Dropouts Survey, 2011. The investigation adopts a quantitative methodology which includes the estimation of binomial and multinomial logistic regression models. This study found that the effects of ascriptive factors such as social and ethnic background, gender and geographical location vary for each school transition. In addition, some of these factors contribute to predict person’s location in academic and vocational pathways of upper secondary education. Nevertheless, individuals’ capacity to attain higher levels of schooling is not completely determined by structural-related aspects. This thesis found that agency and capability dimensions such as freedom to choose school, aspirations and persons’ preferences towards education are not only intrinsically valuable but instrumentally relevant for making higher educational transitions. Furthermore, the type of institution attended and academic performance matter for entering and completing upper secondary and for attending higher education. This thesis concludes that the degree to which structural factors, agency and capability dimensions and school experiences make an impact on individuals’ educational trajectories is significantly affected by specific institutional arrangements at each stage of education. Finally, the empirical evidence of this thesis has a number of important implications for educational policies in Mexico.

by Agnes Kam-Kwan Chow Gardner. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Bibliography: leaves 136-144.

The role of inequality in development has been the subject of long-standing debates in academic and policy circles. Notwithstanding disagreements about exactly how the two are linked, conventional wisdom agrees that inequality is an objective 'fact' that can be measured free from ideological considerations. New data detect trends towards higher inequality, weaker economic positions for those at the bottom, and a concentration of wealth at the very top of the distribution in most regions. Inequality studies as currently practiced are ill-equipped to accommodate the empirical changes and the resulting theoretical implications. Putting an end to over half a century of mainstream consensus assuming that inequality would automatically recede with developmental progress, the discipline needs rethinking. My thesis proposes a new research agenda for studying inequality that is not only able to integrate these empirical developments, but which also challenges what has been taken for granted: that inequality just is, independently of context, time and observer. Instead, it proposes that along with its objective existence, inequality is a relational phenomenon subjectively experienced relative to a particular context. In five interconnected Sections, my dissertation challenges conventional views of how inequality looks, how it is seen, and what can be done about it, especially in developing countries. The study focuses on the ways in which inequality is perceived, and how it is perpetuated. After an introduction to the subject in Section I, Section II investigates how inadequate measurement perpetuates inequality, proposing a new indicator that shows that inequality is largely defined in the extreme ends of the income distribution. Section III examines the reproduction of inequality at the bottom, contrasting minimum wage policies over recent decades in Mexico with those of other countries in Latin America. In light of a political economy resistant to change, Section IV scrutinizes Mexican elites, exploring how inequality is perceived from the very top of the income distribution, how this affects policy-making and, subsequently, measured inequality levels. Section V concludes by outlining the theoretical and practical implications of my findings.

Trust is a good approach to explain the functioning of markets, institutions or society as a whole. It is a key element in almost every commercial transaction over time and might be one of the main explanations of economic success and development. Trust diminishes the more we perceive others to have economically different living realities. In most of the relevant contributions, scholars have taken a macro perspective on the inequality-trust linkage, with an aggregation of both trust and inequality on a country level. However, patterns of within-country inequality and possibly influential determinants, such as perception and socioeconomic reference, remained undetected. This paper offers the opportunity to look at the interplay between inequality and trust at a more refined level. A measure of (generalized) trust emerges from ESS 5 survey which asks "...generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?". With the use of 2009 EU-SILC data, measurements of income inequality are developed for age-specific groups of society in 22 countries. A sizable variation in inequality measures can be noticed. Even in low inequality countries, like Sweden, income imbalances within certain age groups have the potential to undermine social trust.

Against the background of Nigeria’s substantial rise in oil income, under three distinct chapters, this thesis analysed poverty mobility, inequality, and developments in oil industry. Given that the rate of progress against poverty is considered to be an increasing function of growth (Ravallion and Chen, 1997; Ravallion, 2001; Dollar and Kraay, 2002, 2016); and based on documented evidence on the negative effect of oil intensity on growth, it is hypothesized that: (a) ‘resource-curse’ makes it harder to grow the economy (e.g Gelb (1988) and associates, Sachs and Warner (1995, 1997, 2001), Auty (2001); Gylfason (2011; 2001), and Sala-i-Martin and Subranmanian (2013)); (b) inequality is growth-impeding and also make it harder for the growth that occurs to help poor people (Ravallion, 2007). Therefore, the presence of ‘resource-curse’ and the high level of inequality in Nigeria could explain the country’s inability to address its rising poverty incidence, given its enournous oil wealth. In other words growth drives poverty reduction. Growth is crowded-out by ‘resource-curse’ (or oil intensity). Therefore oil intensity harms poverty reduction. To provide the contexts for these hypotheses, we open the thesis by clearly laying out, in Chapters 1 and 2, the groundwork for the analyses that follow: respectively, general introduction, and review of relevant literature. We analyse the evolution of welfare of households according to the demographics of the household heads in Chapter 3. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, we asked the following questions and try to address the questions using original survey data on Nigeria and aggregate-level data on oil-related variables. What is the current extent of poverty and inequality in Nigeria? How have these evolved through the years? Is there micro-based evidence of the ‘curse-effect’ of oil on the average living standards of households in the country? Since a static poverty profile understates the extent of poverty, in Chapter 3, we construct and used a synthetic panel to measure poverty dynamics (i.e. the rates of poverty transitions, movement in and out of poverty or individual poverty experiences through time) in the country. In addition, we model the determinants of poverty dynamics using Censored Least Absolute Deviation (CLAD) estimator. The chapter produces evidence that there were more transitions [into] than exits from poverty over 1980-2010; and, as a result, absolute poverty incidence has risen by nearly four-fold over the period. We also find evidence that much of the observed poverty in Nigeria is chronic than transient and the determinants of transient and chronic poverty are not congruent. For instance, the dummy coefficient for households living in oil producing states indicate stronger impact on transient than chronic poverty. Finally, drawing on six sweeps of household surveys of Nigeria that together span 1980–2010 with a pooled sample size of about 97,000 households and data on Nigeria’s age-gender-specific life expectancy from the World Health Organization, this paper shows that about 72 percent to 91 percent of Nigeria’s poor are at risk of spending their entire life below the poverty line. To show this, I estimate the duration of poverty spells and link this to the average age of the poor and to the life expectancy. I find that the poor are expected to escape poverty at the age of 85.46 years on average. However, there is heterogeneity in the exit time, with the transient poor averaging 3–7 years below the poverty line and the chronically poor averaging 37 years or more. Given these exit times and life expectancy, the mean age of the poor at their expected time of escaping poverty exceeds the average life expectancy, meaning some of the poor are not guaranteed to escape poverty in their remaining lifetime. The implication is that growth in Nigeria has not been sufficient nor has it demonstrated the potential to help the poor break free from poverty. However, like Brazil, Nigeria can significantly reduce poverty without absolute reliance on economic growth by reducing its high inflation rate and substantially expanding its social security and social assistance transfers. In Chapter 5, using household surveys of Nigeria, we link and analyse the evolution of poverty in Nigeria to the response of poverty to growth. In particular, we test two hypotheses [put forward by earlier studies]: (i) "Growth is still good for the poor" - (Dollar, Kleineberg, & Kraay, 2016); (ii)" Inequality is bad for the poor" - (Ravallion and Chan, 2007). In a two-fold aim, we estimate the various measures of distribution in order to see how inequality has evolved over 1980-2010 on one hand, and link this evolution to the response of poverty to growth, on the other. Based on the findings, our measures of distribution are all in agreement that Nigeria is less unequal in 2010 than it was in 1980. This decline in inequality, we found, was partly driven by contractions in average living standards, 'pro-poor' growth during 1996-2004 and redistribution of welfare among the non-poor rather than, as expected, redistribution between the non-poor and the poor. Also, we found that the changing pattern of inequality has mitigated the impact of contraction on the poor and in another period, countervailed the gains of growth that should have accrued to the poor. We investigate in Chapter 6, at a micro-level, the hypothesis that the abundance of natural resources (e.g. oil) exerts a depressing effect on growth. Instead of growth in GDP per capita, growth in PCE was used as the LHS variable in the growth regression. Because the surveys in Nigeria are not panel, we follow Deaton (1985) to construct a pseudo panel for the above exercise. This chapter did not find – as far as our leading measures of oil intensity are concerned – negative effects of changes in oil intensity on changes in household consumption. However, growth in the country’s oil revenue is found to be growth-impeding in household consumption. For instance, based on our POLS (FE) results, a 1% rise in real oil revenue is associated with decline in per capita expenditure of households by 0.35%. The impact of the variable that measures oil output (in barrels) per person per day, is negative both for POLS and FE estimations and significant at 1% levels. This result has two implications. First, the country’s population size has been growing at a rate faster than the output from oil, i.e the country’s major source of revenue. More clearly, the more Nigerians there are, for every barrel of crude produced per day, the slower the growth in household welfare. Precisely, if the number of citizens for every barrel of crude produced per day grows by 100%, household welfare will decline by 52%. We provide general policy conclusion in Chapter 7.

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Sonita Singh

This dissertation consists of four studies on the role of institutions, education and institutional reform in economic development. Three of the studies examine empirical aspects of the issue and the fourth provides an analysis of policy implications. A key theme of the dissertation is the recognition that institutions, both formal and informal, are important for development. The observation that some developing economies have been unable to substantively improve institutional structures, creates a vital agenda for studying institutional change. The first study empirically investigates the impact of education, both quantitatively and qualitatively, on the informal institution of social capital measured as social trust. Differences in levels of education are considered to find the separate effects of primary, secondary and tertiary education. The relationship between education and social trust levels in countries is found to be positive. The sample is further split into developed and developing countries which also substantiates the main hypothesis. The results can be interpreted as schooling playing a transformative role in the society. The second study develops a framework for studying education inequality and institutional development. A range of economic, political and social measures of institutional quality are used in a cross-country analysis. The study confirms that the cross-country differences in institutional variables are influenced negatively by the education inequality. Several competing hypotheses of institutional improvement are used to test the sensitivity of the results. The sample is further split into OECD and non-OECD countries, with no new results arising from this split. The third study investigates the relationship of education inequality and institutional quality using panel data techniques and an alternative data set of institutional measures, than the one used in the second study. This study initially estimates the relationship using the pooled OLS and fixed effects models. The issue of persistency in institutional variables is then investigated by using a system GMM estimator. The evidence suggests that the impact of reducing education inequality is associated with improvements in institutional quality. The fourth study analyses the implications from the first three studies with reference to the institutional reform agenda. Insight is given for improving the reform process. Areas of context specificity and sequencing of reforms are dealt with, using country examples. The intuition from this essay is that educational equality is a deliberate initiative which needs to be carried out through policy initiatives, although the process adopted would depend on the specific economy. It is suggested that there is a need to change the fundamental focus from emphasis on altering formal rules, to considering the current underlying structures in societies as a constraint, in developing a way forward to improving the reform agenda.

This thesis investigates income inequality and poverty in urban China using survey data from 2002. It shows that in urban China, income in the coastal region is less equally distributed than in the interior region, although social welfare is higher. Developed cities have more inequality than less developed cities, but they also have a higher level of social welfare. Further decomposition analysis indicates that intragroup inequality accounts for the dominant part of overall inequality no matter how groups are categorized - by region, by city level, by gender, or by education. There is a significant difference in the incidence of poverty between interior regions and coastal regions, with the interior region having a higher headcount ratio and a greater poverty gap ratio. It is also found that developed cities have lower poverty than less developed cities.