No description available.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1985 K37 / Master of Arts

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 331-404) Attempts to contribute toward greater understanding of the urbanization process in Bangladesh. Focuses particularly on the rural-urban migration process, explaining the causes of mobility and stability and the consequences flowing from that movement for the wellbeing of migrants and their families.

published_or_final_version / Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This thesis is a collection of three independent essays that applies microeconometrics techniques to empirically study topics in development and labour economics. The first chapter uses evidence from a natural experiment in Bangladesh, where households were treated to different types of transfer, food grains and cash, at different periods in time, to test the effect of these transfers on household consumption behaviour. Using the fixed effect instrumental variable model, the estimation results show that though in-kind transfers did cause households to consume more grain than they would have chosen under equal-value cash transfers, the impact on calorie consumption and children health status is minimal. Households that received cash were able to reallocate their funds more effectively, and chose to spend their extra income on clothing and children's non-food consumption, while at the same time spending no more on vices. The second chapter investigates the dynamics of living standards in Thailand. Income and earnings processes are first modelled after the statistical Galton-Markov process before being extended to follow a more structural permanent earnings model. Empirical estimations of income and earnings persistence in Thailand employ both constructed pseudo-panel data from Thailand's Labour Force Surveys and the Townsend Thai panel data. Galton-Markov estimates found conditional persistence to be low in Thailand. However, quantile regression estimates find that persistence is low at the bottom of the distribution but high at the top, indicating a divergence in earnings as time passes. A study of the covariance structure of earnings finds that total variation in the earnings process is predominantly driven by moderately persistent transitory components following the AR(1) process. The third chapter attempts to empirically fit the power-law distribution and study the dynamics of inequality, especially at the upper end, of the income and consumption distribution in Thailand. We find that using the popular but incorrect method based on the linear regression approach will lead to researchers drawing a wrong conclusion. Regression estimates of the power-law exponent, a, provide strong evidence of power-law fit in Thailand. However, from the implementation of the superior Clauset et al. method, the evidence in support of the power-law fit is much weaker. Estimates of a for both income and consumption suggest that there is low inequality at the top in Thailand but further inspection finds that there is a high level of persistent between-group inequality between the top and bottom ends of the distribution. In addition, following Battistin et al. (2009), we find weak support for Gibrat's law of proportional random growth as the income-generating process in Thailand.

Among the reasons for financial exclusion is the fact that the poor, being largely illiterate and unemployed, are traditionally perceived as ‘bad credit risks’. This is the dominant perception of the poor in the formal credit markets – a perception that also exists in the microcredit sector. In other words, while information asymmetry is a recognized problem in lender-borrower relationships, lenders consider the problem particularly severe when they contemplate doing business with the poor. A contrasting paradigm, such as the one adopted by Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, views the poor as possessing economic potentials that have not been tapped – that is, as ‘good credit risks’. Grameen Bank’s microcredit features appear to have successfully mitigated the problems of information asymmetry and, to a large extent, made it possible for the poor to access microenterprise credit. Using the Grameen Bank model as a benchmark, this study examined the lending features of private sector microlenders in South Africa and those of KhulaStart (credit) scheme. The aim was to identify how the lending features affect microenterprise credit access. Primary data were obtained through interviews, while relevant secondary data were also used in the study. A key finding of the study was that while the Khulastart scheme was, like Grameencredit, targeted at the poor, the method of its delivery appeared diluted or unduly influenced by the conventional (private sector) paradigm that pre-classifies people as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ credit risks. As a result, the scheme was not robust enough to support microenterprise credit access. This has consequences for job-creation and poverty reduction. Based on the findings, the study maintains that a realistic broadening of microenterprise credit access will not occur unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift in microcredit practices, and unless measures designed to mitigate information asymmetries are sensitive to the historical, economic and sociocultural realities of the South African poor.

Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Text in English / Sustainable development empowers poverty-affected people and communities by strengthening their capabilities. HRDP, a Bangladeshi development agency aims to achieve this goal by offering literacy classes and primary school edu-cation. In recent years, they have encountered obstacles to their empowerment strategy. Socio-cultural mediated expectations and moral obligations impeded the capability approach. This case study seeks to research the effects of entitlement and patronage on the empowerment of people in one of their projects. To be able to understand these structures and to determine possible implications for the asset-based ap-proach, 14 interviews and two focus-group discussions with local stakeholders have been conducted in the village of Gabtali, Bangladesh. Findings revealed that people desire to invest their own assets to increase their well-being, but expect assistance for this to happen. The study suggests align-ing expectations and obligations with the capability approach and also suggests a few ideas how this could be accomplished. / Development Studies / M.A. (Development studies)