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Thesis (M.Comm.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009. / This dissertation examines the challenges of poverty alleviation in Malawi, with particular reference to the period 1995 to 2005. Malawi is a small landlocked country, considered to be one of the poorest countries in the world. Some of the major indicators of poverty in Malawi are inequality in income distribution, attainability of basic needs and low levels of development. The Integrated Household Survey (IHS) of 2004/5 revealed that 52.4 percent of the Malawian population was living below the poverty line in 2005 (National Statistics Office (NSO), 2005: 139). Poverty reduction strategies in Malawi have had a slight impact on reducing the level of poverty. Nevertheless, the government of Malawi remains committed to the implementation of redistributive measures and economic reforms in its quest for economic growth, poverty reduction and enhanced employment opportunities in the country (Malawi Government, 2006:1). This study uses an econometric analysis to examine the effects of government spending on socioeconomic services, foreign aid and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth on the levels of poverty in Malawi, using data for period 1995-2005. The regression results indicate that in GDP growth and government expenditure on socioeconomic services, particularly on education, have a significant impact on reducing poverty levels in Malawi. To address poverty, Malawi should thus pursue an economic growth enhancing strategy, with expansion of human capabilities that also facilitates fiscal redistribution. The regression results show that if GDP growth is increased by 1 percent on average, this would decrease the headcount poverty by 0.237 percent, ceteris paribus. The model also shows that, on average, a K1 million increase in government expenditure on education will decrease the headcount poverty by 0.1 percent, ceteris paribus. The regression results therefore indicate that GDP growth and government expenditure on education will have to increase in order for poverty levels in Malawi to decrease in the long run. The results of a similar comparative regression analysis for Botswana further confirm the consistency that education is a significant factor in reducing poverty.

The purpose of this study was to identify and understand the social-ecological resources which encouraged resilient Basotho youth in the rural areas of the Thabo Mofutsanyana district of the Free State province towards positive adjustment in the face of poverty and underdevelopment. Positive adjustment, or resilience, is the focus of the International Community-University Research Alliance (ICURA) and International Development Research Centre (IDRC) funded project, called Pathways to Resilience. My study forms part of this broader resilience study. Resilience, or positive adjustment to hardship, can be defined as the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to health-promoting resources that encourage positive adjustment, and the concomitant capacity of the individual’s family, community and culture to provide these health resources and experiences in culturally meaningful ways. Recently, researchers have suggested that the socio-ecological resources that encourage positive adjustment might differ across ecologies. There is little understanding in South Africa of which resources, within specific ecologies, encourage such positive adjustment. My study seeks to address this gap, with specific reference to Basotho youth in the Thabo Mofutsanyana district in the Free State. I used a qualitative phenomenological strategy of inquiry and participatory visual methods to determine the socio-ecological antecedents of the resilience of 130 resilient Basotho youth from rural areas of the Thabo Mofutsanyana district in the Free State province of South Africa. Using Bronfenbrenner‟s Ecological Systems Theory (1979), Sameroff‟s Transactional Model of Development (2009) and Unger’s Social Ecology of Resilience (2011) as framework, I explored the resources underpinning the resilience of my participants. The findings suggest that the resilient Basotho youth in this study were encouraged to adjust well to the risks of poverty and associated threats by making use of social-ecologically accessible resilience-promoting resources. In other words the resilient Basotho youth found resilience-promoting resources in their microsystems (individual, family, school, peers and nature and pets), mesosystems (social interactions), exosystems (community resources like libraries and medical facilities, and role models) and macrosystems (religious beliefs and practices, pastors, and access to information through television, radio, cell phone, and inspirational publications). The conclusion of my study lays emphasis on the interwovenness of socioecological systems in resilience processes: no one system could be sing led out. The entire ecosystem was involved, reciprocally, in providing the participants with resilience-promoting resources. My findings emphasise the importance of mothers, grandmothers, school and educational resources, religious beliefs and practices, and access to information (through the use of television, radio, computer and inspirational literature) for Basotho youth in the Thabo Mofutsanyana district, but do not suggest that these are the sole pathways to their resilience. Continued research in other parts of South Africa, with additional groups of youth, is needed to reach a comprehensive understanding of the socio-ecological antecedents of resilience among South African youth. / MEd, Learner support, North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2012

Extreme poverty is a reality facing over a billion people, and a striking contradiction is that huge disparities coexist with a relatively rapid economic growth. This thesis investigates whether economic growth reduces poverty. Through an empirical cross-sectional regression, it analyses what impact economic growth has on poverty, and what structures that possibly preserve these phenomena. The theories of Dual Economy and Human Capital are used to explain such structures that cause poverty to coexist with growth. Brazil is an example of a dual economy whose recent history is characterised by successful economic and public policies that have managed to reduce the level of extreme poverty. Structures of dualistic labour markets contribute to the preservation of the extreme poverty, thus they do have some explanatory power of the coexistence of poverty and growth. The main conclusion from the empirical results is that economic growth does indeed reduce poverty. Also the level of poverty is strongly related to decrease of poverty, in such a way that a high level of poverty is associated to a slow decrease of poverty. However, economic growth does not appear to be sufficient a tool when the level of extreme poverty is high, suggesting that well-designed policies and investments in education are needed to obtain an inclusive, pro-poor growth and thus reduce the level of extreme poverty.

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This thesis encompasses three essays around criminal behaviour with the first one analysing the impact of programmes aimed at poverty reduction, the second one developing a theoretical model of hysteresis in crime, and the third one empirically investigating the hysteresis hypothesis in crime rates. In the first chapter I investigate the impact of conditional cash transfers (CCT) on crime rates by analysing the Brazilian Bolsa Familia, the largest CCT programme in the world, in a panel data between 2001 and 2008. The related existing economic literature analysing general welfare programmes usually ignores the crucial endogeneity involved in the relationship between crime rates and social welfare policies through poverty, since poorer regions are focused in the distribution of resources. I use the existing temporal heterogeneity in the implementation of the programme across the states to identify the causal impact of CCT programmes on poverty and criminality. The guidelines of the Brazilian programme established that the amount of resources available for each state should be based on the poverty levels in the 2000 Census. However, due to reasons unrelated to poverty levels and crime rates, some states were able to implement the programme to a greater extent more quickly than others. States that reached the level of cash transfer expenditures proposed by the guidelines of the programme more promptly had a more significant reduction in poverty rates. Similar but less robust results are found for crime rates as robbery, theft and kidnapping, while no significant effects were found for homicide and murder, indicating a weak or non-existent relationship between conditional cash transfers and crime. I also develop, to my knowledge, the first theoretical model to explicitly account for hysteresis - a situation where positive exogenous variations in the relevant economic variables have a different effect from negative variations - in both criminal behaviour and crime rates in order to fill the gap between the theoretical predictions and the empirical evidence about the efficiency of policies in reducing crime rates. The majority of the theoretical analyses predict a sharp decrease in crime rates when there are significant improvements in the economic conditions or an increase in the probability of punishment. However, the existing empirical studies have found lower than expected effects on crime rates from variations in variables related to those factors. One important consequence of hysteresis is that the effect on an outcome variable from positive exogenous variations in the determining variables has a different magnitude from negative variations. For example, if hysteresis is present in the criminal behaviour and part of the police force in a city are dismissed in a given year, resulting in an escalation in crime, a reversal of the policy in the following year by readmitting all sacked police officers in an attempt to restore the original crime levels will result in lower crime rates, but higher than the original ones, yielding an asymmetric relationship between police and crime. Hysteresis is considered in a simple framework to model illicit behaviour. At the individual level, if criminal activity is associated with intrinsic sunk costs and learning, then the cost of leaving a criminal career is higher than entering it. At the aggregate level with homogeneous agents, this is translated into a hysteresis effect that will only occur if a specific threshold is surpassed. With heterogeneous agents, this phenomenon is reinforced generating a hysteresis effect that exists for all possible values of the variable affecting the crime decision. There are multiple equilibria at both levels. In the last chapter I empirically investigate the existence of hysteresis in crime rates. To my knowledge, this is the first empirical study to consider the existence of asymmetric effects on crime from variations in the probability of punishment and in the opportunity cost of crime. More specifically, I investigate whether positive variations on variables associated to those factors, respectively police officers and average level of income, are statistically different from negative variations. Using US crime data at the state level between 1977 and 2010, I find that police force size and real average income of unskilled workers have asymmetric effects on most types of crimes. The absolute value of the average impact of positive variations in those variables on property and violent crime rates are statistically smaller than the absolute value of the average effect of negative variations. These effects are robust under several specifications. A closer inspection of the data reveals a relatively monotonic negative relationship between wages and property crime rates, as well as negative variations in police and most crime rates. However, the relationships between positive variations in law enforcement size and most crime rates are non-linear. The magnitude of the observed asymmetries supports the hypothesis of hysteresis in crime, and suggests that no theoretical or empirical analysis would be complete without careful consideration of that important feature in the relationships between crime, police and legal income. These results corroborate the argument that policy makers should be more inclined to set pre-emptive policies rather than mitigating measures.