Critical theory cannot say, today, what the rise of new technologies is changing for the socio-political order. By reducing the impact of digital technology to the specific interests of those who exploit it, the constructivist approach to technology only gives a segmental and tactical vision of its issues. Furthermore, if they indeed diagnose ruptures in practices and representations, epistemological analyzes of digital technology remain silent as to the structurally political dimension of these transformations, however radical. This thesis therefore proposes to articulate these critiques with an epistemic, unified postulate of the impact of digital transformation on the implicit theoretical framework which underlies the legitimacy (and even more profoundly, the condition of possibility) of liberal democracy. It puts the critical theory of technology into perspective using a classic approach to political theory, which consists of recalling the contingency and dependence of regimes on a certain social reality (relevant not only to practices but to symbolic, epistemic order that results from it). The political issues of technology are thus approached through the notion of the imaginary - not only to show the influence of digital transformation on the representations which form the basis of the common world, but to affirm that the fundamentally political issue of digital technology is above all a poetic issue: we must restore to theory its creative power, to dare to imagine a socio-political landscape, and an ideal horizon, radically transformed. Une relecture des enjeux politiques du numérique: la technologie et la production de l'imaginaire social La théorie critique ne sait pas dire, aujourd’hui, ce que change l’essor des nouvelles technologies pour l’ordre socio-politique. En réduisant l’impact du numérique aux intérêts ponctuels de ceux qui l’instrumentalisent, l’approche constructiviste de la technologie ne donne de ses enjeux qu’une vision segmentaire et tactique. Par ailleurs, si elles diagnostiquent bien des ruptures dans les pratiques et les représentations, les analyses épistémologiques du numérique demeurent muettes quant à la dimension structurellement politique de ces transformations pourtant radicales.Cette thèse propose donc d’articuler ces critiques à un postulat épistémique, unifié, de l’impact de la transformation numérique sur le cadre théorique implicite qui sous-tend la légitimité (et plus profondément encore, la condition de possibilité) de la démocratie libérale. Elle met en perspective la théorie critique de la technologie à l’aide d’une approche classique de la théorie politique, qui consiste à rappeler la contingence et la dépendance des régimes à une certaine réalité sociale (relevant non seulement des pratiques mais de l’ordre symbolique, épistémique qui en découle). Les enjeux politiques de la technologie sont ainsi abordés au travers de la notion d’imaginaire — pas seulement pour montrer l’influence de la transformation numérique sur les représentations qui fondent le monde commun, mais pour affirmer que l’enjeu fondamentalement politique du numérique est avant tout un enjeu poétique : il faut rendre à la théorie sa puissance créatrice, pour oser imaginer un paysage socio-politique, et un horizon idéel, radicalement transformés.

In this dissertation, I investigate the socioeconomic causes of consequences of ethnic conflict, and evaluate interventions that can reduce social animosity and misperceptions about outgroups. In particular, I focus on conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India. In recent years, online misinformation has emerged as a major contributor to misperceptions and animosity towards Muslims in India. In Chapter 1, I investigate if we can inoculate people against misinformation and mitigate its impact on people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior? We conduct a large field experiment in India with an intervention providing weekly digests containing a compilation of fact-checks of viral misinformation. In these digests, we also incorporate narrative explainers to give details and context of issues that are politically salient and consistent target of false stories. Specifically, we address misperceptions about Muslims increasingly fuelled by online misinformation. We find that familiarity with fact-checks increases people’s ability to correctly identify misinformation by eleven percentage points. However, belief in true news also decreases by four percentage points. We estimate a structural model to disentangle the two mechanisms of impact—truth discernment, which is the ability to correctly distinguish between false and true news; and skepticism, which changes the overall credulity for both false and true news. The impact is driven by an increase in both truth discernment and skepticism. Whereas skepticism increases immediately, it takes several weeks to become better at discerning truth. Finally, our intervention reduces misperceptions about Muslims, as well as leads to changes in policy attitudes and behavior. Treated individuals are less likely to support discriminatory policies and are more likely to pay for efforts to counter the harassment of inter-faith couples. In Chapter 2, I investigate the economic impacts of conflict and social animus by estimating the causal impact of ethnic violence on economic growth in India. For causal identification, I use shift-share instruments to isolate exogenous national shocks to violence from endogenous local shocks. On average, a riot reduces state GDP growth rate by 0.14 percentage points. To investigate mechanism, I estimate the dynamics of impact using the synthetic control method and compare it to theoretical predictions from a shock to social capital versus physical capital. This shows that the negative impact of violence is likely driven by a negative shock to social capital from higher animosity and discrimination among communities exposed to violence. This impact of violence on growth creates a vicious cycle when one also considers the effect in the opposite direction – lower growth leading to more violence. The multiplier due to this vicious cycle magnifies the impact of external growth shocks by 40 percent in equilibrium. Overall, the results highlight the importance of strong institutions to manage conflict for the long-term prosperity of societies. In Chapter 3, I investigate the historical origins of ethnic violence in India by comparing violence in regions that were directly ruled by British, versus those that were indirectly ruled through native kings who had significant autonomy. I find that regions that are directly ruled have more violence in post-independence period. I then use direct British rule as an instrument for ethnic violence to estimate the impact of violence and residential segregation.

This author conducted a qualitative interview study of community orchestra musicians to better understand why they have sustained their music-making. The first chapter of this dissertation outlines the three research questions along with a rationale and author’s narrative. A problem statement along with a conceptual framework are also included within the first chapter. Three key areas of connected and relevant literature are identified and discussed in the second chapter of this proposal: 1) Socioeconomic Status (SES), parental involvement, efficacy, and attrition in formal school settings: Motivations of students to start learning an instrument and sustain that learning through high school; 2) Characteristics of members of community orchestras; and 3) Studies examining why adults sustain their music-making. The first dimension enables comparisons and contrasts between community orchestra members and school music students. The second and third domains offer a context for both the musicians' individual work and adult music-making in general. The third chapter is a description of the methods, research questions, and timeline of data collection. Data were gathered via a semi-structured interview and a PhotoVoice activity from 10 community orchestra musicians in the New York City area. A description of the pilot study is also included along with the findings. Additionally, the third chapter includes a detailed description of the PhotoVoice method. There were three main findings for each of the three research questions and those findings and the supporting themes/codes are described in chapter 4. The discussion chapter includes extensive thoughts on the implications of the findings. The concluding chapter summarizes the research, lays out plans for future research, and reflects on the study.

Thesis (MBA. (Business Administration)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / This study investigated the socio-economic effects of the youth unemployment on the economy of Limpopo Province. Youth unemployment is rife in the province whereby drugs, alcohol abuse, HIV/AIDS, and crime affect young people. A great number of these young people are unskilled or semi-skilled and are therefore not able to create jobs for themselves; they rely on government for job creation. Thus, a research was conducted in Capricorn District of Limpopo Province, wherein participants were drawn from two municipalities. The two municipalities that were identified for the study were Polokwane and Lepelle-Nkumpi. These municipalities were identified due to the number of active youth programmes that they conduct. A total of 54 individuals participated in the study. They included the municipality officials and the young people. A quantitative research approach was used to collect and analyse data. A Likert scale was used as a research instrument to collect data. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to the selected participants. Thus, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25 was used to analyse data. The major finding in the research was that unemployment affected all the youth across the entire education spectrum. The study therefore recommended changes in the education system, and rigorous programmes on entrepreneurship.

Over the past two decades, economic change in sub-Saharan Africa has been characterized by the persistent importance of small and informal activities. Unlike South East Asia, economic growth has not been accompanied by an expansion of the formal manufacturing sector. Chapters 1 and 2 of this dissertation examine social factors with the potential to dampen labor supply to the formal sector. Chapter 1 demonstrates the presence of strong complementarities in labor supply among social networks, driven by the value of commuting together with friends and neighbors to work. Chapter 2 shows that informal redistributive arrangements act as a tax on earned income, thereby dampening incentives to exert effort at work. Both of these chapters are based on field experiments, implemented in urban Cote d'Ivoire in partnership with private companies. The third chapter of this dissertation focuses on environmental factors. It demonstrates that a large-scale forestation program in the 1930s across the US Midwest changed the climate, both locally and downwind. This policy-induced change in the climate is then used to the effects of climate change on the agricultural sector, with a specific focus on the role of adaptation. Taken together, these three chapters pave the way for future research on the green transition in lower-income countries.

Background: Longitudinal studies suggest that socioeconomic status (SES) and mental health have a bidirectional relationship, such that declines in SES lead to a deterioration of mental health (social causation), while worsening mental health leads to declines in SES (social drift). Nevertheless, existing research has important substantive and methodological gaps. Most notably, studies often employ one from a diverse range of SES indicators and arrive at different conclusions, with labor market indicators (e.g., earnings) providing more consistent evidence of bidirectional effects and non-labor market indicators (e.g., family income) generally offering only support for social causation dynamics. Studies frequently estimate “average effects” failing to examine differences in social causation and social drift effects across populations. From a methodological standpoint, studies often have limited ability to draw causal inferences. For instance, studies examine either social causation or social drift effects independently without controlling for reverse causation. Other studies fail to control for time-invariant differences across individuals that could significantly bias estimates. Furthermore, studies on the association between material hardship and mental health often rely on measures of material hardship with unknown validity and reliability. This three-paper dissertation seeks to tackle several shortcomings in existing research, with the goal of improving and advancing our understanding how SES and mental health affect each other over time and how these dynamics vary across populations. Methods: This dissertation employs data from a five-wave representative panel (n=3,103) of working-age (18-64) New York City adults with yearly measures of individual earnings, family income (income-to-needs), material hardship, and psychological distress. Paper 1 examines bidirectional effects between income types (individual earnings and family income) and distress by relying on cross-lagged panel models with unit fixed effects (FE-CLPM). Subgroup analyses are conducted by examining effects by age, gender, education, and racial/ethnic identification. Paper 2 develops measurement models for material hardship and examines the relationships longitudinal trajectories of income, material hardship, and distress. To identify dimensions underlying the seven observed material hardship indicators, Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA) were performed on a randomly selected training sample (n=1,542). Subsequently, cross-sectional Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) and longitudinal invariance tests were conducted on the holdout sample (n=1,561) to further examine the factor structure extracted via EFA and test its measurement equivalence across time. A latent state-trait model examined the extent to which indicators vary or persist over time. Additional CFA models were specified to examine the association between material hardship and income types and psychological distress. Lastly, utilizing factor scores calculated based on CFA models, parallel linear growth curve models were estimated to examine the association between the longitudinal trajectories of income types, material hardship, and psychological distress. Paper 3 examines the bidirectional effects between material hardship, psychological distress, earnings, and family income. Material hardship is measured via a single scale and two subscales for unmet needs (e.g., food insufficiency, housing instability, medical needs, cash hardship) and billpaying hardship (e.g., difficulty paying for rent/mortgage and utilities, utilities disconnection). Factor scores for material hardship measures were estimated based on measurement models developed in paper 2 of this dissertation. I utilize FE-CLPMs to examine social causation and social drift effects between material hardship and psychological distress. An initial model examines effects between material hardship and distress only controlling for partnership status and number of children as time-varying covariates. Subsequently, three-variable FE-CLPMs examine effects between income (earnings or family income), material hardship, and distress. Total, direct, and indirect effects are estimated to examine the effect of income on distress via material hardship, and the effect of distress on material hardship through income. Follow-up models examine the simultaneous effects of unmet needs and billpaying hardship. Finally, subgroup analyses examine bidirectional effects between the material hardship subscales and distress by age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, and permanent family income. Conclusions: The findings of this dissertation provide new evidence about the bidirectional effects between SES and psychological distress. Nonetheless, this study also reveals important differences in the magnitude and direction of effects depending on the SES indicator employed and the population studied. Across income types, individual earnings may be stronger determinants of mental health than family income. Additionally, social causation and social drift effects between income and distress vary by age, education, gender, and racial/ethnic identities. In paper 2, two distinct, although highly correlated, dimensions of material hardship were identified, namely, unmet needs and billpaying hardship. Consistent with prior research, the rate of change in material hardship mediated the association between the rates of change in income and distress. However, the mediating role of material hardship seems to be driven by the unmet needs factor and not billpaying hardship. Unmet needs (e.g., food, housing, medical care) may be more important social determinants of mental health than difficulties paying for bills (e.g., rent, utilities). The findings of paper 3 offer evidence supporting the reciprocal relationship between material hardship and psychological distress, particularly highlighting the significance of unmet needs as a social determinant of mental health. Difficulties in paying bills seem to be especially important among individuals facing economic disadvantage and those nearing retirement age. From a methodological perspective, the findings of this three-paper dissertation make a case for employing rigorous methods to improve the causal inference of studies about the relationship between SES and mental health. Particularly, this study underscores the importance of methods that can control for unobserved differences between individuals and examining social causation and social drift effects simultaneously. From a substantive perspective, this dissertation also underscores the importance of moving beyond ‘average effects’ and examining potential disparities in the way that subpopulations experience the effects of SES and mental health. From a social policy standpoint, this study highlights the importance of providing support to mitigate the impact of material hardship and income shocks, particularly earnings losses, as these factors have independent effects on distress. Moreover, future research ought to prioritize the development of interventions aimed at alleviating the economic and mental health consequences arising from bidirectional effects between SES and psychological distress.

There are many ways parents can improve their offspring’s outcomes. For example, they can invest in offspring’s education or health. They can provide better social connections to obtain job information or personal references. In addition, they can exert political influence to obtain better labor market outcomes for their offspring. Understanding exactly how parents improve their offspring’s outcomes is very important for the formation of political perspectives and policy designs. However, it is very difficult to disentangle the factors, as parents of high socioeconomic status do many things to help their children succeed. This dissertation presents three quasi-experimental studies to understand the causal mechanisms of parents’ influence on children’s outcomes in the context of China and United States. Chapter two examines the implementation of court-ordered racial desegregation of schools and finds that school desegregation increases biracial births. This provides the first evidence of how an education policy that affects racial integration also has demographic implications and an intergenerational impact on social and economic opportunities. Chapter three examines the effect of school desegregation on infant health. This chapter adopts the same empirical strategy and data as chapter three. I extend the paper by examining the effect of school desegregation on infant health. I find that for black mothers, school desegregation improves infant health, as measured by preterm birth. It also increases maternal education and fertility age. These may be important pathways to improve infant health. Chapter two and chapter three add to the growing literature on the impact of school desegregation beyond academic achievement. Chapter five examines the effect of fathers’ political influence on offspring’s labor market outcomes in China. It presents a difference-in-difference approach that exploits the variation of political influence in three dimensions: parent bureaucrat occupation, retirement status instrumented by retirement policy, and offspring gender. Using cross-section data from China Household Income Survey, it finds that the retirement of a bureaucrat with political influence translates into a decrease in offspring’s income of 13 percent. Chapter six provides a summary and conclusions and discusses future research directions.

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

The rise in America’s drug poisoning rates has been described as a public health crisis and has long been attributed to the rapid rise in opioid supply due to increased volumes of medical prescribing in the United States that began in the mid-1990s and peaked in 2012. In 2016, the introduction of the “deaths of despair” hypothesis provided a more nuanced explanation for the rising rates of drug poisoning deaths: increasing income inequality and stagnation of middle-class worker wages, driven by long-term shifts in the labor market, reduced employment opportunities and overall life prospects for persons with a high school degree or less, driving increases in “deaths of despair” (i.e., deaths from suicide, cirrhosis of the liver, and drug poisonings). This focus on economic and social conditions as capable of shaping geospatial differences in drug demand and attendant drug-related harms (e.g., drug poisonings) provides a larger context to factors potentially underlying the heterogeneous distribution of prescription opioid supply across the United States. However, despite the likelihood that economic and social conditions may be important demand-side factors that also interact with supply-side factors to produce the rates of fatal drug poisonings, little information exists about the effect of area-level socioeconomic conditions on fatal drug poisoning rates, and no study has investigated whether socioeconomic conditions interact with prescription opioid supply to affect area-level rates of fatal drug poisonings. The overarching goal of this dissertation was to test the independent and joint effects of supply- and demand-side factors, operationalized as prescription opioid supply and socioeconomic conditions, on fatal drug poisoning in the U.S. First, a systematic review of the literature was conducted to critically evaluate the evidence on the ecological relationship of prescription opioid supply and socioeconomic conditions on rates of drug poisoning deaths. The systematic review provides robust evidence of the independent effect of each prescription opioid supply and socioeconomic conditions on rates of drug poisoning deaths. The gap in the literature on the joint effects of prescription opioid supply and socioeconomic conditions was clear, with no study examining the interaction between supply- and demand-side factors on rates of fatal drug poisonings. Moreover, although greater prescription opioid supply was associated with higher rates of fatal drug poisonings in most of the studies, two studies presented contradictory findings, with one study showing no effect of supply on drug poisoning deaths and the other showing locations with higher levels of prescription opioid supply were associated with fewer drug-related deaths. Three limitations were also identified in the reviewed studies that could partially explain the observed associations. First, although studies aggregated data on drug poisoning deaths to a range of administrative spatial levels, including census tract, 5-digit ZIP code, county, 3-digit ZIP code, and state, no study investigated the sensitivity of findings to the level of geographic aggregation. Second, spatial modeling requires the assessment of spatial autocorrelation in both the unadjusted and adjusted data, but few studies even assessed spatial autocorrelation in the data, and fewer still incorporated spatial dependencies in the model. This is important because when spatial autocorrelation is present, the independence assumption in standard statistical regression models is violated, potentially causing bias and loss of efficiency. Third, studies operationalized prescription opioid supply and socioeconomic conditions using a variety of different measures, and no study assessed the sensitivity of findings to the different measures of supply and socioeconomic conditions. Second, the ecological relationship between prescription opioid supply and fatal drug poisonings was examined. For this, pooled cross-sectional time series data from 3,109 U.S. counties in 49 states (2006-2016) were used in Bayesian Poisson conditional autoregressive models to estimate the effect of county prescription opioid supply on four types of drug poisoning deaths: any drug (drug-related death), any opioid (opioid-related death), any prescription opioid but not heroin (prescription opioid-related death), and heroin (heroin-related death), adjusting for compositional and contextual differences across counties. Comparisons were made by type of drug poisoning (any drug, any opioid, prescription opioids only, heroin), level of geographic aggregation (county versus state), and measure of prescription opioid supply (rate of opioid-prescribing per 100 persons and morphine milligram equivalents per-capita). Results indicated a positive association between prescription opioid supply and rates of fatal drug poisonings consistent across changes in type of drug poisoning, level of aggregation, and measure of prescription opioid supply. However, removing confounders from the model caused the direction of the effect estimate to reverse for drug poisoning deaths from any drug, any opioid, and heroin. These results suggested that differences in adjustment for confounding could explain most of the inconsistent findings in the literature. Finally, a rigorous test of the hypothesis that worse socioeconomic conditions increase risk of fatal drug poisonings at the county level, and interact with prescription opioid supply was conducted. This analysis used the same pooled cross-sectional time series data from 3,109 U.S. counties in 49 states (2006-2016). The analysis modeled the effect of five key socioeconomic variables, including three single socioeconomic variables (unemployment, poverty rate, income inequality) and two index variables (Rey index, American Human Development Index [HDI]) on four types of drug poisoning deaths: any drug (drug-related death), any opioid (opioid-related death), any prescription opioid but not heroin (prescription opioid-related death), and heroin (heroin-related death). Using a hierarchical Bayesian modeling approach to account for spatial dependence and the variability of fatal drug poisoning rates due to the small number of events, the independent effect of socioeconomic conditions on rates of drug poisoning deaths and their joint multiplicative and additive effect with prescription opioid supply were estimated. Results showed that rates of fatal drug poisonings were higher in more economically and socially disadvantaged counties; the five key indicator variables were differentially associated with drug poisoning rates; and the American Human Development Index (HDI) and income inequality were most strongly associated with fatal drug poisoning rates. Finally, the results indicate that both HDI and income inequality interact with county-level prescription opioid supply to affect drug poisoning rates. Specifically, the effect of higher prescription opioid supply on rates of fatal drug poisonings was greater in counties with higher HDI and more equal income distributions than counties with lower HDI and less equal income distributions. Overall, this dissertation increased knowledge about the separate and conjoint roles of supply- and demand-side factors in the geospatial distribution of fatal drug poisonings in the U.S. The idea that area-level prescription opioid supply are key drivers of prescription drug use, misuse, and addiction and the attendant consequences, including nonfatal and fatal drug poisonings, has been in the literature for well over a decade. However, no study to date has shown that area-level socioeconomic conditions modify the effect of prescription opioid supply on fatal drug poisonings. By identifying important contextual factors capable of modifying the effect of prescription opioid supply reductions on mortality, high-risk geographic areas can be prioritized for interventions to counter any unintended effects of reducing the prescription opioid supply in an area. As federal and state policies continue to target the rising rates of fatal drug poisonings, these findings show that area-level socioeconomic conditions may represent an important target for policy intervention during the current drug poisoning crisis and a critical piece of information necessary for predicting any future drug-related crises.

The main objective of the study is to show how the use of tax incentives as means of attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is threatening the realisation of socio-economic rights in Africa. Particular attention is given on how the granting of generous tax incentives can affect the proper and adequate provision of public services and infrastructures by highly reducing government revenue. The research does not intend to analyse the impact of loss of revenue through tax incentives on each and every socio-economic right. Rather the focus is on its general impact on obligations of African states to respect, protect and fulfill socio-economic rights as derived from the major international, regional and national human rights instruments / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Mr Pramod Bissessur, Faculty of Law and Management, University of Mauritius / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM