Frédéric Lapeyre

Social Exclusion: Towards an Analytical and Operational Framework

This article attempts to analyse the economic, social and political dimensions of social exclusion. After comparing the concept with the conventional notions of poverty and marginalization, we argue that social exclusion overlaps with poverty broadly defined, but goes beyond it by explicitly embracing the relational as well as distributional aspects of poverty. It is shown that the concept has universal validity although it has not gained much attention in developing countries. Indicators to measure different aspects of social exclusion are discussed; in this context, the article considers how appropriate it might be to use precariousness of employment as a measure. Finally, methodological problems involved in operationalizing the concept as a tool of policy formulation to fight exclusion are underlined.

Growth, Employment and Poverty Reduction: The ILO Contribution to Alternative Development Thinking

The history of the ILO is characterized by a long fight to put employment at the heart of development strategies. Cautious about the limits of the growth trickle down effect, the ILO always emphasized that the economic growth objective should be reincorporated into an integrated development strategy, in which growth is an important aspect but should be given no more importance than the creation of productive jobs, the improvement of working and living conditions, the development of workers rights, the fairer distribution of income and the meeting of basic human needs.

A Socio-Economic Profile of UNRWA Registered Refugees

Based on a survey of almost 10,000 individuals, the UNRWA/IUED/UCL project aims at analysing the current living conditions of Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The present study represents the first comprehensive attempt to examine the socio-economic conditions of registered Palestine refugees in these five fields of UNRWA’s operations based on a random sampling procedure for individuals from UNRWA’s registered refugees file.

Globalization and Exclusion

In Chapters 1 to 6 we discussed the economic and social issues largely in a national context, even though the framework in Chapter 2 explicitly recognized the importance of the global dimension. The causes of exclusion are a complex interaction of both internal and external factors. The purpose of this chapter is to extend our analysis to the external factors and the global dimension of exclusion. The two main global phenomena in the twenty-first century are (i) the emergence of a global economy involving increasing interdependence between countries of the North and South and (ii) an acceleration of the process of democratization in most developing societies briefly discussed in Chapter 6. Both these phenomena have implications for the analytical as well as normative aspects of the concept of exclusion discussed in the earlier chapters. While globalization may alleviate poverty and exclusion in some societies which are equipped to benefit from it, it may accentuate marginalization and exclusion in others, as is increasingly demonstrated by a growing anti-globalization movement and a softening of the protagonists‘ stance. Does globalization generate exclusion and social disintegration and thereby threaten social cohesion and sustainable growth? This question is addressed below in the context of both industrialized and developing countries.

Exclusion in Developing Countries

Our concern in this chapter is to examine, in the context of developing countries, economic, social and political dimensions of exclusion and the interrelationships between its distributional and relational problems defined in Chapter 2. Although economic and social dimensions of exclusion may be discussed separately for ease of exposition, they are closely interrelated. As we noted in Chapters 1 and 2, the state of economic exclusion is embedded in the prevailing social and political structures.

Unemployment, Precarious Jobs and Exclusion

Having presented an analytical framework and a set of indicators of the economic, social and political dimensions of exclusion in Chapter 2, in this chapter we examine the merits and limitations of two specific indicators of social exclusion, namely, long-term unemployment and job precariousness.