Rachel Sabates-Wheeler

Transformative Social Protection: The Currency of Social Justice

Social protection emerged as a critical response to the ‘safety nets’ discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the World Development Report 1990, for example, safety nets were very much the third prong of the World Bank’s three-pronged approach to ‘attacking poverty’ (World Bank, 1990), and were conceptualized as minimalist social assistance in countries too poor and too administratively weak to introduce comprehensive social welfare programmes. During the 1990s, as new thinking emerged in areas such as ‘rights-based approaches’, ‘sustainable livelihoods’, and the multidimensional nature of poverty and vulnerability, safety nets began to be criticized as residualist and paternalistic, and more sophisticated alternatives began to be proposed. As this agenda has evolved, the broader potential of social protection began to be recognized, and bigger claims are now being made for what social protection can and should strive to achieve.

Farm Strategy, Self-Selection and Productivity: Can Small Farming Groups Offer Production Benefits to Farmers in Post-Socialist Romania?

Abstract This paper addresses two questions: why are Romanian farmers continuing to place land in cooperative forms of farming when theory suggests that private farming is more productive and, are there efficiency gains to be had from cooperative farming endeavors? Results from an econometric selection model suggest that smaller, endogenously developed farming cooperatives, such as family societies, provide benefits over private farming strategies under certain conditions. This paper questions the wholesale rejection of cooperation around production and challenges policy to move away from the typically dichotomized presentation of agrarian structure as being a trade off between private small-scale farming and large-scale collective farming.

Social Protection for Migrants: The Challenges of Delivery in the Context of Changing Migration Flows

Access to social protection differs widely among international migrants. This article focuses on the issue of earnings-related contributions to social security programmes and their (frequent) lack of portability across borders — a problem that particularly affects South-South migrants. Furthermore, attention is drawn to the fact that in many low-income countries a lack of administrative capacity in the operation of social security programmes is often, in the first instance, a greater problem than the lack of portability of any potential earned rights to cash benefits provided under them. Commonly, the inability of migrants to benefit, both from social security programmes that are in place in the country of origin and in the host country detracts significantly from the well-being and security of migrants and their families. The article concludes that South-South migration must be understood as being significantly different from North-North migration, where social protection issues are much more tractable.

Do Transfers Generate Local Economy Effects

The paper examines local economy effects of social transfers, by focusing on food consumption and asset holdings of non-eligible households in rural Mexico following the introduction of PROGRESA in 1997. The quasi-experimental nature of the evaluation data collected for the purposes of evaluating the impact of PROGRESA enables the quantification of this impact. In the paper we compare welfare indicators among noneligible households in treatment areas and control areas. The analysis finds that noneligible households in treatment areas show significantly higher levels of food consumption and asset holdings following the introduction of PROGRESA, compared to non-eligible households in control areas. These results are interpreted to suggest that transfers in poor rural areas in Mexico enable agents to interact more strategically such that non-beneficiaries, as well as beneficiaries, reap consumption and production advantages.

Safety in small numbers: Local strategies for survival and growth in Romania and the Kyrgyz Republic

Abstract  Using a comparative study of farm households from poor rural communities in Kyrgyzstan and north-east Romania this paper explores the intricacies of a variety of forms of cooperation in agriculture. The findings highlight the safety net, labour specialisation, asset-pooling and service delivery functions of different groups that enable rural livelihoods to, at times, cope and at times improve in situations of imperfect information, sluggish labour and land markets, and constrained capital markets. The research presented here indicates that small to medium forms of cooperation provide the rural poor with predictable livelihood strategies under conditions of uncertainty. Specifically, cooperative action, in the form of groups, substitutes for imperfect markets. Despite the push for decollectivisation and privatisation across transition countries there remains a place for encouraging group initiatives, at least for the medium term, on the grounds of both poverty alleviation and agricultural growth.

Accessing the ‘Right’ Kinds of Material and Symbolic Capital: the Role of Cash Transfers in Reducing Adolescent School Absence and Risky Behaviour in South Africa

Abstract This article investigates how well South Africa’s Child Support Grant (CSG) responds to the material and psychosocial needs of adolescents, and the resultant effects on schooling and risky behaviour. One driver of schooling decisions is shame related to poverty and the ‘social cost’ of school, where a premium must often be paid for fashionable clothes or accessories. The other driver relates to symbolic and consumptive capital gained through engaging in sexual exchange relationships. The anticipated impacts from the CSG are partial because of these non-material drivers of adolescent choices. Non-material transmission mechanisms must be better understood and addressed.

Structures of Access to Social Provision for Migrants

Low-income migrants are often more vulnerable and have poorer access to social provisioning than low-income non-migrants. The ethical and legal arguments for the right or entitlement of migrants to social provision have been discussed in Chapter 1. In this chapter we start from the hypothesis that being entitled or having a right to social provision does not guarantee that it is actually received. Of course, receiving welfare provision depends on formal entitlements specified in international and national laws, regulations and policies. Provision can be granted, denied, controlled and obscured at this level. However, successfully claiming social provision in practice turns on the way that individuals (formally entitled or not) are able to leverage opportunities for accessing resources. This hypothesis implies that getting the formal rules right is not enough.

Introduction: Mapping Migrant Welfare onto Social Provisioning

International migration of all kinds has grown significantly since the mid-twentieth century. It has become an important element of globalization, with political, economic and social implications for both sending and receiving countries. Inevitably there has been a concomitant increase in scholarly attempts to understand and theorize migratory processes.

Strategic complementarities and social transfers: how do PROGRESA payments impact nonbeneficiaries?

The article examines local economy effects of social transfers by focusing on food consumption and asset holdings of noneligible households in rural Mexico following the introduction of Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) in 1997. The quasi experimental nature of the evaluation data collected for the purposes of evaluating the impact of PROGRESA enables comparison of welfare indicators among noneligible households in treatment areas and control areas. The analysis finds that noneligible households in treatment areas show significantly higher levels of food consumption and asset holdings following the introduction of PROGRESA, compared to noneligible households in control areas. These results are interpreted to suggest that transfers in poor rural areas in Mexico enable agents to interact more strategically such that nonbeneficiaries, as well as beneficiaries, reap consumption and production advantages.

Social Security for Migrants: A Global Overview of Portability Arrangements

The most recent Human Development Report (HDR) on Human Mobility and Development (2009) estimates the total global migrant stock at 214 million people, approximately 3 per cent of the world’s population. This represents a substantial increase since 1960, where the stock was 75 million, and even more recently 2005, where estimates indicated that the total migrant stock was 191 million. Due to the underlying economic and demographic global imbalances, this trend is likely to persist and calls for policies that effectively manage migration to the benefit of all — migrants, origin countries and host countries (Holzmann and Muenz, 2004).