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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Deindustrialization And The Postsocialist Mortality Crisis, Gabor Scheiring, Aytalina Azarova, Darja Irdam, Katarzyna Doniec, Martin Mckee, Lawrence King
Deindustrialization And The Postsocialist Mortality Crisis, Gabor Scheiring, Aytalina Azarova, Darja Irdam, Katarzyna Doniec, Martin Mckee, Lawrence King
PERI Working Papers
An unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the transition from socialism to capitalism. Working-class men without a college degree suffered the most. Some argue that economic dislocation caused stress and despair, leading to adverse health behavior and ill health (dislocation-despair approach). Others suggest that hazardous drinking inherited as part of a dysfunctional working-class culture and populist alcohol policy were the key determinants (supply-culture approach). We enter this debate by performing the first quantitative analysis of the association between economic dislocation in the form of industrial employment decline and mortality in postsocialist Eastern Europe. We rely on a novel multilevel …
Delhi Green Deal, Rohit Azad, Shouvik Chakraborty
Delhi Green Deal, Rohit Azad, Shouvik Chakraborty
PERI Working Papers
In this paper, we propose a carbon tax policy for Delhi, the most polluted capital in the world, which will fundamentally change the energy mix of Delhi’s economy toward clean, green energy and will guarantee universal access to electricity, transport and food, up to a certain amount. Any carbon mitigation strategy needs to alter our dependence on fossil fuels, requiring a systemic overhaul of its energy mix. Implementing a carbon tax will mitigate emissions and mobilise revenue for our proposed re-distributive program of Right to Food, Energy and Travel (RFET). The policy is designed to prefer ‘the poor over the …
Green Growth And The Right To Energy In India, Rohit Azad, Shouvik Chakraborty
Green Growth And The Right To Energy In India, Rohit Azad, Shouvik Chakraborty
PERI Working Papers
Can growth in India be simultaneously made equitable and environ- mentally sustainable? The recent pattern of high growth in India has been inequitable even as serious questions have been raised about its ecological sustainability. In contrast to the current growth trajectory, this paper argues that an alternative growth trajectory can be de- veloped which answers the question in the affirmative. We propose an Energy Policy with Equity (EPE), which fundamentally changes the energy mix of the Indian economy towards greener forms of en- ergy as well as guarantees universal access to energy thus generated to the entire population, a feat …
On The Measurement Of “Grayness” Of Cities, Sripad Motiram, Vamsi Vakulabharanam
On The Measurement Of “Grayness” Of Cities, Sripad Motiram, Vamsi Vakulabharanam
PERI Working Papers
We consider a situation where individuals belonging to multiple groups inhabit a space that can be divided into smaller distinguishable units, a feature characterizing many cities in the world. When data on an economic attribute (in our case, income) is available, we conceptualize a phenomenon that we refer to as “Grayness” - a combination of spatial integration based upon group-identity and income. Grayness is high when cities display a high degree of spatial co-existence in terms of both identity and income. We lay down some desirable properties of a measure of Grayness and develop a simple and intuitive index that …
Workers And Technological Change In The United States, Mark Stelzner, Enzo Cerrutti
Workers And Technological Change In The United States, Mark Stelzner, Enzo Cerrutti
PERI Working Papers
In this paper, we put forward a theoretical framework for understanding a positive relationship between labor laws and innovation and rigorously test it against both historical and empirical data. We show how several periods in the economic history of the United States – like the increase in slave-field hand productivity in cotton picking in the Antebellum South, the transition in the North from artisanal shops to nonmechanized factories, the increase in productivity in mechanized textile factories in the Northeast in the late Antebellum period, and the increase in productivity in sharecropping after the Civil War – can be understood, at …
Gender, Distribution, And Balance Of Payments Constrained Growth In Developing Countries, Stephanie Seguino
Gender, Distribution, And Balance Of Payments Constrained Growth In Developing Countries, Stephanie Seguino
PERI Working Papers
An unresolved debate in the development literature concerns the impact of gender inequality on economic growth. Previous studies have found that the effect varies, depending on the measure of inequality (wages or capabilities). This paper expands that discussion by considering both the short- and long-run, evaluating the effects of gender equality in two types of economies—semi-industrialized economies (SIEs) and low-income agricultural economies (LIAEs). Further, it incorporates the effect of gender equity on the balance of payments constraint to growth. These preliminary results suggest that gender equality is more likely to stimulate growth in LIAEs than in SIEs in both the …
Accounting For Inequality: A Proposed Revision Of The Human Development Index, Elizabeth Stanton
Accounting For Inequality: A Proposed Revision Of The Human Development Index, Elizabeth Stanton
PERI Working Papers
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a country-level measure of social welfare based on national values for average life expectancy, rates of adult literacy and school enrollment, and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Since HDI is based entirely on national averages it can provide only limited information about distribution within countries. The distribution of access to key resources is an important determinant of the effect of health, education and income on both individual well-being and on the aggregate well-being of a population as a whole. This paper makes a case for the importance of inequality to measuring social welfare; …
The New Face Of Unequal Exchange: Low-Wage Manufacturing, Commodity Chains, And Global Inequality, James Heintz
The New Face Of Unequal Exchange: Low-Wage Manufacturing, Commodity Chains, And Global Inequality, James Heintz
PERI Working Papers
The institutional structure of global commodity chains and cross-border production networks has a profound impact on how the benefits of globalized production are distributed. This paper engages with this issue by developing a model that combines the insights of earlier unequal exchange theorists and new work on global commodity chains to clarify the distributive dynamics of the expansion of low-wage manufacturing in the developing world. In this framework, the ability of productivity-led development to raise employment incomes in low-wage manufacturing is constrained and depends on how the benefits of productivity improvements are captured – as lower prices for consumers or …