Outputs from the Addressing and Mitigating Violence programme, May 2013 – October 2015

Knowledge and evidence are important elements of all policy processes. While the availability of more or higher quality evidence does not guarantee better policy processes, it is difficult to imagine how development policy and outcomes can be improved without it. In addition to a myriad of development problems, the increasing recognition of diversity, complexity and context means that policy-relevant knowledge and evidence must address different scales of analysis, speak to different audiences and be accessible in a variety of formats. This brochure presents outputs from the Addressing and Mitigating Violence strand of work within an IDS programme entitled Strengthening Evidence-based Policy funded through an Accountable Grant from the UK Department for International Development. Work under the grant privileges the review and synthesis of existing knowledge and evidence over new primary research. The modus operandi is one of ‘co-construction': a broad range of partners have played critical roles in the conception, generation and dissemination of these outputs. Beyond publication, IDS and its partners are actively working to integrate these outputs, and the lessons and recommendations that emerge from them, into policy processes at local, national and global scales. All outputs from this programme, including those that will be produced in the next year, are available through the IDS website (www.ids.ac.uk) and through OpenDocs, the IDS institutional repository (http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/). If you would like to stay abreast of developments in relation to this work, you can sign up to the IDS newsletter at www.ids.ac.uk/e-alert-signup

Autonomy or Efficiency. An experiment on household decisions in two regions of India.

経済学 / EconomicsDyson and Moore (1983) posit that women in South India enjoy relatively more agency than in the North. Their conclusions have become part of the standard picture of Indian rural society. In this paper, we examine using experimental data the implications of the regional contrast in female autonomy for the efficiency of family decision-making. We take a sample of 1200 couples from one rural and one urban area in the north of India (Uttar Pradesh) and one area in the south (Tamil Nadu) that are often taken to exemplify differences in the autonomy of women and the nature of marital relationships. Generally, we find large-scale and robust evidence of inefficiency and the hiding of assets when this is possible. Men invest more and are more generous to their partners. Women are more willing to invest in a common pool when their income is earned through working and when assets are publicly observable. Regarding the focus of our paper, we find continuing significant differences between North and South and we find relatively little evidence that urban living is associated with changes in the nature of marital behaviour. There are some differences between response to treatment but the key and striking difference between the North and the South is that in both rural and urban sites in the former region household efficiency is considerably greater than in the latter, which does on the face of it suggest a tradeoff between autonomy and efficiency.http://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/munro_alistair

The lion\u27s share. An experimental analysis of polygamy in Northern Nigeria.

経済学 / EconomicsUsing samples of polygamous and non-polygamous households from villages in rural areas south of Kano, Northern Nigeria we test basic theories of household behaviour. Husbands and wives play two variants of a voluntary contributions game in which endowments are private knowledge, but contributions are public. In one variant, the common pool is split equally. In the other treatment the husband allocates the pool (and wives are forewarned of this). Most partners keep back at least half of their endowment from the common pool, but we find no evidence that polygynous households are less efficient than their monogamous counterparts. We also reject a strong form of Bergstrom’s model of polygyny in which all wives receive an equal allocation. In our case, senior wives often receive more from their husbands, no matter what their contribution. Thus the return to contributions is higher for senior wives compared to their junior counterparts. When they control the allocation, polygynous men receive a higher payoff than their monogamous counterparts. We speculate on the implications of this pattern of investment and reward for the sustainability of polygynous institutions.http://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/munro_alistair