The role of education in development of an indigenous Mexican community : indigenous perspectives : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies at Massey University

This thesis is concerned with the role of formal education in development for indigenous peoples. To shed light on the complex relationship between education and development, it presents an in-depth exploration of the experiences, concerns and aspirations of members of one indigenous Mexican community concerning the issues of identity, development and schooling. It investigates how the people of this location, a Zapoteco village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, see development for their community, and how formal education could best contribute to the achievement of these aspirations. Education is considered within the context of different social processes taking place in the community. Attention is focused on the perspectives of indigenous parents and young people, in accordance with a view of development which recognises the expertise of local people in analysing their situation, and respects their opinions and ideas as paramount to achieving appropriate development. Data from interviews with community members is analysed to reveal a number of themes running through respondents' opinions on culture, identity and development, and the interaction of formal education with these. Their ideas concerning education and cultural autonomy are considered in the light of educational and cultural theories sustained by research, and an analysis of the potential of formal education to contribute to the achievement of expressed development goals is presented. Development for most Tabaeños consisted on the one hand of cultural continuity, in terms of traditional livelihoods, forms of social organisation and language, and on the other of the acquisition of skills, knowledge and institutions that will allow for the economic, social and cultural development of the community and its individuals. Research and the experiences of indigenous communities elsewhere in the world suggest that education has the potential to support community development in both of these aspects. Tabaeños are beginning to take a more active role in formal education, and the existence of a solid and autochthonous foundation for participation and locally controlled development in the community offers grounds for cautious optimism regarding its ability to continue to define and achieve both the education and the development talked of by community members

The Projection Postulate of Quantum Mechanics on the Lightcone

We discuss an interpretation of the projection postulate that implies collapse of the wavefunction along the lightcone.Comment: 5 pages, LaTex, SJSU/TP-93-1

Bolivia during the global crisis 1998-2004: towards a ‘macroeconomics of microfinance

The macroeconomic role of microfinance appears to have varied enormously between country cases, as notably exposed by the recent wave of macro-economic crises. For example, in Indonesia in the late 1990s microfinance appears to have played a notably counter-cyclical role, whereas in Bolivia, the main focus of this paper, its role was in most cases to intensify rather than restrain the crisis. We find part of the explanation for this in the behaviour of government towards microfinance (much more conciliatory towards defaulting debtors in the Bolivian case) and in the structure of demand (unfavourable, in Bolivia, to the distribution and service sector which is the main market for microenterprise). However, closer examination of the Bolivian case suggests that institutional design also played an important role. In particular, those organisations which provided savings, training and quasi-insurance services bucked the trend of rising default rates and falling lending through the crisis and did particularly well, whereas the new breed of consumer-credit microfinance organisations did particularly badly and in several cases went out of business. This experience suggests,in particular, that it may be appropriate to call into question the fashionable´ minimalist´ (credit-only) model of microfinance, as certainly in Bolivia it was principally the credit-plus institutions which proved more financially disciplined and more resilient to crisis

Capital controls re-examined: the case for ‘smart’ controls

The global financial crisis which began in east Asia in 1997 is not over, neither is the inquest into its implications for adjustment policy. In the wake of this crisis, we focus here on the role of capital controls, which formed a much publicised part of the crisis-coping strategy in one country (Malaysia) and, less openly, were also deployed by other crisis-afflicted countries. Evaluation so far has examined different target variables with different estimation methods, generally concentrating on efficiency and stability indicators and ignoring equity measures; it has also typically treated `control´ as a one-zero dummy variable, ignoring the `quality´ of intervention and in particular the extent to which efficiency gains are obtained in exchange for controls. Partly because of these limitations, the literature has reached no consensus on the impact of controls, nor therefore about where they fit within the set of post-crisis defence mechanisms. We propose an approach in which the government plays off short-term political security against long-term economic gain; the more insecure its political footing, the greater the weight it gives to political survival, which is likely to increase the probability of controls being imposed. The modelling of this approach generates a governmental `policy reaction function´ and an impact function for controls, which are estimated by simultaneous panel-data methods across a sample of thirty developing and transitional countries between 1980-2003, using, for the period since 1996, the `new´ IMF dataset which differentiates between controls by type. We find that controls appear to cause increases in income equality, and are significantly associated with political insecurity and relatively low levels of openness to trade. They do not, in our analysis, materially influence the level of whole-economy productivity or GDP across the sample of countries examined, although they do influence productivity in particular sectors, in particular manufacturing. But the dispersion around this central finding is wide: the tendency for controls to depress productivity by encouraging rent-seeking sometimes is, and sometimes is not, counteracted by purposive government policy actions to maintain competitiveness. Whether or not this happens – whether, as we put it, controls are `smart´, and the manner in which they are smartened - is vital, on both efficiency and equity grounds. We devise a formula for, and make the case for capital controls which are time-limited, and contain an inbuilt incentive to increased productivity, as a means of improving the sustainability and equity of the adjustment process whilst keeping to a minimum the cost in terms of productive efficiency

Poverty and Economic Growth in Russia’s Regions

The extent of poverty reduction has varied enormously during the recovery period across the eighty-three regions of Russia, with some regions continuing to experience increases in poverty even though they have returned to growth. We attempt to understand and analyse the reasons for this regional variation. We focus on two principal causative factors: the changes in economic structure resulting from the liberalisation of the economy, and policy instruments aimed at poverty reduction. We find that many regions which experienced structural change under perestroika (notably those benefiting from the current oil and gas boom) experienced massive growth in GDP but little poverty reduction, because their prevailing production function is capital-intensive and thus they were unable to transmit much or any reduction in poverty through the labour market. Regions where the growth of the early 2000s was diversified, was based more on the service sector, and where the educational system made possible flexibility within the labour market, tended to be more effective at generating poverty reduction

Community development finance institutions and the ‘poverty trap’: social and fiscal impact

This paper examines the current and potential ability of `community development financial institutions´ – institutions aimed at reducing the incidence of financial exclusion at the bottom end of the capital market – to reduce poverty, and the fiscal implications of this process. It seeks to connect the growing literature on labour supply functions for the self-employed with the literature on poverty and measures to escape from it, generating in the process a `poverty exit function´ which is then estimated against data (at this stage, a pilot sample of 45 self-employed households only, plus their employees) for three UK cities. Our model, by analogy with the `poverty trap´ models sometimes used in developing countries, has potentially self-reinforcing features, in which in the presence of certain parameter values efforts to get out of poverty only make the problem worse; but this, to our knowledge, is the first application of such a model to an industrialised country. The quantitative analysis indicates a negative role, in escaping from the poverty trap, for uninsured shocks. It indicates a positive role for formal education and for institutional measures which protect against risk; indeed, some of independent variables such as training are significant only if interacted with protection against risk, implying that simple injections of inputs are insufficient as a support policy for the sector. We make a preliminary investigation of the fiscal savings arising from investment in the CDFI sector, of which the upper bound is about £350 million a year or about 1.5 per cent of the total social social security budget; these impacts, however, are sensitive to variations in the policies of both CDFIs and the various levels of government support for the sector. The qualitative part of the analysis, in addition, suggests a positive role for `integrated support´ to microentrepreneurs which combines finance, mentoring and training. We have observed that many escapes from the poverty trap are achieved by employees rather than by entrepreneurs, which draws attention to the importance of growing along a labour-intensive production function, which ironically was in our sample secured better by small-to-medium firms than by start-up enterprises. Finally, a key variable in the exit-from-poverty process is the `regeneration multiplier´: the extent to which benefits provided by CDFIs remain within, or leak outside, target areas of high social deprivation. This multiplier varied greatly across our samples, being highest in Glasgow and lowest in Sheffield. We surmise (and proper analysis of this parameter is an important agenda for future research) that the regeneration multiplier varies negatively with the wage level and positively with the level of human capital inside regeneration areas. Diversification of financial products, and accompanying expenditure in support of regeneration areas by incentives to source labour and materials locally, could be a useful addition to this policy agenda

The development of trust and social capital in rural Uganda: An experimental approach

Trust is important for development but can be hard to build. In this paper, we report on experiments designed to understand the determinants of trust in villages in eastern Uganda, and in particular whether trust can be `built´ by offering insurance to people as a protection against the possibility that the trust they offer will not be reciprocated. We find, firstly, that the effects of income and wealth on trust are ambiguous: trust is higher in the richer than the poorer village, but once association and female education are added as explanatory variables, the wealth effect disappears. Secondly, although the offer of insurance is taken up by a majority of players, this is in most cases not an `effective demand´ in the sense of incentivising higher levels of trust. Effective demand for insurance, defined in this way, however responds positively to high levels of risk efficacy, microfinance membership and female education. Insurance offered in this form, therefore, is on its own apparently not a reliable technology for building trust; but its effectiveness as a trust-building instrument appears to increase if certain complementary institutions are in position

Debt and Health

Debt problems in the UK have recently become much more severe, especially for the lowest income groups, and we examine here their impact on health, using data from the national Families´ and Children´s Survey (FACS). We model the relationship between debt and health as a simultaneous two-way interaction, and find that debt levels have a negative effect on both physical and psychological health. We find that debt repayment structure, defined as the percentage of debt borrowed in high-interest categories, has an impact on health independent of the level of debt. The interaction between debt and health may aggravate the poverty trap, by pushing heavily-indebted low-income people into ill-health, which then makes it difficult for them to acquire or hold on to the steady jobs needed to ease their debt problems. We also find that worry has a negative influence on debt management capacity, and thence on health, which makes it more difficult for those caught in a debt trap to escape from it. Membership of credit unions tends to reduce worry, however, and thereby may facilitate escape from the debt-ill health spiral

Market share and market segment of public employment services

After an introductory discussion of market share and market failure in job matching, the results of two empirical analyses are reported. The first is a cross national comparison of the importance of the public employment service (PES) as a job search channel in 12 EU states based on a special tabulation from the Eurostat Community Labour Force Survey; the second is an in-depth study of the role of the PES in job finding in Germany based on data drawn from 10 waves of the German socio-economic panel, 1984-1993. Briefly stated, the principal findings of the cross-national comparison are: 1) The PES does not primarily compete with private employment services (PRES), even in countries where they are permitted, because most job seekers use other formal and informal search channels (advertisements, direct applications to employers, friends and acquaintances etc.); 2) The clientele served by PRES is surprisingly heterogeneous and differs only in degree from that served by the PES, which suggests that PES and PRES are complementary not because they serve markedly different clienteles - as sometimes assumed - but because most PRES are temporary work agencies with similar clienteles. -- Mit der Liberalisierung der Arbeitsvermittlung und der Zulassung privater Arbeitsvermittlung in den meisten Ländern der Europäischen Union stellt sich die Frage nach der Rolle der öffentlichen Arbeitsvermittlung neu: Wie wichtig ist das Arbeitsamt heute noch im individuellen Suchprozeß auf Arbeitsmärkten für Arbeitslose und Beschäftigte? Gibt es Unterschiede zwischen den Kunden privater und öffentlicher Arbeitsvermittlung? Hilft das Arbeitsamt den Problemgruppen? Diese Fragen wurden im Forschungsprojekt Aktivierung der Arbeitsvermittlung auf Basis international vergleichbarer Daten von Eurostat untersucht. In einer vertiefenden Analyse auf Basis des sozioökonomischen Panels wurde zudem geschätzt, wie viele neue Arbeitsplätze direkt über die Vermittlung des Arbeitsamts zustande kommen und wie wichtig diese Arbeitsmarktinstitution für Zielgruppen ist.