April 2002-March 2004: An Outline
The present brief presents the themes
that emerged from the discussion of the launching meeting on chronic
poverty held in BIDS in April 2002. It may be noted that there is no
rigid divide between year 1 and year 2 in terms of initiating a
particular research activity: some themes initiated in the first year
can spill over into the second year, while some themes earmarked for
the second year may have early start-up.
A. Themes scheduled for
Year 1 (April 2002-March 2003)
Theme 1: Trends in Poverty and Social Indicators: An Update
(Binayak Sen, Zulfiqar Ali)
This component will serve as the
“information bank” of PRCPB research activities. It will provide
general update on poverty trends and profile defined in the
multidimensional and interlocking space of human deprivations. While
the review is not exclusively focused on chronic poverty, many of the
themes under PRCPB will draw upon the statistical database generated
under this component. A special focus of this component will be on
analysing the characteristics of the extreme poor and specific
chronic poverty groups. The component will also try to assess the
extent of spatial variation of the multidimensional poverty
indicators—a theme at the heart of chronic poverty analysis. The
information generated under this component will be used to prepare
separate policy brief on the same theme as well as serve as
background statistical materials for the first Chronic Poverty
Report. The analysis under this component will be carried out at two
levels, one based on primary data collected by different agencies,
and the other based on the published secondary evidence collected by
Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and other agencies.
Most of
the studies using quantitative panel data using consumption, income
or asset based poverty line focused on the counting the numbers of
various groups of chronic and transitory poor. This component of the
study will aim to go beyond measuring the incidence of various groups
of poor and attempt to understand the factors (household, community)
and intervening structures (public policy, markets, and institutions)
that underlie chronic poverty. The analysis will be done in two
stages. At the first stage a panel of chronically poor, transitory
poor, transitory non-poor, and always non-poor will be identified
based on existing quantitative panel surveys to study their
characteristics, profile, and determinants. Alternative poverty line
(objective/subjective, income/consumption/asset based line, or some
combination of these) will be used to identify various sub-categories
(such as stochastically poor/structural poor, always poor/usually
poor/churning poor/occasionally poor/never poor as well as check the
robustness of the predicted results based on conventional poverty
lines. At the second stage, qualitative studies will be carried out
for specific chronic poverty groups to identify the “drivers”,
“maintainers”, and “interrupters” of chronic and transient poverty.
Theme 3: Vulnerability, Agency, and
Chronic Poverty
(Naila Kabeer)
The
extreme forms of vulnerability associated with chronic poverty are
likely to undermine the ability of the chronic poor to exercise
independent forms of agency, either economic or political. Their
search for security leads them to seek out forms of livelihood which
are either extremely clientilistic or else leave them with little
time or energy to seek alternatives. In this context, 'external'
interventions whether by the government (public works programmes) or
NGOs (micro-credit for the very poor) offer the possibility of
expanding their options in ways that they are unlikely to have
achieved on their own. This component of the research will explore
what different such interventions make in the lives of the
chronically poor, whether it increases their capacity to exercise
agency and if so, what their exercise of agency can tell us about the
relationship between economic and political 'freedoms' in the lives
of the very poor. The research will entail qualitative fieldwork with
chronically poor households, comparing the situation of those with
some access to public interventions and those without any.
Theme 4: Violence, Mastanocracy and Chronic
Poverty
(Imtiaz Ahmed)
The relationship between violence,
mastanocracy and chronic poverty is more conjectural than established
and proven. In modern times, we are tutored to assume lot of things
and when such assumptions are repeated with increasing vigour and
frequency we often start believing them. This however does not negate
the relationship between violence, mastanocracy and chronic poverty.
It only suggests that the linearity posited by the relationship may
not hold true and more complex processes may be at work both in the
making of the relationship as well as in the reproduction of what are
actually real life categories.
There
has been a remarkable transformation in the conceptualisation of
poverty, particularly the manner in which poverty is understood,
portrayed and deliberated upon. There was first the ethical kind, as
Gandhi used to say, ‘poverty is violence.’ But few followed him on
this. The modernist amorality and at the same time positivist
vocations soon separated poverty from other categories and sought its
rectification largely within itself, and that again mainly through
reforms and retribution. Save the mapping of poverty (a commendable
job nonetheless), nothing much could be made out of this exercise.
It is
against this background that an enquiry into the relationship between
violence, mastanocracy and chronic poverty becomes meaningful. Three
critical issues could easily be identified here. There is obvious the
issue as to whether chronic poverty reproduces violence and
mastanocracy. And this not in the sense that the poor are prone to
violent and mastani acts, but more in the sense that the structure
reproducing poverty is simultaneously in the business of reproducing
violence and mastanocracy. Put differently, the power of police,
mainly in its biased and discriminatory treatment of the poor
(possibly a consequence partially of colonial legacy and partially of
post-colonial governmentalization of things), could very well put the
chronic poor in an ever-deepening condition of poverty.
Secondly, the extent to which mastanocracy finds convenient to use
violence to reproduce itself with poverty only accelerating the
process. Relative deprivation would be another way of looking at
this, but there is also the cultural element of having someone
recognized as a mastan (a leader, a hero), which could only come
about when there is a following that seeks to transform his or her
livelihood from real and imaginative poverty to something that is
again relatively real and imaginative prosperity. In the absence of
legalised lucrative possibilities for the less skilled, violence and
mastanocracy are not only viewed but also become the quickest means
of overcoming poverty. And this makes the existence of the latter,
often more as an excuse, deadly.
Finally,
there is the added problem of violence (indeed, in the midst of its
protracted use and continuation) getting internalised and in the
process making both reforms and revolutionary quests equally
tolerable to violence. This has critical implications for societies
with chronic poverty, for tolerance of violence could easily feed
into a mindset or even a politics of tolerating poverty as well.
Nothing can be a better combination than this for reproducing
mastanocracy.
How do
we then overcome the state of things arising from the complex
combination of violence, mastanocracy and chronic poverty? One can
only contemplate at this stage a set of activities, including:
-
Re-forming or rather restructuring of the police and the
organization of policing;
-
Creating space for the less skilled, putting them into legalised
lucrative possibilities;
-
Re-creating a mind as well as a lifestyle with non-violent options.
This is as much an issue of education, from primary to tertiary
levels, as it is an issue of creating democratic structures within
offices, political parties, industries, even in our use of roads
and highways. There could be other activities as well.
The paper will discuss the above in detail.
Theme 5: Women’s Health and Chronic Poverty
(Sharifa Begum)
It is now well
established that the absolute poverty implying lack of basic
resources necessary for survival is associated with ill health.
Indeed, it is the leading cause of ill health in less developed
countries and is a main threat to health development. As opposed to
this, there is broad agreement today also that good health is a
prerequisite for human development without which national economies
cannot thrive.
However, the poor are not homogenous. In developing countries
intensification of poverty often takes place along certain individual
traits. The most prominent and glaring one of them has been the sex.
For a variety of reasons representing social, cultural, economic,
demographic etc. the women of developing countries often bear the
greatest burden of poverty with associated inequalities in health,
health prerequisites and, other related aspects. In other words, the
experience of the household members’ across gender in a poverty
condition may be quite different with women’s ones being much worse.
Also, their ill health can have disproportionate negative bearings
for the poverty. Malnutrition of the mother is often associated with
pre-mature and low birth weight babies who not only face increased
risk of mortality but of them who survive remain also highly
vulnerable to ill health, learning impairment etc., which curtail
their effective and productive life. Thus, poverty through women’s
health is able to affect the well being of next generation subtle
manners, which many may not recognize. Indeed, as Amartya Sen has
argued, ‘to concentrate on family poverty irrespective of gender can
be misleading in terms of both causation and consequences’.
In this background we propose to study
the health status and health determinants of the women of the poorer
households vis-à-vis that of their counterpart men. Since health is
not a one-time affair but is an outcome of cumulative experiences we
shall look at it in totality right from the infant and childhood to
elderly ages with major concentration on maternal health, which
encounter additional from their reproductive role.
The study will be conducted using
various published and unpublished information and data set.
Theme 6: Financial Services
Possibilities and the Chronic Poor
(Imran Matin)
What are
the ways in which the chronic poor manage shortfalls to meet life
cycle, opportunity or emergency needs? Financial intermediation is
one way in which such shortfalls can be managed and access to better
ways to intermediate can have important welfare enhancement effects.
How well do conventional microfinancing mechanisms in Bangladesh
address the financial intermediation needs of the chronic poor? What
types of organizational form are needed? Is there a need for a staged
approach through strategic linkages with safety net types of
programmes? If so, how can operationally separate but conceptually
joint partnerships be built?
These
are some of the questions that this research wants to address. The
work will involve mapping of the existing financial service landscape
of the extreme poor and review lessons and experiences from existing
programmes. There are a number of programmes using different types of
approaches to microfinancing with the very poor. This study will base
itself on the experiences and lessons drawn from such initiatives to
frame a comparative analysis. The recent PKSF initiative to
experiment with various approaches to microfinance with the hard core
poor will be extremely useful for this work and can also benefit from
it.
In this situation of total absence of
knowledge about them the proposed study wants to start with a modest
aim. It initially wants to construct a story about them with whatever
information is available and later intends to conduct a bigger
primary study having both quantitative and qualitative dimensions on
them. The negotiation for a primary survey is going on and, if
materializes, a survey will be conducted in the second year of the
program.
Theme 7: Unfavourable Environments,
Remote Rural Areas, and Chronic Poverty
(Quazi Shahabuddin)
The
adverse interface between chronic poverty, remote rural areas, and
unfavourable agricultural environments is well known. These
environments can be salinity prone, flood prone, susceptible to river
erosion, or drought prone. The analysis of the 1974 famine as well as
the experience of major flood events (1988, 1998) highlights these
environments as being highly vulnerable to extreme shocks and severe
entitlement failures. However, very little research has been
undertaken to understand the interlocking of diverse sets of
circumstances—economic, social, environmental, and political--that
have influenced the persistence of poverty and shaped the livelihood
systems of the chronic poor in such environments. A potentially
important aspect of the study would be to study the process of
displacement and out-migration pattern of the poorest from these
fragile environments, including transnational migration, often
expanding the demographic frontier. The study would undertake
qualitative research in these areas in course of the next two years
as well as utilise primary and secondary information available at
national and sub-national levels. The results of this study would
also feed into the Poverty Mapping exercise (Theme 8) carried out in
the second year.
Theme 8:
Graduation and Poverty Dynamics
(Binayak Sen)
The
issue of graduation was initially raised in the context of
microcredit and targeted programs. However, the theme has a wider
significance in understanding the poverty dynamics in general. This
paper will focus on the choice of criteria for judging the
performance of anti-poverty programmes in supporting a graduation
process for the different groups of the poor. While the conventional
assessment of graduation is based on some notion of current poverty
cut-off (such as income/ consumption poverty line) there are hidden
accumulations in physical, human, and social capital within the
poverty process that often pass unnoticed. The study will examine the
significance of these accumulations as an alternative criterion for
assessing graduation potentials of the poor and, by implications, of
the anti-poverty programmes. The household decision making process
will be studied to explore the patterns of divergence among the poor
households with similar initial resource endowments and facing
similar market and institutional conditions. In addition to the
quantitative household level panel data in-depth qualitative case
studies will be carried out to explore the key reasons for
divergence.
B. Themes scheduled for
Year 2 (April 2003-March 2004)
Theme 9: Poverty Mapping, Determinants
of Spatial Poverty, and Policy Implications
(Binayak Sen, Zulfiqar Ali, and Shankar Saha of
BIDS in collaboration with Mahabub Hossain, Suan Pheng Kam, and Manik
Lal Bose of Social Sciences Division, IRRI, Los Banos)
The presence of rather strong geographic
effects on poverty cannot be ignored. In particular, one needs to go
beyond division or district to identify pockets of severe distress,
i.e. areas which are more vulnerable to widespread starvation and
intensified destitution during bad agricultural years and/or during
the routine lean period even during a normal agricultural year.
Identifying these poverty pockets (with high poverty concentrations)
and their determinants would have strong policy implication in order
to attack poverty in these chronically poor areas. The study intends
to do the following:
-
To
carry out a poverty mapping exercise at the district and the
sub-district levels using econometric approach based on the
combination of “household” survey and “community” level data, which
would be integrated with GIS-based “area” information;
-
To
study the determinants of spatial poverty prevailing at different
levels; and
-
To
undertake focused studies and qualitative surveys in the selected
poverty pockets to determine why the people of those pockets remain
poor over generations and to identify policy and institutional
interventions for addressing their concerns.
Poverty
mapping exercise will be carried out on the basis of Household Income
and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2000 of BBS, Basic Needs Survey 1995 of
BBS, and existing information on social indicators at district and
sub-district levels. GIS tools will be used in this exercise. This
study will be a collaborative exercise jointly undertaken with the
Social Sciences Division, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
during July 2002-June 2004.
Theme 10:
Malnutrition, Educational Attainment, and Chronic Poverty
(Omar Haider Chowdhury)
The
study will constitute two separate papers, exploring two major
transmission mechanisms in the literature causing the persistence of
chronic poverty. The first of these mechanisms operates through the
nutrition-productivity channel, while the other works through the
effects of human capital, influencing productivity per worker and the
likelihood of escape from chronic poverty. The quality divide in
education between the rich and the poor aggravates the situation
further. There is considerable interaction between these two
transmission mechanisms though. Poor nutrition affects cognitive
ability and, consequently, the schooling performance of children.
Lack of adequate informational access and low quality of education
adversely impact the nutrition and health status of children and
mother. A specific focus of the study would be to assess the
micronutrient deficiency of various categories of poor and non-poor
groups. Existing micro-level community and household survey data as
well as information collected on specific nation-wide programmes such
as Food/ Cash for Education (FFE/ CFE), National Nutrition Programme
(NNP), Non-formal Primary Education (NFPE) will be pooled to analyse
the differential access of various asset-holding groups to nutrition
and education. Given the possible dearth of the quantitative data on
these scores qualitative case studies and surveys may have to be used
to assess the nature of temporary and permanent dropout from the
schooling system, constraining the upward (both within-generation as
well as inter-generational) social mobility of the poor.
Theme 11: Health Shocks and Chronic
Poverty
(Sharifa Begum)
Ill
health often puts pressure on the poor households by placing an
increasing demand for resources for the health care or treatment. But
health related shocks particularly that of the breadwinners often
threaten the survival of the household. Sudden unanticipated health
related shocks such as, long term debilitating illnesses, accident
etc, of breadwinners no only lead to loss of income and employment
but often necessitates sale of assets and/or acceptance of loan to
cope with the crisis. The whole process not only have economic
consequences but may have many non-monetary consequences too having
both short and long term effect on the household well being. Indeed,
this helps many moderate poor to descend into hardcore poverty in
subsequent periods.
The
proposed study thus intends to understand the process and
consequences (both monetary and non-monetary) of these health related
shocks of breadwinners among the poor. Apart from making use of
existing information and data set for the purpose the study also
contemplates to undertake few case studies relating to health related
shocks for better understanding of the health shocks and poverty
interface in the country.
Theme 12:
Operationalising Unfreedoms
(Binayak Sen, David Hulme)
Amartya
Sen’s (1999) work delineates five kinds of freedoms, namely,
political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities,
transparency guarantees, and protective security. The paper will be a
methodological exercise scoping the possibility of operationalizing
these dimensions with the use of household and community level data.
The idea is not to propose yet another synthetic index of wellbeing
based on alternative aggregation rules. The key idea is to measure
the incidence of these freedoms—or, Unfreedoms—by different
groups of poor and non-poor and explore the linkages among these
dimensions. Initially, in-depth case studies would be done on
households placed at different levels of poverty trying to understand
the factors relevant to their lives and livelihoods. A special
emphasis would be given to developing suitable indicators
(instrumental variables) to capture these dimensions through
quantitative and qualitative surveys and techniques.
Theme 13: Images of Stability in Development: How Can We Include the
‘Unstable’
(Imran Matin)
There is
a close correspondence between our image of the poor and development
programme design. The notion of the household as a unit of
intervention is for instance predominant in most programmatic
thinking and design. Yet, the assumption of household as a unitary
model has been well debated. There can also be points of extreme
vulnerability within a household that is otherwise non-poor that
remain invisible to development programmes. Another image of the
target group of most development programmes is one of stability---
both in a physical and social sense. Such images are carried through
in programme design and ‘invisiblizes’ groups who are physically
(such as char dwellers, those living in squatters, street children,
etc.) or socially (such as prostitutes abandoned/divorced women,
certain occupational groups like sweepers, grave-diggers, mentally
ill, etc.) unstable.
This study will map the ways in which such images
of stability influence programme imagination and design. A review of
experiences of working with such ‘unstable’ groups, if any, will also
be carried out. Questions of how such groups may be ‘counted’—both in
an enumeration and inclusion sense will be explored.
Theme 14: Disability and Chronic Poverty
(Sharifa Begum)
It
requires no mention that the main assets of the poor people are their
bodies. Often their physical capacity in the form of ‘ability to
work’ is the only means of ensuring not only their own well-being but
that of their family as well. Any compromise with the physical
ability often claims high price in terms of personal well being as
well as that of the family transcending to next generation. Thus,
disability has direct and significant impact on the society as well
as on family.
Disablement, the impairment of the capacity for life and work by
injury, diseases, or congenital deformity, is one of mankind’s great
personal and social afflictions. In human term the problem of
disability is one of suffering and misery. Their feelings of
inadequacy, redundancy, dependency, and insecurity often grip them
and many desperate ones turn into begging as a means of livelihood.
In developing countries facilities for the disabled people are
extremely inadequate or non-existent. Mostly they are bypassed by
whatever little welfare provisions are there for the socially and
economically underprivileged ones. A major lacuna is that the
developing countries are often unaware of the number of disabled
people in the society who need social protection and social care. All
probable evidence, however, indicates that persons with disabilities
may constitute a significant proportion—10 per cent or more--of the
total population in a country.
The
situation is no different in Bangladesh. Here the precise estimates
on the incidence of disability (including both physical and mental)
are stunningly lacking. The nature, extent and socio-economic profile
of disabilities with their spread across population are also
virtually unknown. The proposed component will be based on the review
of existing evidence with the possible use of the primary data
generated through a nationally representative special purpose survey
done by Mitra and Associates in collaboration with ADD.
Theme 15: Integrating Quantitative and
Qualitative Methods for Poverty Research
(Binayak Sen and
others in PRCPB in collaboration with CPRC and IDS, Sussex)
This is a general thrust of the research
activities under PRCPB. Several research activities listed above will
deploy both quantitative and qualitative methods. The specific theme
highlighted here will focus on exploring the scopes for
integrating quantitative and qualitative methods in analysing
poverty dynamics. Three immediate areas of applications are
highlighted here. The first possibility is in the area of setting the
objective poverty line (with particular reference to assigning
non-food weights in costing the fixed bundle). The second possibility
lies in tracking movement using objective and subjective poverty
lines with possible identification of the reasons for the striking
contrast, if any. The third possibility is to combine information on
the movement in and out of objective poverty with the subjective
perspectives on being gainers and losers. Other potential areas of
application of the idea of integration will be indicated for further
research.
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