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- About – Contact Info
- Social and economic empowerment - GSDRC
- "Big Nudging" - Ill-Designed for Problem Solving
- Slouching Toward Crapitalism
About – Contact Info
At some point there needs to be a discipline of trying to explain many facts with one theory. The challenge for behavioural economics is to elaborate on the neoclassical model to deliver psychological realism without collapsing into a mess of special cases. It is a mathematical tweak designed to represent the particular brand of short-termism that leads us to sign up for the gym yet somehow never quite get around to exercising.
The question is, how many special cases can behavioural economics sustain before it becomes arbitrary and unwieldy? Not more than one or two at a time, says Kahneman. He argues that trying to unify every psychological idea in a single model is pointless. Meanwhile, the policy wonks plug away at the rather different challenge of running rigorous experiments with public policy. There is something faintly unsatisfying about how these policy trials have often confirmed what should have been obvious.
One trial, for example, showed that text message reminders increase the proportion of people who pay legal fines.
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- Social and economic empowerment?
This saves everyone the trouble of calling in the bailiffs. Other trials have shown that clearly-written letters with bullet-point summaries provoke higher response rates. None of this requires the sophistication of a mathematical model of hyperbolic discounting or loss aversion. It is obvious stuff. Unfortunately it is obvious stuff that is often neglected by the civil service.
It is hard to object to inexpensive trials that demonstrate a better way. He says that the idea of running randomised trials in government has now picked up steam. The Financial Conduct Authority has also used randomisation to develop more effective letters to people who may have been missold financial products. For example, in May , just before David Cameron came to power, he sang the praises of behavioural economics in a TED talk.
But Cameron was mistaken. The single best way to promote energy efficiency is, almost certainly, to raise the price of energy. A carbon tax would be even better, because it not only encourages people to save energy but to switch to lower-carbon sources of energy. The appeal of a behavioural approach is not that it is more effective but that it is less unpopular. Thaler points to the experience of Cass Sunstein, his Nudge co-author, who spent four years as regulatory tsar in the Obama White House. Should we be trying for something more ambitious than behavioural economics?
Small steps have taken behavioural economics a long way, says Laibson, citing savings policy in the US. Laibson says behavioural economics has only just begun to extend its influence over public policy. Subscribe to the FT. Daniel Kahneman Add to myFT. Tim Harford March 21, Listen to this article Play audio for this article Pause Cookies on FT Sites We use cookies for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to analyse how our Sites are used.
Close Financial Times International Edition. Search the FT Search. World Show more World links. US Show more US links. Companies Show more Companies links. Markets Show more Markets links. Opinion Show more Opinion links. More generally, the discourse on economic empowerment centres around four broad areas: International development actors often lack awareness of much that is already known about these issues. These are the conceptual tools for identifying complex and mutually dependent processes that development actors can support and facilitate for achieving pro-poor growth.
Much of this focused on gender equality in agriculture and rural development. It finds that forms of work that offer regular and relatively independent incomes hold the greatest transformative potential. In this review the bulk of the interventions presented are aimed at women who are also often further marginalised by their location and class. Land and property rights, especially for women, are considered an important way of addressing underlying economic, social and political inequalities.
Social and economic empowerment - GSDRC
Addressing entitlements to land has been shown to improve productivity and access to credit, increase income, and encourage social and economic investments in land and property as well as education, health or other income-generating activities. In contexts where the management of natural resources may pose problems, empowering communities through land titling or investing ownership with private entities, mandatory consultations and benefit-sharing, mandatory social impact assessments, cash or in-kind compensations, and legal redress for damage to property are a central focus of discussions.
How can property systems be reformed in a way that enables the poor to access and secure property? This chapter suggests that a pro-poor reform strategy for effectively functioning property systems should be based on land tenure security, the creation of opportunity for investment, and adequate management of risk. It shows that land registration is not inherently anti-poor. The distributional consequences of land registration depend on the design of the registration process and of the institutions responsible for its management.
It is important to design land registration systems that secure the land rights of marginalised groups in specific geographic and historical contexts, rather than adopting blueprint solutions based on Western models. This study analyses legal tools that have been used in several African countries to secure the resource rights of local groups affected by foreign investment projects.
"Big Nudging" - Ill-Designed for Problem Solving
Empowerment can occur through opening to negotiation decisions that were previously closed to local groups, or by providing local groups with tools to aid their negotiations with external actors. Social protection is increasingly being discussed in terms of its potential to bring about transformational change to the status and opportunities of marginalised groups.
Social protection schemes are believed to empower poor people by helping them to adopt strategies to balance their immediate needs with their investments in future livelihoods.
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They enable people to invest in more productive, but also riskier, activities such as entrepreneurship or keeping their children in school. Social protection mechanisms are particularly important for those who do not have the means even to save small amounts. There is evidence that social protection interventions have: It suggests that social protection needs to move beyond risk management and safety nets to support productive or developmental trajectories out of poverty that can strengthen citizenship rights and claims to security.
Innovative, more developmental social protection approaches adapted to particular contexts are emerging around the world.
Slouching Toward Crapitalism
However, greater attention should be paid to the political economy of redistributive policies, the challenge of financing such policies, and their implications for the social contract between state and citizens. The state has a key role in coordinating inclusive social protection provision. This paper examines empowerment in the context of social protection for informal workers.
It argues that social protection can help to improve the health and well-being of informal sector workers, especially poorer women, and build their capacity to organise and demand better working conditions. There is strong evidence, for example, that cash transfers can address age-based social exclusion. Research has found that social pensions in Namibia and Lesotho have improved the status of older people without relatives, who otherwise have been isolated and excluded from community life.
Cash transfers are also regarded as a particularly effective way of empowering women and girls within the household. However, it is argued that conditional cash transfers CCTs requiring that children are taken to school and for health check-ups reinforce gender stereotypes of women as responsible for the household, while men maintain a role as income earners. Overall, the evidence on the impact of cash transfer programmes on empowerment is still patchy.
This paper assesses the evidence and looks at the extent to which it can be generalised. Ultimately, cash transfers work as part of a broader strategy to achieve economic and social development. If CCTs do little to promote the empowerment of women might they even be making things worse? Women involved in the programmes report that, in general, they experience greater self-esteem, well being and autonomy.
How can NGOs and donors develop more gender-sensitive CT programmes that help to redress inequality and work towards empowerment? This report examines the impacts of cash transfers on gender dynamics within households and communities. It finds mixed impacts and insufficient consideration of gender inequality and gender analysis in programme processes. To realise the potential value of CTs for women, NGOs and donors need to ensure, for example, that all emergency responses include a gender and social analysis; that clear and attainable gender aims are specified for each stage of the intervention; and that more investment is made in staff training.
However, enabling women to participate in economic life is subject to both formal and informal constraints: Removing these barriers, and actively creating mechanisms through which women are able to add value to the economy, are explained in the following review in terms of: The paper below argues that while access to financial services and microfinance can and does make important contributions to the economic productivity and social well-being of poor women and their households, it does not automatically empower women.
This article published in the Economic and Political Weekly, India, examines the empirical evidence of the impact of microfinance on poverty reduction and the empowerment of poor women.