INCOME DISTRIBUTION OF RURAL HOUSEHOLDS IN MEXICO

Despite the efforts to reduce poverty in rural municipalities income inequality persists in Mexico. This study presents an analysis on rural household income distribution in the country, since it is argued that conditional federal transfers fail on improving income distribution among rural households. The hypothesis stated that, because of local public goods are also part of individual budget constraints, it is rational to think that an expansion in the provision of local public goods will increase total income and, if such public goods are financed with conditional grants that target low-income groups, it is expected that income inequality may decrease. Thus, the objective was to classify rural municipalities in order to observe which among them have benefited from federal grants and those that did not, finding the reasons why assuming grants are accepted as an instrument contributing to reduce poverty and income inequality in recent years. Each group was analysed as a cluster to observe the effect of federal transfers on rural household income distribution. Main results showed that municipalities with rural low income-inequality and better economic development indicators improve income distribution when obtaining unconditional grants. This means that, in such cases, those transfers designed to reduce poverty also reduce rural income inequality. But that was not the case for the high income-inequality groups, where conditional grants did not have any effect on inequality and, in some cases, inequality increased. For the rural high income-inequality group, unconditional grants showed not to have a positive effect on reducing inequality. The clustering and regression analyses revealed large heterogeneity in the rural areas in terms of income and economic development.

When Refugee Exposure Increases Incumbent Support through Development: Evidence from Uganda

How does exposure to refugees affect elections, development, and citizen support for migration within the Global South? In the context of wealthy consolidated democracies, recent studies have found that when voters are more exposed to refugees, they punish incumbents and turn to far-right parties. Yet there is a dearth of studies on the electoral consequences of refugee-hosting in developing countries, where the majority of refugees reside and politics often do not fall on a left-right divide. We explore this question in Uganda, one of the largest refugee-hosting countries. Combining information on the populations and locations of refugee settlements with four waves of national elections data at the parish level, we find that greater exposure to refugees increases incumbent support. Unique longitudinal data on access to healthcare, schools, and roads coupled with national survey data suggest that this effect is due to positive externalities of refugee-hosting on local public goods provision.

Environmental Public Goods

Chapter 8 considers the conservation of environmental public goods. The nonexclusive and nonrival nature of public goods provide an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others. The result is that such public goods are systematically undervalued and the underlying environmental assets—such as watersheds, habitats, and ecological communities—are underconserved. It shows how individuals determine their contribution to public goods (via a Nash-Cournot reaction curve), and compares the result to the contribution that would be made if resources were being allocated efficiently from the perspective of society. Types of environmental public goods considered include additive (climate change), best- and better-shot (defence), weakest- and weaker-link (infectious disease control), and local public goods (common pool resources). The chapter also shows how strategic behavior by the beneficiaries of public goods may lead to socially undesirable outcomes (such as prisoner’s dilemmas).

Surrounded and threatened: how neighborhood composition reduces ethnic voting through intimidation

Ethnic voting is an important phenomenon in the political lives of numerous countries. In the present paper, we propose a theory explaining why ethnic voting is more prevalent in certain localities than in others and provide evidence for it. We argue that local ethnic geography affects ethnic voting by making voters of ethnicity that finds itself in the minority fear intimidation by their ethnic majority neighbors. We provide empirical evidence for our claim using the data from round 4 of the Afrobarometer survey in Ghana to measure the voters’ beliefs that they are likely to face intimidation during electoral campaigns. Using geocoded data from rounds three and four of the Afrobarometer, as well as data from the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, we find no evidence for local public goods provision as an alternative mechanism.

Factors Supporting or Hindering the Place-based Structure of Commons in Local Productive Systems

Recent results on the relationship between external economies and local public goods may be summarised as follows. Marshallian external economies are at the core of paths of development in vital local productive systems, such as Marshallian industrial districts or similar forms. They are partly external to the resources organized by single specialised firms and largely dependent on the embeddedness of the firm in the system and its various forms of division of labour. Exchanges need to integrate the contributions of the specialised producers, but all sorts of difficulties hinder them if a joint access to ‘local’ public goods does not help producers. Markets do not provide for them easily, nor top-down State planning does. Mechanisms and processes of local governance and place leadership, possibly combined with social customs and conventions, are an important support to local integration. The paper comes back to this kernel in the theories of local development, proposing an extended framework of relevant local public goods, qualified as specific public goods, club goods, and place-based common-pool resources, all sharing “commons”-like features. Factors hindering virtuous circles between external economies and specific commons are considered as well, in particular those related to different structures of interests