This project has three main objectives in line with UNU-WIDER’s tradition in the area of inclusion and horizontal inequality: (1) to shed further light on the extent to which inequalities run along ethnic, gender, and other communal lines; (2) to understand the determinants of such group-based inequalities, including the potential for change; and (3) to consider the impact of such inequalities on development and structural transformation.
The project is organized under two main components. The first addresses the question of what we have learnt so far about discrimination and affirmative action, and will focus on evaluating various affirmative-action policies that have been used to correct historical inequalities. The second focuses on the politics of group-based inequalities, distilling and developing key perspectives from political science and political economy.
We design a lab-in-the-field experiment involving naturally occurring groups operating in three South-African townships. We introduce an incentives-based mechanism named 'participatory incentives' consisting of monetary incentives that are awarded...
A concern with absolute poverty, defined as a money-metric measure of the ability to meet basic subsistence needs, has occupied a central place within the international development agenda for much of its existence. Efforts in recent years to promote...
Anecdotal evidence suggests that involving beneficiaries in charity decision-making ensures better governance processes. This study provides the first experimental test of the effects of beneficiaries’ participation in the decision of how to spend a...
This study provides the first country-wide research evidence that an affirmative action policy may induce a backlash. I exploit the timing of the implementation of castebased electoral quotas across and within the states of India. The results show...
This study investigates the unexpected impact that enforcing birth control policies in China has upon the educational stratification between the Han majority, the policy target group, and ethnic minorities, a partially excluded group. Exploring...
We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment among childcare workers in Chandigarh, India, to evaluate discriminatory attitudes of the Hindu workers toward Muslim children. We use a third-party allocation game that controls for selfish payoff...
We evaluate a development programme with an important maternal health care component in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The region and its mostly indigenous people experienced violent conflict in the past and face a constant risk of...
Inequality and social exclusion receive considerable contemporary policy attention. In the field of international development, inequality—both vertical (between individuals and households) and horizontal (between groups)—is a core concern in the 2030...
Inequality—both vertical (between individuals and households) and horizontal (between groups)—is a core concern in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, despite considerable attention to horizontal inequality in both research and...
‘Legal empowerment’ is defined as a process of systemic change through which the poor and excluded become able to use the law to protect and advance their rights and interests as citizens and economic actors. Since the 2000s, legal empowerment...
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal inequality in the Global South
This paper investigates progress in reducing the high level of racial stratification of occupations after apartheid in South Africa. Empirical analysis, using census microdata and Labour Force Surveys, does not provide compelling evidence of...
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
The articles in the forthcoming special issue are already available online on full open access. The special issue will be officially published in March 2019, vol. 55, issue 3. Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles...
This paper provides new insights on the labour market discrimination faced by indigenous Australians one of the most disadvantaged indigenous populations in developed countries. Combining two large, nationally representative datasets, we decompose...
A considerable body of recent research suggests that inequality between ethnic groups has major socioeconomic implications. ‘Economists have long...
A considerable body of research suggests that horizontal inequality between ethnic groups has major socioeconomic implications, in particular for peace and economic development. Much of this work focuses on horizontal inequality as an independent...
Implicit associations and biases are carried without awareness or conscious direction, yet there is reason to believe they may be influenced by social pressures. In this paper, I study social pressure as a motive to give, as well as giving itself...
A considerable body of research suggests that horizontal inequality between ethnic groups has major socioeconomic implications, in particular for peace and economic development. Much of this work focuses on horizontal inequality as an independent...
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
Hiếu (pseudonym) embodies the ‘good refugee’ story. In 1979, he fled Vietnam by boat and eventually resettled in the Federal Republic of (West)...
Education is my freedom ... if I have my education, everything is still possible for me in the future. Mohammed grinned, and looked down at his newly...
Policy makers should see integration and upward mobility, and not simply placement and survival, as goals of resettlement of refugees. Our research on...
A considerable body of research suggests that horizontal inequality between ethnic groups has major socioeconomic implications, in particular for peace and economic development. Much of this work focuses on horizontal inequality as an independent...
We take school admission mechanisms to the lab to test whether the widely-used manipulable Immediate Acceptance mechanism disadvantages students of lower cognitive ability and whether this leads to ability segregation across schools. Results show...
Unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have arrived in Europe over the last decade, and young Afghans account for the highest proportion of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children across the UK. Despite research exploring the...
Inequality and social exclusion receive considerable contemporary policy attention. In the field of international development, inequality—both vertical (between individuals and households) and horizontal (between groups)—is a core concern in the 2030...
Using 1990 5% Census and American Community Survey data, we examine the economic integration of Afghan refugees to the US, focusing on employment rates and income levels. First-wave Afghan refugees (those arriving 1980–90) have made significant...
Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on...
Despite the relevance of geographical disparities in India, earnings inequality occurs mostly within states, but with a broad range of variability in its levels. We investigate the sources of such variability using RIF decompositions of the...
Until the 1970s, only 1000 Vietnamese lived in West and East Germany, most of them international students. West Germany, in particular, had not yet been confronted with non-European refugees. This changed after 1978 with the influx of around 35,000...
In this study, we examine the Vietnamese population of the United States as a case study in the integration of a refugee group in a host country. We approach this case in three parts. We first offer a brief review of Vietnamese refugee resettlement...
The Vietnamese refugee experience in the UK has been characteristically different from the broader international flows of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ to the West. With no pre-existing Vietnamese community in the UK, largely composed of the rural poor...
Past research suggests that Afghan immigrants and their children face challenges in settlement, stemming from the impact of displacement, language barriers, poor health, limited education, limited knowledge of or access to services, and...
Welcoming 60,000 Southeast Asian refugees in the 1979–80 period has become a celebrated part of Canada’s history, but the eventual integration of these refugees into Canadian society has received insufficient attention. This study provides a...
Concerns about the dramatic rise in income inequality across the world and, at the same time, assessments of national progress on the Millennium Development Goals made it clear that it is the intersection of income inequality, marginalized social...
This paper contributes to the scant body of literature on inequalities among and within ethnic groups in the Philippines by examining both the vertical and horizontal measures in terms of opportunities in accessing basic services such as education...
We analyse horizontal inequality in wealth and in years of education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the period 2001–13. We find that the trend in horizontal inequality is similar to the trend in vertical inequality over the period of...
In less than a decade, foreign investors have erected more than 3,200 wind turbines across the Isthmus of Techuantepec investing billions of dollars and generating more than 90 per cent of Mexico’s wind energy. The isthmus is also home to more than...
This article contributes to the growing scholarship on how ethnic inequality can dampen the provision of public goods and services. On the one hand, it pushes beyond purely economic inequality to include status inequality between population groups...
In the developing world, clientelism is common. In Africa, public office is often used to redistribute resources to ethnically defined constituencies, and this form of clientelistic exchange is a key determinant of vote choice. Does clientelistic...
This paper provides an informative picture of the extent of regional inequality of economic outcomes and opportunities in the pre-and post-reform Ethiopia. We start by presenting evidence that regional inequality in educational attainment, formal...
With the second largest indigenous population by percentage in Latin America, Guatemala is an important case for understanding horizontal inequality and indigenous politics. This paper presents new analysis of survey data, allowing for consideration...
Efforts to tackle discrimination in access to basic services have shown mixed results in different country settings. This study examines the positive and negative outcomes attributed to anti-discrimination measures adopted in different country...
Racial wage inequality and discrimination have pervaded South African society for centuries. Apartheid legislation cemented these disparities by...
Girls in India face many challenges. From the moment they are conceived, they are less likely to be born as compared to boys. This presence of...
This paper investigates progress in reducing the high level of racial stratification of occupations after apartheid in South Africa. Empirical analysis, using census microdata and Labour Force Surveys, does not provide strong evidence of sustained or...
This paper brings labour back into the literature on legal empowerment against poverty. Employing a historical lens, I outline three waves of legal movements. Each wave is distinguished by its timing, the state-level target, and the actors involved...
This article explores whether legal empowerment can address horizontal inequalities in post-conflict settings, and if so, how. It argues that legal empowerment has modest potential to reduce these inequalities but that there are risks of...
Land registration and titling in Africa has been seen as a means of legal empowerment of the poor that can protect smallholders’ and pastoralists’ rights of access to land and other land-based resources. Land registration is also on the ethnojustice...
What explains the popularity of right-wing parties amongst the poor? This paper argues that in hierarchical societies with high social-status inequality, poor high-status voters may ally with rich high-status voters if they believe their social...
This paper examines the issue of horizontal inequalities in Vietnam over the past 20 years. Using data from three recent Vietnam population censuses (1989, 1999, and 2009) and three Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys (1998, 2008, 2012), we...
For the first time in Indonesia, we jointly analyse several economic statistics and ethnic diversity indicators at national and local levels. Nationally, we find very high levels of economic inequality, measured from household asset values or...
Horizontal inequality by ethnic group has remained remarkably persistent for wealth, education, and access to certain services in Nigeria. While significant gains in the reduction of inequality and improvement in access have been made for more...
The business rights pillar of the Legal Empowerment of the Poor agenda is not preoccupied with equality of outcome; it concentrates instead on equality of opportunity. This paper addresses the lacuna in the business rights literature by ‘bringing...
This study explores the patterns and consequences of ethnic and regional inequalities in Pakistan. Using inter-district variation in inequality, ethnic fractionalization, and access to public goods, we extend the literature on public service...
What explains the persistence of racial or ethnic inequalities in political representation, in the absence of strongly politicized racial or ethnic cleavages? This paper uses new data to demonstrate a substantial racial gap between voters and...
The Center for American Progress estimates the costs of discrimination at US$64 billion per year, or roughly 2 million annually displaced American...
An ever-expanding body of empirical research suggests that ethno-religious divisions adversely impact a host of normatively desirable objectives linked to the quality of life in society, implicitly representing a strong challenge to multiculturalist...
This paper explores the relationship between a large government cash transfer programme, changes in inequality, and political participation in Mexico. The results show that increases in the coverage of the programme during the 2008 financial crisis...
In this paper I issue a call for a primary focus on expanding and strengthening alternative, community-based justice system, as a strategy for securing the full benefits of legal agency to indigenous and other culturally distinct groups. I do so...
Recent literature has shown that crosscutting social cleavages reduce the likelihood of civil war. This article argues that the same logic does not apply to lower-scale group violence such as riots, which differ in such a way that crosscutting social...
In this paper, we analyse the patterns and trends of group-based inequalities in Brazil in the past 30 years. Using data from the last four demographic censuses (1980, 1991, 2000, and 2010), we estimate numerous measures to analyse inequalities...
Inequalities between ethnic or racial groups, defined as horizontal inequalities, are pervasive and persistent. They persist due to cumulative and reinforcing inequalities arising from unequal access to different types of capital. Affirmative action...
In this study, we embark on measuring inequality in Iran, we compute three measures of group-based inequality (Group-weighted Coefficient of Variation, Group-weighted Gini, and Group-weighted Theil) for the following outcomes: education, assets...
This study uses five series of demographic and health surveys to answer the question: ‘Is horizontal inequality in education and wealth increasing or decreasing in the 20-year interval between 1991 and 2010?’. Horizontal inequality in education...
Having a birth certificate is a stepping stone to acquiring an array of rights and benefits, including other documents necessary to navigate in and outside of one’s home country. Despite its importance, many children in the developing world never...
We analyse vertical and horizontal inequality in Ecuador from a long-run perspective, as well as during and after the commodities boom. Using various data sources we show that Ecuador has made significant progress in reducing inequality, particularly...
Using data from various rounds of the nationally representative NSSO survey between 1988 and 2012, we first construct national, state, and district-level figures for overall, within and between consumption inequality. We find an increase in...
Does economic standing cross-cut ethnicity in African electoral politics? In many countries in the region, ethnicity appears to be a major consideration in individuals’ political decision-making. However, there is significant variation in the extent...
This paper examines the nature and evolution of horizontal and vertical human-capital inequality in South Africa since the end of apartheid. Using census data from 1996, 2001, and 2011, we use different measures of years of schooling to examine the...
We investigate whether there are racial and ethnic disparities in children’s education in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. We find that in all the four countries, and especially in Vietnam, children from small ethnic groups have lower education...
In India, caste shapes access to a variety of resources and outcomes mainly through its influence on inter-generational prosperity, but also the linked phenomenon of discrimination. This paper examines whether caste-based differences in access to...
Research on caste-based inequalities in India has generally focused on differences between large categories such as the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and the remainder of the population. We contribute to the literature on horizontal...
We evaluate the effectiveness of a post-conflict development programme on maternal health-care utilization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Our work varies from conventional impact evaluation studies because of the inclusion of two post...
The market environment in which discriminatory firms operate may be a relevant determinant of their extent of discrimination. In this paper we aim at analysing the effect of local labour market conditions on a firm’s decision to discriminate. We use...
In this paper, we analyse which channels influence individual preferences concerning the choice of the official language in Zambia. We develop a theoretical framework, which is tested using data on elicited beliefs about the effects of changes in...
This paper investigates the net impact of birth control policy in China on educational attainment of the partially excluded ethnic minorities. Exploring county-level variation in the value of fines levied for unsanctioned births, we show that more...
The paper presents the results of a lab-in-the-field experiment in three South African townships located in the suburbs of Cape Town. The experimental design consists of a set of decisions on how the members of a naturally occurring group allocate an...
Mandated political representation over the last twenty years has had a different impact on the reporting of crime by the low castes than what is observed for the reporting of crime by women. I exploit the timing of the implementation of mandated...
This paper presents the results of an attitude survey administered to university students in India that attempts to delineate the social–psychological mechanisms of ‘externalization’ and ‘internalization’ to understand the possible consequences of...
We assess the relative importance of statistical residual-based measures of discrimination in determining indigenous Australians’ perceptions of discrimination in the labour market. We find that statistical measures are largely unrelated to...
This paper examines whether, in India, discriminatory practices by government-employed child caregivers along religious lines, lead to differential health outcomes among the care receiving children. Child caregivers participate in a novel allocation...
Theme: 2014-18, Inclusion
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