· On the JPAL blog, Tanvi Jaluka of CARE discusses what outcomes to measure for women entrepreneurs based on participatory research on what women see counts as success – including financial resilience and confidence, as well as business achievements. And on empowerment: “a good example is our “decision-making and control” module. Rather than assuming that more control is always better, we asked entrepreneurs how much control they currently have and how much they’d want to have. This helped us understand whether a woman entrepreneur felt empowered or burdened by individual responsibility. Through focus group discussions, we also recognized that sharing decisions isn’t inherently a sign of less power; for many women, it reflects the importance of trusting and collaborating with your partner or family member.”
· Hein de Haas on the need for a new migration paradigm that differs from push-pull – which he has as an aspirations-capabilities model. This can also be handled in a standard set-up by adding liquidity constraints and amenities as well as income in the utility function, but this framework he has is a useful counterpoint to simplistic views about what drives migration. “we need to consider migration as an investment and resource rather than a stereotypical ‘desperate flight from misery’. However, it is also a reaction to profound, largely irreversible changes in people’s subjective ideas about the ‘good life’, which typically occur as societies go through fundamental cultural changes linked to education, modernization and media access. The resulting capabilities-aspirations framework helps us understand the complex – and often counter-intuitive – ways in which broader processes of social transformation shape trends and patterns of migration. For instance, it helps us to explain why development and the profound social transformations usually accompanying modernization processes in low-income countries generally increases migration, as factors like poverty reduction, increasing education and better infrastructure tend to simultaneously increase people’s capabilities and aspirations to move within and across borders.”
· Oliver Kim on twilight of the econs – looks at what is going on with the econ job market, offers advice for those on this year’s market, and asks whether the special employability of economists no longer holds.
· The latest VoxDevLit is out – it is on organized crime and development, with Santiago Tobón and Maria Micaela Sviatschi as senior editors. They look at the roots of organized crime, its impacts on development, and promising policy responses as well as those that can backfire.
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