Festschrift celebrating 25 years of PREALC. Includes a description of activities and statements by former directors and prominent persons associated with the programme.
This volume assembles the major papers discussed at an international workshop on poverty monitoring to evaluate poverty indicators and poverty monitoring systems. It aims to focus more attention on poverty issues and improve policies for alleviating poverty.
International development is now a major global activity and the focus of the rapidly growing academic discipline of development studies. The Encyclopedia of International Development provides definitions and discussions of the key concepts, controversies and actors associated with international development for a readership of development workers, teachers and students. With 600 entries, ranging in length from shorter factual studies to more in-depth essays, a comprehensive system of cross references and a full index, it is the most definitive guide to international development yet published. Development is more than a simple increase in a country's wealth and living conditions. It also implies increasing people's choices and freedoms; it is change that is inclusive and empowering. Development theory and practice has important applications to questions of economic growth, trade, governance, education, healthcare, gender rights and environmental protection, and it involves issues such as international aid, peacekeeping, famine relief and strategies against HIV/AIDS. The Encyclopedia treats these topics and many more, and provides critical analyses of important actors within development such as the United Nations and World Bank, non-governmental organizations and corporations. Contributors to this volume reflect the multidisciplinary and international nature of the subject. They come from social science disciplines such as economics, international studies, political science and anthropology, and from specialities such as medicine. This Encyclopedia provides crucial information for universities, students and professional organizations involved with international development, and those interested in related topics such as international studies or other studies of social and economic change today.
This book looks back over the last forty years of change and development in Ecuador, showing how macro level changes have impacted families and workplaces on the local level. Traditionally a dependent economy reliant on agricultural exports, the impact of neoliberalism and new sources of income from oil have transformed the informal and artisanal sectors in Ecuador. Exploring these dynamics using a combination of micro and macro analyses, this book demonstrates how the social relations of the sector are connected to the wider social, economic and political systems in which they operate. The book dives into the links between micro-production and the wider economy, including the relationships between different types of artisanal enterprises and their customers, their connections to the private sector and the state, the importance of social networks and social capital and the relevance of finance capital in microenterprise development. Overall, the analysis investigates how artisans, entrepreneurs and family-based enterprises seek to protect their interests when faced with neoliberal policies and the impacts of globalisation. This remarkable longitudinal study will be of considerable interest to researchers of development studies, economics, sociology, anthropology, geography and Latin American Studies.
The informal sector denotes the small-scale, unprotected, and loosely regulated activities and self-employment that proliferate in developing countries. This book is about the people who engage in informal activities and the people who study, interpret, intervene in, promote, or attempt to repress or regulate the sector. The authors bring together and evaluate for the first time competing theories, policies, and research findings on the informal sector, dealing with issues of power, ideology, and politics; basic research, applied research, program evaluation, and policymaking; exploitation, entrepreneurship, and opportunity; and poverty and the accumulation of wealth.