Better measures of informality can improve poverty reduction policy

Informal workers or informal families?

Informality and poverty are closely linked. Reducing one might reduce the other. To do so, policies must account for the realities of families’ income sharing.

Poverty is usually measured based on household income or expenditure with the assumption that families share these. Thus, poverty reduction policies usually consider the whole household; for example, proxies from household data are often used to assess poverty levels for means-testing of eligibility for public benefits, and related transfers often target the whole family. But when informality is studied, most research considers either family firms, individual workers, or only the household head. Consequently, policies related to reducing the risks of informality are often designed with single individuals in mind, rather than their entire household.

If we imagine a family with two adults working, what do you think they do with their work income? They usually share it. If they both work informally, their family is probably vulnerable to poverty. If both have a formal job, they likely are not poor. If one of them has a formal job, the other one not, they still might be less vulnerable to poverty, thanks to the access to insurance of one member. Therefore, we need to consider families as an economic unit when talking about informality and poverty reduction.

https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/better-measures-informality-can-improve-poverty-reduction-policy

Citation: https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/better-measures-informality-can-improve-poverty-reduction-policy

How To Escape The Perils of Fragility

Weaker growth raises the probability of entering into fragility, with substantially larger impact.

Already facing huge development needs, the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating the challenges facing fragile and conflict states—a group of currently about 40 countries trapped in cycles of low administrative capacity, political instability, conflict, and weak economic performance. Our new IMF staff working paper, which analyzes the experiences of 196 countries between 1979 and 2018, shines a light on how countries can avoid or break out of this trap.

Our study also finds that countries that successfully exit from fragility spend more on health and education than those countries that do not escape.

Effective institutions, in turn, provide a foundation for a strong economy.

Finally, countries can escape from fragility by seizing a pivotal moment—a critical juncture that presents a rare opportunity for change (e.g., after a crisis or a change of leadership). 

https://blogs.imf.org/2021/08/03/how-to-escape-the-perils-of-fragility/

Citation: IMF

Empowering action towards improved livelihoods

We often talk about system-level change to address root causes of poverty and the imbalance of risk. This requires us to unite in different and creative ways. The Living Income Community of Practice motivates actors across sectors to help close the income gap, so that smallholders can earn a decent standard of living as a basic human right.

What does it mean to be able to afford a decent standard of living?

A decent standard of living is a human right. We are all accountable for the livelihoods of producers whom we depend on for our basic needs. The idea of a living income is about more than just basic subsistence and survival: it is about dignity, stability and resilience. And leads to lasting change.

https://businessfightspoverty.org/empowering-action-towards-improved-livelihoods/

Citation:  www. businessfightspoverty.org

Five Reasons to Care About the Risks of Chronic Kidney Disease

 The kidneys and the heart work hand in hand.

The health of the kidneys is key to our survival.

The kidneys are the size of two clenched fists, and they fight hard to protect our bodies from harm. Acting as a chief purification system, the kidneys perform a life-sustaining balancing act of filtering excess waste and fluid from the blood (at the rate of about 140 liters per day) and balancing important electrolytes such as sodium and potassium, and help regulate blood pressure.1 When the kidneys are damaged, they may not work as well as they should. If the damage continues to get worse, this can result in chronic kidney disease, which means a gradual loss of kidney function over a period of months to years,2 causing wastes to build up in the body, as the kidneys are increasingly unable to balance the salts and minerals, filter waste products, help control blood pressure and produce red blood cells. 

https://www.bayer.com/en/news-stories/five-reasons-to-care-about-the-risks-of-chronic-kidney-disease?fbclid=IwAR3v88_0vSmrYGL_xYjPFe2Zt9XeCXZYHs-gJUQ3Tlo_V7WeYIvEyzq7kao

Citation:  Bayer

Equity Explained: What It Is and How to Create It at Your Organization

 Increasingly, equity is finding its way into conversations, organizations, and acronyms across the world.

The term DE&I may be new in corporate spaces, but the concept of equity has deep roots, and forward-thinking organizations are beginning to factor it into their people practices and systems.

But there’s a lot of noise, and many misconceptions about what equity means, and how it applies to organizations. 

How is equity different from equality?

Often we conflate or confuse the terms equity and equality.

While equality assumes that all people have access to the same advantages and opportunities, equity acknowledges that individuals have varying degrees of access to resources and opportunities and seeks to distribute resources accordingly to achieve equal results.

Put simply, while equality is about sameness, equity is about fairness.

And—most importantly—while equality is aspirational, equity is actionable.

https://neuroleadership.com/your-brain-at-work/equity-explained/

Citation: Neuroleadership.com

Why Sustainable Food Systems are Needed in a post-COVID World

 Food systems are essential to economic activity because they provide the energy that we need to live and work. However, macroeconomists have long ignored them in the belief that the global agri-food industry, now highly mechanized, subsidized and concentrated, offers all we could wish for when it comes to food.

Economic reset

The rebuilding of economies after the COVID-19 crisis offers a unique opportunity to transform the global food system and make it resilient to future shocks, ensuring environmentally sustainable and healthy nutrition for all. To make this happen, United Nations agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Environment Program, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the World Food Program, collectively, suggest four broad shifts in the food system:

• Resilient food supply chains. Efficient and effective food supply chains are essential to lowering the risks of food insecurity, malnutrition, food price fluctuations and can simultaneously create jobs. Rural transformation to empower small producers and retailers and mainstream them in the food systems economy can help build resilient food supply chains.

• Healthy diets. Curbing the overconsumption of animal and highly-processed food in wealthier countries and improving access to good nutrition in poorer ones can improve well-being and land use efficiency, make healthy food more affordable globally, and slash carbon emissions. Retargeting agricultural subsidies toward healthy foods, taxing unhealthy foods, and aligning procurement practices, education programs and healthcare systems toward better diets can go a long way in achieving this. In turn, this can reduce healthcare costs globally, reduce inequality, and help us weather the next pandemic with healthier individuals.

https://blogs.imf.org/2020/07/14/why-sustainable-food-systems-are-needed-in-a-post-covid-world/

The Future of Development Co-operation: Not the end, just the beginning of a new era?

First, development co-operation needs to adapt to the new polarisation within the developing world. More precisely, the old model of supporting ‘stuck’ and ‘ODA-dependent’ developing countries needs to be complemented with a new model of collaborating with ‘moving’ and ‘post-ODA’ developing countries.

Second, development co-operation to support expanding social welfare regimes and social protection systems focused particularly on children is important to disrupt the inter-generational transmission of poverty, especially given that under 18-year olds make up half of global poverty.

Third, development co-operation needs to consider the ‘productive’ side of economic development as a supporting structure to the ‘social’ side. This is because one of the greatest challenges facing many developing countries is the potential for undesirable patterns of structural transformation. Development co-operation needs to view this issue as a global challenge and understand the importance of the massive expansion of economic infrastructure that is required to support economic development. Long-run concessionary development finance is likely to be increasingly important for post-ODA countries to sustain that economic development, as infrastructure is often expensive and economic returns from infrastructure investment take generations to be fully realised.

https://oecd-development-matters.org/2019/03/15/the-future-of-development-co-operation-not-the-end-just-the-beginning-of-a-new-era/