Poverty and Inequality 1998 In October 1998, the Centre began an initial two-year programme on Poverty and Inequality,
in association with the MacArthur Network on Poverty and Inequality in Broader
Perspectives. In July 1998, a meeting of the MacArthur Network was held at the Harvard
Center for Population and Development Studies. Presentations were made by Sudhir Anand
(St Catherine’s College, Oxford) on Measuring Inequalities in Health, Stephan Klasen
(Ludwig Maximilian Universität, Munich) on Measuring Poverty and Deprivation in South
Africa, Jean Drze (Delhi School of Economics) on Inequality and Development: Himalayan
Insights, Mamta Murthi (Centre for History and Economics and Clare Hall, Cambridge) on
Analysis of the 1991 Indian Census: Preliminary Results, and Amartya Sen (Trinity College,
Cambridge) on Development as Freedom. Stephan Klasen’s paper with Kalpana Bardhan
(Berkeley, University of California), on UNDP’s Gender-Related Development Index was
published in World Development 27 (1999). In connection with this, Professor Klasen
participated as a panellist at the First Global Forum on Human Development in New York,
July 1999 where he discussed papers by Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen, and reviewed the
changes to the Human Development Index.
The programme pays special attention to analytical issues in the measurement and evaluation
of inequalities, in the context of extensive empirical applications dealing with the United
States (especially the hard inequalities that exist across ethnic divisions), India (especially the
remarkably sharp regional and inter-district contrasts, and also differential positions of
women and men), and South Africa (especially the long-standing racial and locational
inequalities inherited from the Apartheid era). The focus is primarily on non-income
information (such as mortality, fertility and other demographic variables as well as morbidity
and health statistics), and on the analytical technology needed to deal with these variables,
which lack the simple measurability of income or wealth data. The empirical work has been
concerned with income distribution in the US, and with the relationship between income and
health, an area in which there was close collaboration with the MacArthur Network on Health
and Socio-economic Status.
Mamta Murthi joined the Centre for History and Economics in connection with this project,
working with other members of the Network, in particular Amartya Sen, Angus Deaton
(Princeton University), Sudhir Anand, Jean Drze and Stephan Klasen. Dr Murthi returned to
the World Bank in January 2001, and in the same year Ananya Kabir joined the Centre as a
Research Fellow in association with this programme.
Over the period October 1998 to December 2000, Dr Murthi worked on two research themes.
The first was demographic change and the position of women in India. Her research, partly in
collaboration with Jean Drze, critically evaluated the arguments against a relation between
female education and lower fertility. The research, based on an analysis of the district-level
data from two recent censuses, makes a strong case for the role of women’s education in
lowering fertility. The main findings are outlined in the paper, ‘Fertility, Education and
Development: Further Evidence from India’ (with Jean Drze), which was published in
Population and Development Review, March 2001. Dr Murthi’s second area of research
evaluated the administrative costs of individual retirement accounts in the UK using a
comprehensive database on charges assembled from a range of existing sources. The main
findings on costs were summarized in two papers, ‘Administrative Costs under a
Decentralized Approach to Individual Accounts: Lessons from the United Kingdom’, and
‘Annuity Margins in the UK’ (both co-authored with J Michael Orszag and Peter R. Orszag).
Together the papers point to the high costs of individual accounts in the UK.
Ananya Kabir began research on how the arts can illuminate the relationship between
conflict, cultural trauma, identity formation and social exclusion in South Asia. Articles
forthcoming in 2003 are: ‘National culture in transnational spaces? On exhibiting and viewing
‘New Indian Art’ at the Manchester Art Gallery’, and ‘Allegories of Alienation and Politics of
Bargaining: Minority Subjectivities in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se’; essays already published
include ‘Witness, Citizen, Artist: Ways of Resisting, ’92- ’02’, ‘The Poetics of
Dispossession’, and ‘Canvassing For Human Security’.
In 2000, Stephan Klasen was involved in a research project on under-nutrition and child
mortality in South Asia and Africa, and also worked on cross-country comparisons of
inequality and welfare. As Professor of Economics at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in
Munich, he produced a discussion paper with Ingrid Woolard (University of Port Elizabeth)
on Surviving Unemployment without State Support: Unemployment and Household
Formation in South Africa. Professor Klasen’s paper, Measuring Poverty and Deprivation in
South Africa, became a Centre for History and Economics working paper in May 2000.
Caroline Humphrey (King’s College, Cambridge) continued her work on social exclusion in
Russia, and in 2000 produced a paper entitled Inequality and Exclusion: A Russian Case
Study of Emotion in Politics. The paper examines the ways in which social and political
anxieties about exclusion in Russia play a part in constructing the inequality they profess only
to describe.
A two-day conference on Fertility Changes in Developing Countries was held in May 2000 at
King’s College, Cambridge. There were three sessions: Concepts and Empirical Evidence,
Fertility in India, and The Global Picture. Participants included Alaka Basu (Cornell
University), Jean Drze, P.N. Mari Bhat (Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi), Tim Dyson
(LSE), Roger Jeffery (University of Edinburgh), Naila Kabeer (University of Sussex), Chris
Langford (LSE), Mamta Murthi, Siddiq Osmani and Amartya Sen. In addition to providing a
valuable opportunity to exchange research and research ideas, the workshop produced a rich
and diverse set of papers and associated discussions around the major themes. Five of the
papers presented at the meeting were accepted for publication in a special issue of World
Development: Alaka Basu’s Why Does Education Lower Fertility? A Critical Review of Some
Possibilities; P.N. Mari Bhat’s Returning a Favour: The Changing Relationship Between
Female Education and Family Size in India; Michel Garenne and Véronique Joseph’s Timing
of the Onset of Fertility Decline in Sub-Saharan Africa; Athar Hussain’s Fertility Transition
in China and its Implications; and Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery’s ‘We Five, Our TwentyFive’: Myths of Population Out of Control in Modern India.
David Barker’s hypothesis regarding Foetal Origins of Adult Disease and its possible
extensive implications provided the subject matter of a conference organised by the Centre for
History and Economics held at Trinity College, Cambridge on 4 July 2001. Participants
included David Barker (Environment and Epistemology Unit, Southampton General
Hospital), Meghnad Desai (LSE), Richard Jolly (University of Sussex), Michael Marmot
(University College, London), Julia Neuberger (The King’s Fund), Siddiq Osmani (University
of Ulster), Roger Robinson (British Medical Journal) and Amartya Sen.
In February 1999, Amartya Sen organised the first in the series of three meetings on
Unemployment held at Trinity College, Cambridge. The meeting spanned two days and
participants included Tony Atkinson, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Stephan Klasen, Mamta Murthi,
Sylvia Nasar (Columbia University), Emma Rothschild and Menachem Yaari (Hebrew
University).
The second in this series was held in March 2000. The meeting was divided into three
sessions: Economic Aspects, Social Aspects, and Political Aspects. Participants included Rune
berg (Ume University), Tony Atkinson, Joakim Palme (Swedish Institute for Social
Research), Philippe van Parijs (Université Catholique de Louvain), Edmund Phelps
(Columbia University), and Amartya Sen. A website was created dedicated to the issues that
emerged from the meeting, providing information about the participants, their papers,
comments and additional material.
The third of three meetings on Unemployment and Inequality was held in February 2001 in
Trinity College, Cambridge. The main topic for discussion was empirical investigations of
inequality and there was also a session on the teaching of economics. Participating were Tony
Atkinson (Nuffield College, Oxford), Fabrizio Barca (Ministry of Treasury, Rome), Andrea
Brandolini (Bank of Italy Research Department), Jean-Paul Fitoussi (Observatoire Français
Conjonctures Économiques (OFCE), Paris), Stephan Klasen (Centre for History and
Economics), Mrten Palme (Stockholm School of Economics), and Hans-Joachim Voth
(Centre for History and Economics).