Third party labour contractors are increasingly prevalent in Global Production Networks (GPNs), and are a potential channel for ‘new forms of slavery’. Our review of case study evidence from South African and UK horticulture suggests unfree labour often emerges off-site through labour...

Microfinance as the best way of tackling poverty is under attack. It has been accused of failing to help the poor, of treating its clients badly, of charging high interest rates and of encouraging poor people to take on excessive debt burdens. The authors examine these issues, and find that...

Microfinance has emerged on the global scale as a key strategy to reduce poverty and promote development. Most of the relevant literature, however, tends to concentrate on breadth as opposed to depth of programme outreach. This paper is based on a primary household survey of 1,132 respondents in...

Abstract The caste system – a system of elaborately stratified social hierarchy – distinguishes India from most other societies. Among the most distinctive factors of the caste system is the close link between castes and occupations, especially in rural India, with Dalits or Scheduled Castes...

Abstract Aid for Trade (AfT) has gained prominence as an innovative form of donor support in the era of the ‘post’-Washington Consensus. Institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the European Commission, and the UK...

The paper argues that South Africa’s participation in the World Trade Organization since the birth of its democracy in 1994 was informed by its domestic development challenges. It claims that South Africa’s values were derived from its long struggle against apartheid and its transition to a...

The microfinance sector in India’s state of Andhra Pradesh was recently marred by a series of mishaps that occurred due to extensive lending, which resulted in over-indebtedness and ultimately, defaults. Lending institutions resorted to coercive measures for loan recovery that led to suicides...

Abstract Over time, while some countries have experienced trends of poverty and inequality moving in the same direction, others have witnessed the two developmental issues panning out in opposite directions. The latter is observed in Ghana, where in the last two decades poverty has been reducing...

Abstract This paper introduces a new volume on Adaptation, Poverty and Development: The Dynamics of Subjective Well-Being (Clark, 2012), sponsored by the ESRC Global Poverty Research Group (Universities of Manchester and Oxford) and the Brooks World Poverty Institute (University of Manchester)....

Social capital has been shown to be positively associated with a range of health outcomes, yet few studies have explored the association between mothers’ social capital and child health. We examine the relationship between mothers' access to social capital via participations in community...