The burgeoning comparative literature on the political economy of welfare states has recently expanded from the global North to the global South. Most typologies of welfare states in the global South pay homage to the typology developed for the global North by Gosta Esping-Andersen, which they modify in order to take into account the uneven development of markets and states in the global South. This literature pays little attention to the distributional question of precisely ‘who gets what?’, i.e. who benefits from different sets of policies. This paper provides a new theoretical and empirical typology of welfare regimes in the global South, and begins to analyse the economic, social and political correlates of these.

Background: For the last decade, discussions about who governs African HIV/AIDS policy have revolved around Western donors and their influence over local aid recipient countries. However, these dialogues are increasingly less relevant due to declining HIV funding from the West, combined with growing financial ownership of the epidemic within Africa. This project tested the hypothesis that the shift in HIV financing has prompted countries in Africa to move their National Strategic Plans (NSPs) away from global policy indicators, in favour of domestic approaches.

Methods: Data was collected from analyzing the NSPs of eight African countries with HIV prevalence rates >10% (Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe). Based on 34 policy indicators (adapted from the Global Fund 2009 M&E Toolkit), the NSPs were evaluated on their compliance with the global policy, measured on a 5-point nominal scale. This was carried out for three successive policies in each country, to show change in global policy compliance over time.

Results: Botswana and South Africa have moved their NSPs away from global indicators in the last five years. Where Botswana's NSP was 65% compliant in 2003, it was 42% compliant in 2010. Similarly, South Africa's newest NSP exhibits a 19% drop in policy compliance. The remaining countries in this study continue to align themselves with global indicators. These trends can be partially explained though significant correlations with explanatory variables, such as perceived corruption (-0.5241) and health expenditure per capita (-0.7311).

Conclusions: The implications of these results may well be crucial in evaluating policy efficacy. In the last five years, the correlation between change in global policy compliance and change in HIV prevalence is also significant (-0.5174). The purposefully provocative conclusion of this project is that heavier national compliance with global policy indicators is connected with larger decreases in HIV prevalence. These findings disrupt many mainstream ideas about the benefits of cultural relevance and grassroots policy-making.

"Eric Schollar's Primary Mathematics Research Project (PMRP) combines an innovative intervention in primary schools to improve basic numeracy with carefully-designed monitoring and evaluation. Eric's earlier work identified some of the impediments to basic numeracy. Eric conducted a field test of pilot version of the intervention in 2007, and in 2010 implemented the intervention on a large scale in part of Limpopo. Eric will be reporting on his more recent follow-up data on these interventions."

 

This paper investigates the (potential) relationship between the quality of national HIV/AIDS responses (specifically: HAART and PMTCT coverage as indicators of treatment and prevention responses respectively) and the presence of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) active on HIV/AIDS. Owing to limitations in data availability, cross-country regression analyses are restricted to Sub-Saharan Africa (N=42). A number of indicators of CSO presence are emnployed, principally the number of organisations listing HIV/AIDS as a focus area in a 2004 UN directory of African NGOs and the number of CSOs responding to, as well as the number of employees reported by CSOs responding to a 2009 UNAIDS civil society survey. Models are constructed that control for population size, national income, international AIDS assistance, burden of disease and other factors expected to influence the outcomes. Results are ambiguous, with some models indicating a positive relationship between the presence of CSOs and HAART and PMTCT coverage and others no, or even a negative relationship. These  results therefore do not support the conclusion that the mere presence of CSOs result in better government responses. However, despite time-ordering, the models may suffer from an insurmountable endogeneity problem in that it is equally plausible that CSOs become active in response to poor government responses, and may therefore be associated with relatively poorer rather than better outcomes.

I use anthropometric scores from two nationally representative surveys in South Africa to examine the comparative changes in urban and rural children’s health over the 15 years post-Apartheid. I find that the urban advantage in children’s health disappears despite urban children retaining considerable advantages in average household socioeconomic status. I then explore several explanations for this pattern common in the urbanization literature, including the growth of particularly vulnerable urban populations, such as migrants and residents of informal areas, and/or the deepening of household poverty in the poorest urban areas. I do not find evidence of deteriorated circumstances for the urban poor, but I do find evidence that urban-rural migrants have begun to show a health disadvantage. However it appears to be related to the relative poverty of urban-rural migrants. I then follow the Dinardo Fortin Lemeiux decomposition method to explore relative shifts in the distribution of household wealth and parental education in urban and rural households. I find that the differential gains are likely due to large improvements made by very poor rural households rather than deterioration in urban wellbeing.

This paper identifies and discusses young adults’ transition to adulthood by looking at the sequencing of stages in starting a family. It challenges the model that young adults move in a linear passage with fixed moments of ‘arrival’ when starting a family. When starting a family, roles are not fixed nor are they homogenous across racial or socioeconomic groups. The results demonstrate that the timing and frequency of key transition events can be very different across racial and socioeconomic groups. The findings suggest that one’s location in a particular cohort affects the way in which ‘beginning a family’ will be experienced. Difference between racial groups can be explained by differences in socioeconomic status as well as differing cultures. Education is crucial for understanding racial differences. Furthermore, in understanding transition of adult life, social structure explains most of the racial differences in ‘settling down’, though cultural differences between whites and blacks do exist and help to explain entry into marriage.

This presentation examines the emergence and evolution of ‘progressive activism and organisation’ between 1976 and 2006 in the African township of Guguletu and the coloured township of Bonteheuwel within the City of Cape Town. Focusing on youth, student and adult involvement in struggle over thirty years it compares both how activism has changed over time (including as a result of democratisation) and how it differed between and within these two communities.

Focusing on people's positions within the state’s economic and distributional networks and the impact of historical experience of class formation on expectation it challenges views of community struggles as dualistic conflicts between classes, races or between the oppressed and forces of global capital. Instead it argues that throughout the thirty years under consideration the City’s political economy combined with changing political opportunities for activism to create complex coalitions of competing and collaborating class forces. These coalitions shaped a local activism that has been characterised by its diversity and fragmentation, as much as its unified sense of struggle and purpose.