Calendrier du 02 octobre 2024
Development Economics Seminar
Du 02/10/2024 de 16:30 à 18:00
R2-01
VOENA Alessandra (Stanford University)
Traditional Institutions in Modern Times: Dowries as Pensions When Sons Migrate
écrit avec Natalie Bau, Gaurav Khanna, Corinne Low
This paper examines whether an important cultural institution in India – dowry
– can enable male migration by increasing liquidity at the time of marriage. We
hypothesize that one cost of migration is the disruption of traditional elderly support
structures, where sons co-reside with parents and care for them in their old age.
Dowry can attenuate this cost by providing sons and parents with a liquid transfer
that eases constraints on income sharing. To test this, we collect two novel datasets
on property rights over dowry among migrants and among families of migrants. Net
transfers of dowry to a man’s parents are common. Consistent with using dowry
for income sharing, transfers occur more when sons migrate, especially when they
work in higher-earning occupations. Nationally representative data confirms that
migration rates are higher in areas with stronger historical dowry traditions. Finally,
exploiting a large-scale highway construction program, we show that men from areas
with stronger dowry traditions have a higher migration response to a reduction in
migration costs. Despite its potential negative consequences, dowry may play a role
in facilitating migration and therefore, economic development.
Economic History Seminar
Du 02/10/2024 de 12:30 à 14:00
R1-09
SARKAR Jayita ( University of Glasgow)
An Anti-Decolonization Bloc. Rössing in Apartheid Namibia
Transnational capital developed Ro?ssing Uranium Limited in South Africa-controlled apartheid Namibia in the 1960s and 1970s. While official newspapers in Windhoek claimed that Ro?ssing was an outcome of renewed hopes of a nuclear energy renaissance after the 1973 oil shock, a closer look at the archives presents a different story. As international pressure increased on the South African government to relinquish its illegitimate control of Namibia—— evident in the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion in June 1971, activism of Sean MacBride as the UN Commissioner for Namibia, and the UN Decree 1 of December 1974—— foreign mining companies increased their extractivism of Namibian natural resources, including uranium. Fearing that an independent and universal Namibia would evict them, these companies began overmining, exporting raw materials and continuing to dispossess Black labor. Ro?ssing was similar but different: it was a combination of the old and the new. Built through majority funding from the Anglo- Australian Rio Tinto Zinc along with contributions from Canadian Rio Algom, French Total Compagnie Minie?re et Nucle?aire, and South African Industrial Development Corporation, it functioned as a secretive and repressive proto-state, while also coopting the language of corporate social responsibility of the 1970s through its philanthropic Ro?ssing Foundation. It was a joint-stock company established with White capital that was closely aligned locally with the German Sudwester settler identity of Swakopmund while dispossessing Black Native laborers toiling in Arandis, Damaraland. Based on corporate and business archives (Ro?ssing, Total Energies, and National Association of Manufacturers), international archives (UNESCO, UNCN, and United Nations), and activists’ collections (Barbara Rogers papers and CANUC), this chapter presents Ro?ssing as a transimperial reactionary bloc throughout the 1970s and 1980s determined first, to prevent independence of Namibia and second, to survive unscathed should independence arrive anyway.