Economic and Social Security 1993 -
The Centre’s Economic and Social Security programme began in 1993 and has encompassed a broad range of research topics. These have included international economic institutions, skills, displacement and resettlement, education, unemployment, child labour, barter and human security.
A meeting on Human Security took place on 9 February 2000 at Trinity College, Cambridge. Participants included Sudhir Anand (St Catherine's College, Oxford), Lincoln Chen (Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies), Yusuke Dan (Tokai University, Japan), Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)), Thandika Mkandawire (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)), Emma Rothschild, Susan Sechler (Rockefeller Foundation), and Amartya Sen (Trinity College, Cambridge).
The Centre invited James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, to give a paper in Cambridge. The talk, entitled A New Framework for Development, took place at Trinity College, Cambridge on 4 March 1999, and was chaired by Amartya Sen. The lecture was attended by several policy-makers, as well as academics and students from Cambridge and other universities. Guests included Mary Robinson (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), David Archer (Action Aid), Mats Karlsson (State Secretary for International Development Cooperation, Sweden), Penina Mlama (Forum For African Women Educationalists (FAWE)), Alastair Newton (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK), Steve Packer (Department for International Development, UK), Lisbet Palme (Swedish Committee for UNICEF and Organisation of African Unity Panel Investigating the Genocide in Rwanda), and Cream Wright (Commonwealth Secretariat, UK).
Following a meeting co-organised with UNICEF in 1998, a second meeting on Basic Education was held in March 1999 in King’s College, Cambridge. There were three sessions: Education and Public Action; Inequality and Education and Reforming Education in Africa. Speakers and participants included Mats Karlsson, Penina Mlama, Lisbet Palme, Emma Rothschild, Amartya Sen and Elaine Wolfensohn (World Bank).
A major international conference was held on Barter in Post-Socialist Societies in Churchill College, Cambridge on 13-14 December 1998. The conference was coordinated by Caroline Humphrey (King’s College, Cambridge), Alena Ledeneva (New Hall, Cambridge) and Paul Seabright (Faculty of Economics, Cambridge). Participants included economists, anthropologists and sociologists from Russia, Canada, Germany, UK and USA. Papers were presented by David Anderson (University of Alberta) on Surrogate Currencies and the Wild Market in Central Siberia, Michael Burawoy (University of California) on Russia’s Real Economy: Barter and Involution in the Boreal Construction Industry, Kenneth Burdett (University of Essex) on Cigarette Money, Simon Clarke (University of Warwick) on Household Survival in a Non-Monetary Market Economy, Simon Commander (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and Christian Mumssen (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) on A Survey of Barter in the Russian Federation, Caroline Humphrey on How is Barter Done? The Social Relations of Barter in Provincial Russia, Barry W. Ickes (Pennsylvania State University) on Demonetization in Russia and the Virtual Economy, Rachel E. Kranton (University of Maryland) on Expanding Markets, Specialization, and Reciprocal Exchange, Alena Ledeneva on Shadow Barter: Economic Necessity or Economic Crime, Alena Ledeneva and Paul Seabright on Barter in Post-Socialist Societies: What Does it Look Like and Why Does it Matter?, Alaina Lemon (University of Michigan) on Signs of Mistrust: Gypsies, Barter, Money and Exclusion, Dalia Marin (University of Munich) on Barter in Transition Economies, Disorganisation and Financial Collapse, Nikolai Serene-Charkov (University of Alberta) on Bear Skins and Macaroni: The Life of Goods at the Social Margins of a Siberian Collective, and by David Woodruff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)) on Prospects for Monetary Consolidation in Russia after the August Crisis. A website for the conference was designed by administrative officer Amy Price.
The Centre organised a roundtable discussion on German Politics and the German Economy which took place on 15 October 1998 at Trinity College, Cambridge. Participants included Bernhard Fulda (St John’s College, Cambridge), John Grimond (The Economist), Emma Rothschild, Adam Tooze (Faculty of History, Cambridge) and Paul Warde (Pembroke College, Cambridge). The meeting preceded a trip by Mr Grimond to Germany to carry out a survey for The Economist, which was published in February 1999.
In July 1998, a meeting was held in Cambridge on Basic Education as a Political Issue in collaboration with the Geneva office of UNICEF. Jean Drze (Delhi School of Economics) presented the findings of the PROBE (Public Report on Basic Education) survey, which he had worked on with the Centre’s support in 1996. In the meeting chaired by the Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF, Stephen Lewis, participants discussed what could be learnt from the historical examples of child labour in European countries. Presentations were given by Jane Humphries (Newnham College, Cambridge), Emma Rothschild and UNICEF participants. The findings of the meeting contributed to the 1999 UNICEF State of the World’s Children report.
In July and August 1997, Noala Skinner (Centre for History and Economics) worked as a consultant for UNICEF Geneva Regional Office. She focused her research on an initiative towards the eventual elimination of child labour, looking in particular at the adoption of a corporate code of conduct. She drafted a report, The Ten Pledges to End Exploitative Child Labour, to supply an ethical and conceptual framework for the use of the UNICEF National Committees in formulating codes of conduct to be used by industries.
In 1997, Stephan Klasen began a research project on unemployment in South Africa in collaboration with Ingrid Woolard from the University of Port Elizabeth. The research, supported by the British Department for International Development and undertaken for the South African Department of Finance, attempted to uncover the underlying causes of high unemployment in rural areas of South Africa. The research involved the analysis of household data as well as field research and the first results of the research were discussed at a seminar in South Africa in April 1998. A second paper which examined the consistency of employment and unemployment statistics has been published in Development Southern Africa 16: 3-35 (1999). Professor Klasen and Dr Woolard continued to work on this topic and subsequently incorporated the findings from a recent census and two further household surveys in their analyses.
The Economic Security Programme supported several studies on primary education in India, and initiated several field-based studies on the schooling system to contribute towards the completion of a major report on the state of basic education in India. In late 1996, Jean Drze and Shiva Kumar (UNICEF) cooperated with a team of researchers based at the Centre for Development Economics and elsewhere to organise a large-scale survey of schooling in rural India. The survey covered 188 villages in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Himchal Pradesh. In each village, all the schooling facilities were surveyed, and a random sample of twelve households were interviewed. The survey focused primarily on the causes of educational deprivation in rural India. Preliminary results of the survey were presented in a major article published in India Today in October 1997, which focused on the respective roles of parental indifference, child labour and low schooling quality as causes of educational deprivation in rural India.
From 1996, Sergei Panarin (Russian Academy of Sciences) focused his research on ethnic migration in association with the Common Security Forum. In 2000 a book, Migratsiya i bezopanost’ v Rossiyi (Migration and Security in Russia) co-authored by Dr Panarin and Galina Vitkvoskaya, was published in Moscow by Interdialect.
In July 1994, a two-day conference on Skills and Training was organised by Paul Ryan (Faculty of Economics, Cambridge) and held at King’s College, Cambridge. There were six sessions: Apprenticeship in Historical Perspective; Skills, Contracts, Guild Organisation and Pre-industrial Apprenticeship; Historical and Economic Accounts of Internal Labour Markets; Gender and Skill; Collective Organisation, Labour Markets and Training in Twentieth Century Great Britain and International Comparisons. Participants included David Ashton (University of Leicester), Marian Bartlett (Faculty of History, Oxford University), Chris Brooks (University of Durham), William Brown (Faculty of Economics, Cambridge), Shirley Dex (University of Keele), Stephen Epstein (LSE), Howard Gospel (University of Kent), Francis Green (University of Leicester), Jane Humphries, Peter Howlett (LSE), David Lee (University of Essex), Bill Lazonick (MIT), Charles More (University of Cheltenham), Margaret Pelling (University of Oxford), Mary O’Sullivan (Harvard University), Sian Reynolds (University of Stirling), Emma Rothschild, Mike Savage (University of Keele), Keith Snell (University of Leicester), Michael Sonenscher (King’s College, Cambridge), David Soskice (University of Berlin), Margaret Stevens (University of Oxford), Wolfgang Streeck (University of Wisconsin), and Jonathan Zeitlin (University of Wisconsin).
In April 1994, a meeting was held at King’s College, Cambridge on Why aren't Universal Banks Universal? A presentation was given by Ben Polak (Harvard University) and Sandeep Baliga (King’s College, Cambridge), and comments were made by Jeremy Edwards (St John’s College, Cambridge). Other participants included Tony Atkinson (Churchill College, Cambridge), Chris Doyle (Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge), Christopher Harris (Nuffield College, Oxford), Sarah Hirschman (Princeton University), Jane Humphries, Sheilagh Ogilvie (Trinity College, Cambridge), Emma Rothschild, Paul Seabright and Gareth Stedman Jones.
In January 1994, a project on Displacement and Resettlement in India began, coordinated by Jean Drze and Shiva Kumar (UNICEF). A meeting was held in December 1993 to consider the lessons of the Narmada Valley Dam project. In 1995 the programme completed its work with a three-day workshop on Displacement and Resettlement in the Narmada Valley held at the Centre for Development Economics in Delhi, India. The proceedings were published in 1996 by Sage, New Delhi, as The Dam and the Nation: Displacement and Resettlement in the Narmada Valley.
In August 1993, a colloquium on Democracy and International Economic Institutions was held jointly with the Commission on Global Governance at King’s College, Cambridge. The meeting addressed the new political questions raised by the dramatically increased role of international economic organisations in domestic governance. Introductory remarks were made by Emma Rothschild and Peter Hansen (CGG), and a paper on Good Government was presented by Geoffrey Hawthorn (Clare Hall, Cambridge) and Paul Seabright. Other participants included James Cornford (Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)), John Dunn (King’s College, Cambridge), Mats Karlsson, Onora O’Neill (Newnham College, Cambridge), Amartya Sen and Carl Tham (SIDA).