Rebuilding Babel: finding common development solutions using cross-contextual comparisons of multidimensional well-being

• Autor(a) principal: Hull,James R.
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: Guedes,Gilvan
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista brasileira de estudos de população (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-30982013000100013
• topic: Multidimensional poverty; Amazonia; Thailand; Cross-site comparison; Grade of membership

In this paper the theoretical tradition of coping strategies and capital portfolios is used as the basis for adaption and combination of existing methodologies to analyze well-being in rural households. Special attention is given to comparisons among different contexts. First we estimate a multidimensional measurement of poverty based on fuzzy logic for two areas of rural frontiers: Nang Rong, Thailand, and Altamira, in the Amazon Basin in Brazil. To enable a cross-contextual comparison we calculated a second estimate using a subset of shared measurements in the two areas. The findings suggest that the pattern of responses on a range of numerous key variables - including education, income and demographic dependency ratio - is robust for the model specification. It is concluded that comparative generalizations, useful in formulating cost-effective public policy interventions across contexts, could be satisfactorily identified in many situations. More generically, this approach provides researchers and policymakers with a framework for understanding the interaction of contexts with the subjective construction of well-being. The understanding of this interaction is useful for distinguishing stable corollaries of poverty from those that are volatile across contexts.