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SAGA Research Proposal
Summary
Even though the debate on adjustment policy has been heated, few people now doubt that a sound macroeconomic environment is important for growth and poverty reduction. Nevertheless, we believe that focusing on "top-down" macroeconomic and sectoral issues alone obscures a deeper truth, which is becoming clear to an increasing number of researchers and policy makers: macroeconomic reforms, while important, are only part of the basis for growth and poverty reduction. What is missing is a "bottom-up" perspective which starts from the capabilities of individuals, households, and communities — their productivities, their vulnerabilities, their institutions, and their environment — and which considers in detail how economic and social development can and do play out at the ground level. That is the perspective that we propose to take in our research. Our aim is to understand further the economic, social, institutional, and natural constraints that keep Africa’s poor from prospering in the context of growth-oriented reforms.
While there are many structural constraints that hold the poor back, we focus on four: education; health and nutrition; risk, vulnerability and poverty dynamics; and empowerment and institutions. Our selection of these four themes reflects that without access for all Africans to education and health services, growth will be low and inequitable. Africa lags behind on both counts, even compared to other countries with similar income levels, and the social indicators are not improving at a rate comparable to other developing countries (IMF et al. 2000). Similarly, even in the best of policy environments, Africans, and especially Africa's poor, live in environments characterized by extreme risk and vulnerability (Collier and Gunning 1999). Without access to markets and institutions that help the poor protect themselves against the vagaries of nature and of the market place, adverse events will have not only the obvious immediate effects on poverty, but potentially devastating indirect effects through behavioral responses, such as pulling children out of school or degrading environmental resources, which worsen poverty far into the future. Poverty traps, the idea that one "can’t get ahead for falling behind," are a reality of poor people's lives in Africa (Barrett and Carter 2001). Finally, if the poor do not have access to local and national institutions that allow their voices to be heard, if the poor are not empowered to act in their own interests, then policy making will inevitably turn away from their interests (Narayan et.al. 2000a; Narayan et.al. 2000b, Stern 2000).
A bottom-up approach naturally invites complementary research from the social sciences other than economics. While we maintain a firm foundation in economics, we will emphasize active collaborative with related social science disciplines, particularly relationships with anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologist. Our research approach promotes interaction between these scholars and the consequent benefits that multidisciplinary work will provide to our ground-level analysis of bottom-up growth.
Many of the topics relevant to our key development theme require dynamic analyses. Although economic growth and poverty reduction are inherently dynamic concepts, the existing debate on policy reform and poverty has paid scant attention to the dynamics of income, wealth, and human development. In part this reflects a lack of the necessary micro data from Africa, but this barrier is now significantly reduced as several panel datasets have become available in the past decade. Understanding these dynamics will lead to a structural foundation for growth and development at a micro level.
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