ABSTRACT
Sites in four countries were selected for the research: Uganda, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe in Africa and the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. Each country offered a very different set of circumstances within which to consider the operation of labour markets and effectiveness of poverty reduction policies. The broad differences at the time of the research (2001-3) included the following features. From the mid-1990s, Zimbabwe has suffered economic implosion: drought has severely affected agricultural production, macroeconomic policies have created instability, inflation has been rampant and land reallocation has added to general uncertainty. People have been forced down a route of retrograde retrenchment. In Ethiopia, the declining world price of coffee from 1999 impacted on job availability and rural incomes, and land reforms intended to improve the lot of the rural poor may have had the consequence of worsening the position of those left without a land allocation. At the time of the research, Uganda presented a more encouraging picture with general economic growth in the 1990s, a decline in poverty and an increase in living standards. Particular elements in this picture included favourable coffee prices during the 1990s (until 1999), while ‘households with higher education, more initial assets (land), better health and better access to infrastructure (electricity) and location (distance to municipality) were far less likely to fall into poverty’ (Christiaensen et al.: 14). India is a rather different case. Here markets are more developed, macroeconomic instability is less evident and waged labour is commonly undertaken. Nevertheless, a third of the population was still living in poverty (three out of four in rural areas) in 2000, and there seemed to have been a reduction in the rate of decline in poverty in the 1990s (Government of India 2000a: 1-2). We now look at these country differences in more detail.
