With stark income inequalities rooted in its dual currency economy, Cuba is taxing down high and unearned incomes, while trying to raise national productivity and official salaries through performance-related pay and labor restructuring. Such measures are portrayed as an abandonment of socialism, but in Cuba are discussed in terms of historic socialist debates about distribution and the balance of moral and material incentives at work, in a society still characterized by common ownership, social protection, and collective debate.
Reforms proposed at the Sixth Communist Party Congress represent a new, third phase of social policy in post-revolutionary Cuba. This new stage has the potential to strengthen social equity in Cuba, improve the socio-economic situation of disparate social groups, and overcome the old limitations of social policy. Yet it could also increase inequality, and at least in the short term, its predicted impacts will be contradictory and ambivalent.
Examines the extent to which publicly-listed Caribbean companies provide social and environmental disclosures, and the factors related to their disclosure practices. It is motivated by the dearth of studies of social and environmental disclosures among publicly listed Caribbean firms.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti and its aftermath have highlighted inherent but understudied transnational governance and socio-legal complexities of disaster recovery and displacement. This paper examines the key transnational governance and socio-legal issues that have arisen in the South Florida region for four distinct groups: (i) displacees and their related legal, social, cultural, and economic issues; (ii) host communities and governance, legal, and monetary complexities associated with compensation payments (e.g., to hospitals for their services to earthquake survivors); (iii) immigrants within the United States and related legalization and citizenship issues; and (iv) diaspora communities and socio-legal issues related to dual citizenship and their ongoing struggles to have a louder voice in the future of Haiti.
Over the last two decades, scholars have investigated the two-way relationship between gender inequality on the one hand, and economic development and growth on the other. Research in this area offers new ways to address the economic stagnation and crisis developing countries have experienced over the last two decades. , and in important ways, constrains economic development and growth in the Caribbean region. It further explores the endogeneity of gender inequality to the macroeconomic policy environment. The article concludes with a discussion of economic policies that can promote a win-win outcome-greater gender equality and economic development and growth.
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
323 p., Despite sustained economic growth at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Latin America and the Caribbean still faces high inequality and weak indicators of well-being among certain population groups. Women, people of African ancestry, and indigenous peoples are often at the bottom of the income distribution. The share of female-headed households rose in the past 20 years. By the beginning of the 1990s, women headed 1.2 percent of complete households (households in which both husband and wife are present) and 79.8 percent of single- head households. This book presents a regional overview of gender and ethnic disparities in labor earnings during this last turn of the century. Latin America and the Caribbean provide a rich environment for studying social inequality, because historical inequalities along gender and ethnic lines persist, despite positive indicators of economic development.
Advances in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) have led to most of the growth and wealth gains in developed economies, but developing countries such as those in the Caribbean with a dearth of technological expertise and development continue to lag behind. This commentary discusses inequalities related to the use (or unavailability) of STI from the perspective of Jamaica. The main focus of the paper is on education and Information and Communications Technology. It also looks briefly at health, employment and security.
Demonstrate how the priority of education in Cuban social policy, from its outset after the 1959 revolution, has privileged women. Statistics chart the rapid increase in educational level and attainment over the decades and the high degree of feminization of higher education and thus the skilled labor force; and today Cuba ranks among the countries with the highest indicators in the United Nations' Millennium Goals with respect to education and gender equity.
