bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Informal work in urban Mexico
Authors: Duval-Hernández Robert 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter presents a descriptive analysis of the labour market in urban Mexico, focusing on its heterogeneity across various employment status groups. It also studies the preferences of workers for formal wage-employment. About half of the employed population are formally employed, almost one-third are in lower-tier informal jobs, and the rest are in upper-tier informal jobs. Most formal workers are wage-employees. In contrast, one in three informal workers are self-employed. There is a clear job ladder and earnings fall as one moves down its rungs. Also, there is little employment mobility at the top (formal) and bottom (lower tier) of this ladder over the course of a year. Finally, almost 80 per cent of informal workers declare it preferable to be employed in a formal job. This suggests that many of the urban informal are in this type of employment because of a lack of better options.
Informal–formal workers’ transition in Nigeria
Authors: Folawewo Abiodun O. , Orija Olusegun A. 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This study evaluates the effects of the informal sector on Nigerian workers’ livelihoods and analyses workers’ transitions within the informal sector and between informal and formal employment. A binary logit model is applied to General Household Survey panel data for the periods 2010–2011, 2012–2013, and 2015–2016. We find that informal employment has the greatest impact on workers’ livelihoods in terms of earnings. Results also indicate the existence of a high level of dynamic transition of workers within different types of informal employment. Our results further indicate that both self-employed and wage-employed informal workers are likely to transit to formal employment, the likelihood being higher for the upper-tier informal wage-employed. While informally employed workers have a very high chance of transiting to formal employment, formal workers have a much lower chance of transiting to informal employment. The policy implication of our results is the need to create better working conditions for informal workers.
The evolution of vulnerable employment in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia
Authors: AlAzzawi Shireen , Hlasny Vladimir 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
Youths in the Middle East and North Africa face the highest unemployment rates in the world. Those who are employed are pushed to accept informal-sector jobs that are insecure, unsafe, and lack non-wage benefits. Precarious employment is pervasive among lower socio-economic groups, leading to the perpetuation of misery across generations. Understanding employment outcomes therefore requires a broad focus encompassing the access to decent work, the evolution in this access over time, and the initial conditions. The authors analyse the static nature of vulnerable employment—especially youth unemployment and informality—and workers’ transitions to decent work using multinomial logistic regressions and recent labour market panel surveys for Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia. The authors find growing trends of vulnerable employment, particularly for youth cohorts. Especially in Egypt and Tunisia, children of poorer and less-educated parents start out in vulnerable jobs and are unlikely to ever attain formal employment. Wealth effects follow them throughout their careers.
How to transform informal work and livelihoods?
Authors: Fields Gary S. , Gindling T. H. , Sen Kunal , Danquah Michael , Schotte Simone 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
In this concluding chapter, the editors present the summary of lessons learnt from the 11 case studies in the book. In addition, a comparative perspective on the distribution of workers, as well as the job ladder between work status groups and transitions between work status groups, are discussed. The chapter offers some policy options suggested by the chapters. Some of the policy recommendations include raising the earnings of lower-tier self-employed workers, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa; creating more formal jobs for those down the job ladder to move into, especially in countries like China, Indonesia, and Mexico; providing those at the bottom of the job ladder with more human capital, particularly in the six Latin American countries; and formalizing the upper-tier informal group and increasing enforcement of labour protections, particularly in China and Latin American countries.
A defence of cellular agriculture
Authors: Milburn Josh 
Published: April 2023

AbstractCellular agriculture includes both growing meat from animal cells (cultivated meat) and genetically modifying non-animal cells to produce animal products (precision fermentation, including cultivated milk). It represents a major potential route to animal-rights-respecting animal products, and, thus, non-vegan food systems in the zoopolis. This chapter reviews and responds to challenges to cellular agriculture, noting that many of the challenges to plant-based meat canvassed in Chapter 3 also apply. First, it addresses challenges to cultivated meat: that it contains animal ingredients; that it rests upon historical injustice; and that it reifies a moral hierarchy through creating animal (but not human) meat. Second, it addresses challenges to precision fermentation, focusing on cultivated milk: that milk is not food; that precision fermentation involves genetic engineering, which we should reject; and that precision fermentation does not require animals, meaning the end of many human/animal interactions.
Eminence of Models
Authors: Zhu Mu 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter uses examples from recent research to elucidate the statistical way of doing data science, and highlight the eminent role played by probability models. Students will see how probability models are used to describe the data generating process, and why a key question for statistics is about how to estimate various unobservable quantities in the model from the observable ones. The research being featured has to do with extending the basic stochastic block model for static friendship data in order to model dynamic communication data over time, and further adapting it to analyse basketball games, shedding light on what a unique player Lebron James is.
Building Vocabulary
Authors: Zhu Mu 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter builds the basic vocabulary for speaking the language of probability, from some fundamental laws to the notion of random variables and their distributions. Topics include: Venn diagrams, and de Morgan’s laws; conditional probability, and independence; the law of total probability, and Bayes law; discrete, and continuous random variables; expectation, variance, and Chebyshev’s inequality. To focus on main ideas, only three specific distributions are mentioned: binomial, uniform, and normal.
Tests of Significance
Authors: Zhu Mu 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter addresses another inferential task, known as the test of significance, which also requires explicit considerations of uncertainty. Key concepts, such as the significance level and the p-value, are introduced, but the main message is the close connection between significance testing and interval estimation. Some existing challenges are also discussed—e.g., multiple testing, and ways to lessen its negative effect, such as the Bonferroni correction and the Benjamini-Hockberg procedure.
Tandas and Cooperativas
Authors: Medina Patricia Campos , Nava Erika , Aramendi Sol 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
Using a multidisciplinary approach, this chapter examines how Tandas (ROSCA) and cooperativas (cooperatives) are part of a system of social purpose business arrangements of mutual aid and group economics that assist in the integration of precarious immigrants to the United States. Historical political dynamics have set legal restrictions limiting the legal migration of people from Latin America to the United States; hence, vulnerable working-class Latin American immigrants entering the United States to work arrive into racialized economic environments where they are forced to function as full participants in society via direct engagement in the informal and gig economy. This chapter examines two case studies of indigenous Latin American immigrants organizing their social capital to bring together economic resources, in the form of formal community worker-owned cooperativas or under informal financial arrangements called Tandas that help them survive and integrate into local communities. Cooperativas and Tandas support community-based entrepreneurship that aids undocumented immigrants in their economic survival and integration. Immigrants of indigenous backgrounds have a long history of pooling economic resources to finance their activities outside the formal economy. Theories of immigrant integration combined with an analysis of racial capitalist theory help explain how capitalism and racism intertwined create an environment of limited resources that truncate social and economic mobility for poor Black and brown immigrants entering local US urban communities. Faced with limited options for economic survival, these immigrants tap into their collectives and cultural support systems to survive and develop their livelihoods in American business and society.
Maroons, Rastas, and Ganja Cooperatives
Authors: Edmonds Kevin 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
While the majority of literature on cooperatives tends to focus on cases operating in legal settings, this chapter examines the history and contribution of illegal cannabis cooperatives in the Eastern Caribbean islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent. This chapter argues that cooperatives were forged out of economic necessity, due to limited options for employment and income generation after trade liberalization devastated the Caribbean banana trade. Existing alongside more unequal structures of production rooted in a sharecropping model, the cannabis cooperatives provide an example of collective and community responses to economic hardship, rooted in longstanding traditions of resistance, from the Maroons to Rastafari. Unlike past illegal economic activities, the cannabis economy, in responding to widespread unemployment and catering to regional as well as local needs, represents a departure from the plantation model of the past.
Fighting to Preserve Black Life and Land Rights
Authors: Silva Silvane 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter shows that quilombos, which is a cooperative institution, have saved Afro Brazilians from business exclusion. To resist slavery, African-enslaved people escaped and to this day the quilombola system continues and is under attack by the state. The residents of nearly 5,000 Black rural Brazilian communities trace their lineage back to the historical quilombos. The Black social economy tied to the ideas of Buen Vivir are a way of ensuring that the self-organization of quilombola communities reveals a connection with other Black diaspora groups in the Americas. Last but not least is the crucial role of Black women in the organization and leardership of contemporary quilombos.
Introduction
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter introduces readers to current medical and political developments in the realms of prenatal genetic testing and selective abortion to illustrate how these developments have influenced whether pregnant women will choose to undergo prenatal testing and what decision they will make based on the information they acquire from the results, especially in cases following a positive Down syndrome diagnosis. Moreover, we also enter into ongoing academic debates surrounding these issues in order to situate our analysis within the broader literatures in political thought, feminist theory, and critical disability studies. After expressing our joint allegiance to the movements for reproductive justice and disability rights, we delineate the core premise of the book: without structural changes to current ableist medical practices, neoliberal social welfare policies, and pernicious cultural norms, prenatal genetic testing technologies can too easily advance a liberal eugenic agenda at the expense of women’s reproductive autonomy and disability rights.
Autonomy in Political Theory
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter provides the normative grounding for the book through a brief survey of how autonomy has been conceptualized, valued, and politicized in the Western canon of political thought. Traditionally defined as an individual’s capacity for self-rule, autonomy has been criticized from various schools of thought. Feminist theorists and critical disability scholars have been especially critical of its associations with unrealistic masculinist and ableist conceptions of citizenship. We share these concerns, but our goal in this chapter is to rethink autonomy without giving it up. We do so by endorsing a relational conception of autonomy—one that foregrounds socialization and takes stock of how oppressive social relations negatively impact on the exercise of autonomy in practice—within a perfectionist liberal framework. Ultimately, we show how a relational understanding of reproductive autonomy committed to perfectionist liberal politics is descriptively accurate, is normatively desirable, and has more political purchase than its mainstream liberal predecessor.
The Healthcare System
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter examines barriers to reproductive autonomy within medical institutions through the lens of Miranda Fricker’s notion of “testimonial justice.” Medical professionals bear professional obligations to counsel patients with accurate, comprehensive information—delivered in a clear and non-directive manner—in order to facilitate patient-informed consent. While many physicians attempt to satisfy this responsibility, numerous studies have demonstrated how ableist biases permeate medical institutions. Such biases often result in physicians offering patients unduly negative quality-of-life assessments that are at odds with the positive testimony of people with Down syndrome and their family members. Moreover, physicians have legal incentives to recommend termination in order to mitigate the risk of wrongful birth litigation. Among other suggestions, we encourage federal oversight of the acquisition and dissemination of information that prospective parents receive following a positive diagnosis of Down syndrome to ensure that reproductive decisions are well informed with balanced and up-to-date information.
Conclusion
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This concluding chapter analyses the Covid-19 pandemic and how it exposed and accelerated problems that we have identified throughout the book. In the starkest terms, the pandemic revealed the dangers of congregate care settings, the shortcomings of the privatization of care, and the depths of ableist attitudes. Prospective parents weighing their options following a positive fetal diagnosis of Down syndrome are doing so in a tumultuous time that has been particularly harrowing for people with disabilities and their families. Despite persistent challenges, we remain hopeful that the crisis can jolt Americans into taking disability rights seriously in an interconnected world. The groundswell of momentum among social justice organizations, coupled with renewed calls for structural change in the halls of power, gives us reason to hope that we can rebuild a more just society where the choice to bring a child with Down syndrome into the world is respected and supported.
The British Model of Capitalism and the Politics of Growth
Authors: Clift Ben 
Published: April 2023

AbstractFocusing on Britain, this chapter delves into the politics of economic growth—a perennial question of political economy that is often discussed in the technocratic governance sphere in dry, technical, and depoliticizing terms. The chapter demonstrates how different views about the most desirable model of capitalism, including about the preferred mode of state intervention in the economy, underpin economic growth debates and imply their inherently political character. Comparative political economy debates about growth models and varieties of capitalism thus nourish and shape the politics of growth. Outlining competing constructions of economic reason, the chapter compares and contrasts four different theories of economic growth—neoclassical, Schumpeterian, Neo-Keynesian and ‘new’ growth theory approaches—and explores their relationship with stakeholder and shareholder models of capitalism. Charting the development and idiosyncrasies of a British ‘Anglo-Liberal’ financed-based growth model, it asks questions about the efficiency, stability, and coherence of growth models. It further places the political economy of UK capitalism in the context of the world economy, and considers how the politics of growth connects with deep-rooted anxieties about Britain’s place in the world. It considers how these anxieties play out in relation to Britain’s place in Europe, competing constructions of free trade, and the politics of Brexit. Previously dominant understandings of Britian’s place within liberal world order have been challenged in recent years by the Brexit vote, which called for the nostalgic renewal of an economically mighty ‘Global Britain’, but led the Office for Budget Responsibility to significantly downgrade the nation’s economic prospects.
COVID Changes Everything
Authors: Clift Ben 
Published: April 2023

AbstractThis chapter explores how the 2020 outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic radically shifted the parameters of ‘sound’ economic policy, and grappled with the limits of economic forecasting in the face of radical uncertainty. Situating the pandemic within Britain’s broader recent history of intersecting economic shocks—including the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and Brexit—the chapter uncovers how sustained crisis and uncertainty have caused the Office for Budget Responsibility to significantly rethink how it evaluates, models, and forecasts the UK economy. While the GFC raised questions about the potential stabilizing role of active fiscal policy, the pandemic consolidated the case in favour of large-scale state intervention, designed to stave off much worse economic outcomes. Amid COVID, the OBR eschewed assumptions of smooth cyclical adjustments in preference for economic models that gave great weight to potentially non-linear dynamics such as deep slumps, economic ‘scarring’, negative spirals, and ‘doom loops’, and the necessity of economic policy responses to them. This paved the way for the OBR’s more positive evaluation of the ‘battlefield medicine’ of the government’s unprecedented bold and fiscally activist COVID responses and interventions. Showing how COVID shifted the tectonic plates of fiscal rectitude and responsibility, the chapter illustrates how economic thinking and forecasting practices are buffeted—and potentially transformed—by historical conjuncture, crisis, and unexpected events. The changing politics of post-COVID UK fiscal rectitude are indicated by the OBR’s rethinking of fiscal space, and its views on the economy’s equilibrating properties in what might be a more crisis-prone ‘new normal’.
Wind of Change? Dioscorus and the See of St Mark
Authors: Menze Volker L. 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
When Cyril died, also the rule of the Cyrillian family clan in the Church of Alexandria ended, as already Cyril’s uncle Theophilus (385–412) had been patriarch of Alexandria. Cyril’s nephew Athanasius wanted to continue the family tradition, but the majority of clerics voted for the archdeacon Dioscorus as Cyril’s successor. The chapter discusses the hierarchy within the church chapter, particularly the role of the archdeacon. As archdeacon Dioscorus was a trusted senior cleric, and the majority of Alexandrian clergy hoped that Dioscorus would improve the financial governance of the chapter which suffered from the embezzlement committed by the Cyrillian family clan. Not much is known of Dioscorus’ tenure before 448, but one of his letters to archimandrite Shenoute of Atripe shows that the patriarch was fighting Origenism. Overall, Dioscorus appears to have been a popular bishop in Alexandria and within Egypt. The election of Dioscorus against the Cyrillian party might also have given the dyophysite near eastern bishops hope for a wind of change in Alexandria’s Christological politics. Dioscorus, however, proved to be a faithful theological disciple of his predecessor Cyril.
Ethics of Selective Restriction of Liberty in a Pandemic
Authors: Savulescu Julian 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
Liberty-restricting measures are basic measures in combatting any pandemic. But whose liberty should be restricted? One standard response in public health ethics is to appeal to the “least restrictive alternative” necessary to achieve a public health goal. But in practice greater restriction of liberty can lead to greater control of the pandemic and save more lives, though with increasing burdens to others. Liberty restriction is thus a question of the distribution of benefits and burdens in a population, a question of distributive justice. This chapter argues that in some pandemics, such as COVID-19, it may be a more proportionate restriction of liberty to restrict the liberty of certain groups rather than the population as a whole. Two arguments were given in the COVID-19 pandemic for liberty restriction: protection of the vulnerable, and protection of the health service. These are, however, more fundamentally issues about distributive justice. The chapter explores how several approaches to distributive justice can support the differential restriction of liberty. In addition, it argues that the commonly accepted justification for liberty restrictions (that liberty restrictions may be justified to prevent direct harm to others) can be overly simplistic, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic; that where risk groups are more likely to utilize limited health resources, they pose an indirect threat to others that warrants coercion; and that there should be a side-constraint on justice of non-maleficence. The chapter addresses the issue of whether selective restriction of liberty constitutes unjust discrimination and proposes an algorithm for making decisions.
Introduction to the Digital Economy Kit
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
This chapter provides background on the Digital Economy Kit, sets out the impetus for the project, summarizes the theoretical framework and methodology, and outlines the structure for the book as a whole. The introduction demonstrates how digital transformation is affecting emerging economies, changing how goods and services are produced, consumed, and exchanged. It describes government efforts to encourage, innovate, and regulate these activities, and how new technologies might affect the broader nature of ‘development’. This chapter briefly introduces the design and process of the Digital Economy Kit, the partner countries in which it was trialled, and the criteria for their inclusion. It then describes the book’s intended audience and goals, what lessons can be drawn from the pilots, and caveats to keep in mind. Next, it outlines the political economy theoretical framework through which these lessons are interpreted, and reviews the structure of the subsequent chapters.