https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Utility Analysis and the Consumption Function: An Interpretation of Cross-Section Data

“Ill being” and “ill health” is a multidimensional term covering not only disease but also other dimensions such as hunger, exclusion, isolation, insecurity and powerlessness. This ill health can consequently prevent individuals from realizing their full potential. Good health, in contrast, is identified as a vital component of a good quality of life. That is why access to good health is recognized as a basic human need and a fundamental human right. The WHO‘s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” applies to all human beings regardless of age gender, nationality and culture. Inequalities and deficiencies in health thus affect the well being of an individual and welfare of a society as a whole.

Health and Nutrition

BACKGROUND: The independent evaluation of the Cameroonian antiretroviral therapy (ART) Programme which reached one of the highest coverage in the eligible HIV-infected population (58%) in Sub-Saharan Africa offered the opportunity to assess ART outcomes in the context of the decentralization of HIV care delivery. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional survey (EVAL ANRS 12-116 2007) was carried out in a random sample of 3151 HIV-positive patients (response rate 90%) attending 27 treatment centres at the different level of the healthcare delivery (central provincial and district) as well as in the exhaustive sample of doctors in charge of HIV care in these centres (response rate 92% n = 97). Multivariate two-level analyses were conducted to assess the impact of the level of healthcare delivery on CD4 cell gains since initiation of treatment and adherence to treatment in the subsample of patients who were ART-treated for 6 months or more (n = 1985). RESULTS: District treatment centres were characterized by more limited technical and human resources but a lower workload. ART-treated patients followed up in these centres had significantly lower socioeconomic status. After adjustment for other explanatory factors immunological improvement was similar in patients followed up at the central and district level whereas adherence to ART was better both at provincial and district levels. CONCLUSION: Success in scaling-up access to ART in Cameroon has been facilitated by decentralization of the healthcare system. Long-term sustainability urgently implies better integration of this HIV-targeted programme in the global healthcare reform of financing mechanisms management of human resources and drug procurement systems.

Scaling up access to antiretroviral treatment for HIV infection: the impact of decentralization of healthcare delivery in Cameroon.

This paper studies the decomposition of poverty changes in Cameroon. Specifically, it reviews theoretical frameworks for growth--redistribution decomposition analyses, presents the data and poverty measures and estimates the growth--redistribution components of changes in measured poverty by the Shapley value-based approach using Cameroon's household surveys. By all the P-sub-α class of measures, poverty increased significantly between 1984 and 1996. The growth components overaccounted for the increase, although shifts in national, rural and semi-urban distributions marginally mitigated the worse effects on the population. A decline in mean incomes as well as adverse distributional shifts contributed to a significant increase in urban poverty during the same period. These findings corroborate the general information in the literature that growth effects tend to dominate the effects of changes in the distribution of income. These results illustrate the potential contribution of distributionally neutral growth in household incomes to poverty alleviation in Cameroon. Although redistribution also has an important role to play, it should be accepted that there must be severe limits to what can be achieved by growth neutral redistribution. Growth in household incomes appears more likely to be essential for long-term poverty reduction and will be more effective if poverty alleviation programmes are targeted disproportionately in favour of rural and semi-urban areas. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Growth, Redistribution and Poverty Changes in Cameroon: A Shapley Decomposition Analysis

This paper reviews theoretical frameworks for sectoral decomposition and assesses the within- and between-sector contributions to changes in aggregate poverty in Cameroon informed by the Shapley Value decomposition rule. Between 1984 and 1996 poverty remained a rural phenomenon in Cameroon. It became more widespread, deeper and severer in both rural and urban areas, but more so in urban than rural areas. While the within-sector effects disproportionately accounted for the increase in poverty in the period 1984–96, the between-sector contributions in both rural and semi-urban areas played a mitigating role on the worse effects of the increase in poverty. These findings infer the potential positive feedback effects of migration such as remittances, and/or increases in rural consumption expenditure in the face of rural underemployment, as effective strategies used by migrants to lift their families and villages out of the worse effects of poverty. The implication of this interpretation is that decision-makers need to better understand the factors that push or pull potential migrants. Rural–urban mobility could, therefore, be viewed as a strategy used by households to moderate the worse effects of poverty and a vector of shared growth. The implications for public policy, in terms of open unemployment and associated social and insecurity problems at the receiving end, point to the wisdom of addressing the push-factors via targeting more in favour of rural areas.

Structure of Sectoral Decomposition of Aggregate Poverty Changes in Cameroon

This paper identifies and decomposes sources that explain household economic well-being in Cameroon. It uses the 2001 and 2007 Cameroon Household Consumption Surveys, synthetic variables constructed by the multiple correspondence analysis and econometric approaches that correct for potential endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity in a step-wise manner and simultaneously. Sources of well-being that explain poverty are then decomposed into growth and redistribution components. Variables that significantly explain household economic well-being are education, health, household size, fraction of active household members, working in the formal sector and area of residence. Decomposition analysis shows that the growth components largely account for changes in deprivation in terms of each regressed-income source. With the exception of the income source education, redistribution components slowed down progress in alleviating shortfall in other regressed-income sources. These results have implications for public interventions that affect education and health for all, labour market participation and infrastructure development.

Determinants of Well‐being and Poverty Changes in Cameroon: 2001–2007

This paper evaluates the determinants of borrowing, effects of borrowing on economic well-being, and potential disparity in responses by sources of well-being, location and gender, while controlling for other correlates. The 2001 Cameroon household consumption survey and a range of survey-based econometric methods that purge parameter estimates of potential intra-cluster correlation, endogeneity and sample selection biases were used. Access to credit/borrowing is strongly associated with household economic well-being irrespective of source of well-being. Rural well-being is significally more contingent on credit access than urban well-being. Male-headed households rely more significantly on credit access to enhance well-being than their female counterparts. Higher levels of education associate more significantly with well-being enhancement than lower levels, more so for female-headed households than their male counterparts. To sustain the impact of credit on well-being, accompanying measures — availability of sufficient funds, quality services by lenders, physical infrastructures, healthcare and training — are required. These findings are useful in the context of economic recovery and poverty reduction under the current situation in Cameroon, where financial intermediation is limited and penetration is shallow. To better serve the needs of the economically active poor, a microfinance delivery model is proposed.

Household Economic Well-being: Response to Micro-Credit Access in Cameroon

This study investigates gender wage differentials using pooled 2005 and 2010 Cameroon labour force surveys. Decomposition of the returns to endowment component reveals that men were overpaid, while women were underpaid on the average and across percentiles. Education, hours worked, agricultural employment and urban residence were contributing in that order in widening the gender wage-gap in terms of endowments, male advantage and female disadvantage. As a policy option, reducing human capital and labour market constraints that provoke the differential pricing of endowments held by men and women, and the differential access to endowments between them should be considered.

Francis Menjo Baye

Papers

Growth, Redistribution and Poverty Changes in Cameroon: A Shapley Decomposition Analysis

Structure of Sectoral Decomposition of Aggregate Poverty Changes in Cameroon

Determinants of Well‐being and Poverty Changes in Cameroon: 2001–2007

Household Economic Well-being: Response to Micro-Credit Access in Cameroon

Wage differentials in Cameroon: a gendered analysis