Showing papers in "Development and Change in 1986"

New York City: Economic Restructuring and Immigration

Abstract: The spatial and technical transformation of economic activity over the last 15 years has contributed new or accentuated forms of differentiation among and within cities. This paper investigates how this has affected New York until not long ago a major light-manufacturing center exporting to the rest of the US and the world and for many decades an important center of finance. The erosion of its manufacturing base the loss of corporate headquarters all capped by a financial crisis in the mid-1970s led analysts to proclaim that the city had entered a phase of irreversible decline. Linking immigration with economic restructuring provides the theoretical and empirical elements to ground the analysis of the current immigration not only in general push-and-pull factors but also in the formation of "world cities". The 1st section of this article examines how current processes of spatial social and technical transformation in the global economy shape the economic base of cities and contribute to differences among cities; the 2nd section examines how the new economic trends in conjunction with the secular growth of the service sector generates an expansion in the supply of low wage jobs and the formation of a disenfranchised work force; the last section examines the timing origin and destination ofthe new immigration to the US and the data on occupational and income characteristics of the major immigrant groups in New York City. Conclusions drawn are: 1) the globalization of economic activity has emerged as a central structure shaping the economics of world cities; 2) the production of coordinating and servicing activities elucidates aspects of the labor question and points to the inadequacy of dividing the world into a core economy specializing in high level professional and technical activities and a periphery specializing in manual activities; and 3) new spatial and socioeconomic arrangements that express the economic restructuring contain the potential for great conflict.

Birth Control by Assetless Workers in Kerala: The Possibility of a Poverty Induced Fertility Transition

Abstract: According to traditional demographic transition theory the fertility of a given group should decrease as its level of welfare increases--both because of changing values and aspirations and because the situation of least welfare is the one where the need for a high rate of childbearing is greatest. This article discusses the evidence (based on sterilization and IUD acceptors which suggests that: 1) a significant proportion of the fertility decline in Kerala is due to birth control by 1 group-- the assetless laborers--of the poorest section in the state; and 2) the lot of this section of the population in Kerala has not unambiguously improved as much as is generally imagined and may actually have worsened in the areas relevant to fertility behavior. The assetless and unskilled workers are becoming less and less able than their socioeconomic counterparts in other occupations to have several children with the assurance that these children will soon support themselves at least partly. Given such an unenviable set of circumstances it seems more reasonable to infer that this group is reducing its fertility because it just cannot afford the number of children it would like rather than because it nourishes hopes of fulfilling new material and personal ambitions through reduced childbearing. There are 2 kinds of motivation to reduce fertility in Kerala. At the top of the scale are the couples who voluntarily restrict the sizes of their families for the traditional reasons of changing aspirations and values. However a significant proportion of the fertility decline is negatively inspired--i.e. it is attributable to fertility control by a section of the population which is motivated by its own special kind of poverty rather than by increasing affluence or welfare.