Urban-rural disparities
METUSALEM NEIB WRITES:
Among all forms of inequality in Namibia, urban-rural disparities are reported to be the biggest contributor, regional disparities are identified to be responsible for smaller but growing portions of inequality.
No matter how well analysed inter-regional disparities in Namibia are, our current knowledge on the extent and effects of intra-regional inequality is extremely limited.
On the one hand, difference in expected incomes – or significantly different incomes from other people – is one of the most powerful driving forces of a market-coordination based economy. On the other hand, excessive inequality is supposed to have detrimental impacts on incentives, growth and development. Inconsistent considering the internal economic structure of the belts. They use regions as appropriate units for understanding growth and development dynamics. However, they also note the strong disparities between prefectures as well as the continuing importance of rural-urban gab.
By using cities as basic units for inequality decomposition, but regions as basic units for analysing the growth impacts of disparities, this paper tries to combine both arguments.
While the first study suffers from a short-time period and a very limited sample, the latter is able to establish a strong negative correlation between economic openness and urban-rural disparities.
Inequality levels increased in almost all of the 14 regions, often very drastically.
It is repeatedly stressed that no simple source can be identified to explain the pattern of regional inequality. For example, neither rural and urban inequality nor rural and urban incomes appeared to be significantly rank-correlated. They conclude that most of income inequality in rural Namibia has been spatial: however inter-regions and – especially – inter-belt disparities were more important than disparities between rural counties within regions. They report that almost two-thirds of the overall inequality is due to within regions disparities. Where he finds only a very tiny share of overall inequality to be explained inter-regionally.
Finally, examine economic disparities between and within regions in Namibia using city-level data. To conclude that – within the widening regional inequality – large but similar intra-regional disparities within the northern, central, western and southern regions exist. However, several serious limitations of their analysis invalidate their conclusions.
Compared with the papers mentioned above the first contribution of this study is to describe the development of different components of inequality – in absolute as well as in relative terms – over time, using a broadly consistent data set on the city level.
The approach is expected to include the sectoral division of city level data as well, and spans over a longer and more recent time period.
The basic concept, defined above can easily be decomposed within and between group components for different groups of income receivers, or as in this case – regions. In this paper, I go one further step by decomposing the within group inequality. The two ways.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
The dichotomy between rhetoric and reality is always likely too large in economic politics.
The traditional notion of democratic accountability refers to ways that citizens can control its government and the mechanism for doing this.
The formation of Democracy Trust of Namibia (DTN) is an independent non-profit organisation, registered on 2014-04-09 in Windhoek in the Republic of Namibia.
* Rubrieke, meningstukke, briewe en SMS’e deur lesers en meningvormers weerspieël nie noodwendig die siening van Republikein of Network Media Hub (NMH) nie. As mediahuis onderskryf NMH die etiese kode vir Namibiese media, soos toegepas deur die Media-ombudsman.
Among all forms of inequality in Namibia, urban-rural disparities are reported to be the biggest contributor, regional disparities are identified to be responsible for smaller but growing portions of inequality.
No matter how well analysed inter-regional disparities in Namibia are, our current knowledge on the extent and effects of intra-regional inequality is extremely limited.
On the one hand, difference in expected incomes – or significantly different incomes from other people – is one of the most powerful driving forces of a market-coordination based economy. On the other hand, excessive inequality is supposed to have detrimental impacts on incentives, growth and development. Inconsistent considering the internal economic structure of the belts. They use regions as appropriate units for understanding growth and development dynamics. However, they also note the strong disparities between prefectures as well as the continuing importance of rural-urban gab.
By using cities as basic units for inequality decomposition, but regions as basic units for analysing the growth impacts of disparities, this paper tries to combine both arguments.
While the first study suffers from a short-time period and a very limited sample, the latter is able to establish a strong negative correlation between economic openness and urban-rural disparities.
Inequality levels increased in almost all of the 14 regions, often very drastically.
It is repeatedly stressed that no simple source can be identified to explain the pattern of regional inequality. For example, neither rural and urban inequality nor rural and urban incomes appeared to be significantly rank-correlated. They conclude that most of income inequality in rural Namibia has been spatial: however inter-regions and – especially – inter-belt disparities were more important than disparities between rural counties within regions. They report that almost two-thirds of the overall inequality is due to within regions disparities. Where he finds only a very tiny share of overall inequality to be explained inter-regionally.
Finally, examine economic disparities between and within regions in Namibia using city-level data. To conclude that – within the widening regional inequality – large but similar intra-regional disparities within the northern, central, western and southern regions exist. However, several serious limitations of their analysis invalidate their conclusions.
Compared with the papers mentioned above the first contribution of this study is to describe the development of different components of inequality – in absolute as well as in relative terms – over time, using a broadly consistent data set on the city level.
The approach is expected to include the sectoral division of city level data as well, and spans over a longer and more recent time period.
The basic concept, defined above can easily be decomposed within and between group components for different groups of income receivers, or as in this case – regions. In this paper, I go one further step by decomposing the within group inequality. The two ways.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
The dichotomy between rhetoric and reality is always likely too large in economic politics.
The traditional notion of democratic accountability refers to ways that citizens can control its government and the mechanism for doing this.
The formation of Democracy Trust of Namibia (DTN) is an independent non-profit organisation, registered on 2014-04-09 in Windhoek in the Republic of Namibia.
* Rubrieke, meningstukke, briewe en SMS’e deur lesers en meningvormers weerspieël nie noodwendig die siening van Republikein of Network Media Hub (NMH) nie. As mediahuis onderskryf NMH die etiese kode vir Namibiese media, soos toegepas deur die Media-ombudsman.
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