Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

August 1999 - To minimize the harmful impact on poor people of macroeconomic shocks, sound policies for dealing with crises - and an adequate public safety net - should be in place before a crisis starts. Many developing countries faced macroeconomic shocks in the 1980s and 1990s. The impact of the shocks on welfare depended on the nature of the shock, on initial household and community conditions, and on policy responses. To avoid severe and lasting losses to poor and vulnerable groups, governments and civil society need to be prepared for a flexible response well ahead of the crisis. A key component of a flexibly responsive system is an effective permanent safety net, which will typically combine a workfare program with targeted transfers and credit. Once a crisis has happened, several things should be done: Macroeconomic policies should aim to achieve stabilization goals at the least cost to the poor. Typically, a temporary reduction in aggregate demand is inevitable but as soon as a sustainable external balance has been reached and inflationary pressures have been contained, macroeconomic policy should be eased (interest rates reduced and efficient public spending restored, to help offset the worst effects of the recession on the poor). A fiscal stimulus directed at labor-intensive activities (such as building rural roads) can combine the benefits of growth with those of income support for poor groups, for example; Key areas of public spending should be protected, especially investments in health care, education, rural infrastructure, urban sanitation, and microfinance; Efforts should be made to preserve the social fabric and build social capital; Sound information should be generated on the welfare impacts of the crisis. This paper - a joint product of the Poverty Group, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, and Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to inform policy choices aimed at minimizing the social costs of macroeconomic shocks. The authors may be contacted at fferreira@econ.puc-rio.br, gprennushi@worldbank.org, or mravallion@worldbank.org.

Banks and Banking Reform --- Debt Markets --- Drought --- Economic Theory and Research --- Emerging Markets --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Financial Literacy --- Fiscal Deficits --- Household Income --- Individual Welfare --- Labor Demand --- Labor Policies --- Living Standards --- Macroeconomic Crisis --- Macroeconomic Shocks --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Poor --- Poverty --- Poverty Reduction --- Private Sector Development --- Public Transfers --- Recessions --- Resource Allocation --- Rural Development --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Safety Net --- Safety Nets --- Safety Nets and Transfers --- Services and Transfers to Poor --- Shock --- Social Protections and Labor --- Structural Reforms --- Unemployment --- Wage Earners --- Welfare

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

In 2002, after an altercation between Muslim vendors and Hindu travelers at a railway station in the Indian state of Gujarat, fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. The ruling nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party blamed Gujarat's entire Muslim minority for the tragedy and incited fellow Hindus to exact revenge. The resulting violence left more than one thousand people dead--most of them Muslims--and tens of thousands more displaced from their homes. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi witnessed the bloodshed up close. In Pogrom in Gujarat, he provides a riveting ethnographic account of collective violence in which the doctrine of ahimsa--or nonviolence--and the closely associated practices of vegetarianism became implicated by legitimating what they formally disavow. Ghassem-Fachandi looks at how newspapers, movies, and other media helped to fuel the pogrom. He shows how the vegetarian sensibilities of Hindus and the language of sacrifice were manipulated to provoke disgust against Muslims and mobilize the aspiring middle classes across caste and class differences in the name of Hindu nationalism. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Gujarat's culture and politics and the close ties he shared with some of the pogrom's sympathizers, Ghassem-Fachandi offers a strikingly original interpretation of the different ways in which Hindu proponents of ahimsa became complicit in the very violence they claimed to renounce.

Muslims --- Ethnic conflict --- Pogroms --- Gujarat Riots, India, 2002. --- Mohammedans --- Moors (People) --- Moslems --- Muhammadans --- Musalmans --- Mussalmans --- Mussulmans --- Mussulmen --- Religious adherents --- Islam --- Conflict, Ethnic --- Ethnic violence --- Inter-ethnic conflict --- Interethnic conflict --- Ethnic relations --- Social conflict --- Genocide --- Jews --- Massacres --- Riots --- Godhra Train Fire, Godhra, India, 2002 --- Violence against --- Persecutions --- 2002 pogrom. --- Ahmedabad. --- Ahmedabadis. --- Bharatiya Janata Party. --- Dalit. --- Gandhi. --- Godhra incident. --- Gujarat. --- Gulbarg Society. --- Hindu nationalism. --- Hindu pilgrim. --- HinduЍuslim divide. --- ISI. --- Indian national integration. --- Jain. --- Jainism. --- Muslim communities. --- Muslim. --- Muslims. --- Naroda Patiya. --- Pakistani intelligence services. --- Rajput. --- Sandesh. --- The Times of India. --- Vaishnava traditions. --- accumulated suggestion. --- ahimsa. --- anti-Gujarati plots. --- anti-Hindu. --- anti-Muslim pogrom. --- bandh. --- butcher. --- civic order. --- collective violence. --- communal aggregation. --- cosmopolitan freedom. --- cultural processes. --- cultural unity. --- dietary habits. --- economic discipline. --- ethnic cultivation. --- heterogeneity. --- identification. --- insinuation. --- krodh. --- low-intensity tension. --- meat eater. --- meat eating. --- middle class. --- modern decadence. --- news coverage. --- nonviolence. --- phantasmagoria. --- pogrom. --- political movement. --- potency. --- power. --- pratikriya. --- psychological processes. --- relief. --- sacrifice. --- separation. --- sexual fantasies. --- state police. --- stereotypes. --- terrorism. --- tofan. --- urban experience. --- urban spaces. --- vegetarianism. --- violence. --- wage earners. --- women. --- word imagery.