NGO and farming income explain employment differences without any property effects

Evidence

The informal urban neighborhoods of Peru are not, it turns out, similar to one another. The migrant communities of Huancayo, the city that provided one-third of the survey sample of households in neighborhoods waiting to be titled (and zero percent of those already reached by the titling program), had a quite distinctive political economy. Impoverished by war and isolation, they had relatively few opportunities for daily employment outside the household. But in the 1990s a plethora of international NGOs supplied food rations and healthcare along with opportunities for home-based income generation, while farming provided urban households with an occasional but significant income. These arrangements suggest a more plausible explanation for how households of similar basic levels of nutrition, literacy, access to municipal services, and other indicators of relative well-being might have very different levels of regular employment outside the home. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1974

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to critiques of de Soto-style titling programs and their assumed causal claims about informal property. — connects to: Peruvian property titles shifted household labor toward outside work and adults — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1926