Critics of Lula's administration argue that business has greatest weight in setting its priorities and that anti-poverty programmes based on conditional cash transfers have little long-term structural impact on social inequality. Yet the coherence and scope of these programmes is now an order of...

Brazilian slums and squatter settlements have acquired a generally unattractive public image that often obscures differences between peripheral urban situations. Based on research in a socially stigmatised neighbourhood of the city of Salvador, Bahia, this paper begins with a broad structural...

There has been a dramatic surge in Islamic participation and values since the 1970s.  We propose a theory of the contemporary Islamic revival based upon two forms of relative deprivation - envy and unfulfilled aspirations.  To analyze these motivations, a behavioral model of religion is...

It is often claimed that large buyers wield buyer power.  Existing theories of this effect generally assume upstream monopoly.  Yet the evidence is strongest with upstream competition.  We show that upstream competition can yield buyer power for large buyers by generating supplier-level...