Participatory Equity, Identity, and Productivity Policy Implications for Promoting Development

This paper tries to advance the perspective that the poor and the marginalized in society lack a sense of “participatory equity,” by building a new model where a person’s community identity matters, ex post, in determining if he or she will be poor, even though (unlike in the Spence model) all persons are identical ex ante. The paper also draws on data collected from an NGO-run school in Calcutta to illustrate the role of a school child’s sense of ‘belonging’ in determining how the child performs academically. The theory and the empirical work are inputs into the larger and more general idea that when people feel marginalized in a society, they tend to ‘give up’. A substantial part of the paper is devoted to the policy implications of these analytical ideas and empirical results in the context of national policies and globalization. [BREAD WP No. 119].