The Persistence of Horizontal Inequalities and the Role of Policy: The Case of Peru

Abstract

The paper studies a case of deeply embedded group or “horizontal” inequalities, and asks why part of the reason for this persistence of inequality appears to be that even well-intentioned policies that attempt to improve the position of the most disadvantaged often fail to achieve their goals. The paper investigates the role of the institutions underpinning the implementation of policy and the responses of the different actors, and explores how these often produce perverse results. The case studied is Peru and the paper explores two instances of social policy and one of land reform. The paper explores the relationships between policy failure and group inequality. The paper concludes that if policy failures left group inequalities even more deeply embedded, while the embedding increased the likelihood of further failure, this would be a significant vicious circle of underdevelopment.

Notes

¹ See, for example, Barrett & Swallow (2006); Bowles et al. (2006); Carter & Barrett (2006).

² See Stewart (2009, p. 324) for a developed discussion and many examples.

³ Tilly labels these two processes “emulation” and “adaptation”.

⁴ We are grateful to an anonymous reader for pushing us to clarify the meaning of voice.

⁵ This is the topic of Chapters 4–6 of Thorp & Paredes (2010), and the reader is referred to that text for detailed documentation.

⁶ Nestlé in the South being the prime but not the only example.

⁷ The term “gamonal” is first located in use in 1863, in the Revista Americana. See Ibarra (2002); also Burga & Flores-Galindo (1991).

⁸ The archive comprises wills but also documents such as valuations.

⁹ The three who left Sierra land to their descendants were all women, dying in Lima or abroad. The remaining one was the key mining entrepreneur, Proaño, whose battles were fought exclusively around protection of his mining interests.

¹⁰ See Thorp & Paredes (2010) and Escobal & Ponce (2012) for a full discussion of data issues and documentation.

¹¹ In the work we are citing here we explore these problems and estimate group inequalities within reasonable bounds. In regard to ethnicity, the key difficulty is that the marker for which there are at least some data—an individual's first language—has over time become a poor indicator of ethnicity, as some regions have experienced significant loss of their native tongue without necessarily losing their indigenous identity. We have opted for place of birth, a marker which we consider functions well today, though with migration over generations it will gradually work less well.

¹² The source for expenditure data is the Ministerio de Justicia y Culto. The data on illiteracy are from the National Censuses.

¹³ See the monographs written in the 1960s by the Instituto Indigenista Peruana.

¹⁴ Cotler (1970) and Stepan (1978) explain that Velasco's idea was to construct a system based on occupational or functional units (an “organic state”) in order to avoid class conflict or individual egoism, which were seen as the major defects of liberal capitalism, as well as total control by the state, which violates the principle of subsidiarity and was seen as the major problem of the communist systems.

¹⁵ Perhaps the most important benefit that a worker of the cooperatives received was that they did not need to pay rent for land or livestock. However, only half of the land was distributed, the haciendas were in a bad economic situation when they were given to the campesinos and the shared profits were never significant enough to address the needs of the campesinos and agricultural workers. Figueroa (1973) and Webb & Figueroa (1975) showed that the previous rural system relied heavily on pre-capitalist modes of labour for the maintenance of centralised production and on diversified agriculture through the communities for personal consumption. Once salaried payments were imposed and centralised production was enhanced, it was more difficult for cooperatives to reach the required level of efficiency and produce profits for redistribution among members.

¹⁶ Communities needed to register their new organisations in Sinamos, which could intervene by supervising community management and accounting, providing advice during articulation and following-up of their activities and, if necessary, by suggesting dissolution of the communities to an agrarian court (Quijano, 1979).

¹⁷ Other jobs were previously an important source of supplementary income.

¹⁸ This has been richly documented for poor urban areas by Stepan (1978) and Dietz (1969).

¹⁹ Crabtree & Thomas (1999) provide an overview.

²⁰ The organisations had to prepare a short profile of the community, collect signatures that indicated that the community had selected the project as well as the núcleo ejecutor and prepare a preliminary profile of the project.

²¹ The visual presence of these small projects, all of them labelled with the name of Foncodes and painted with the colour of the official political party, had a great impact on presidential and municipal elections.

²² Tanaka & Trivelli (2002) identify the political campaign in 2001 as a context that showed this approach.

²³ In an interview with Hilaria Supa, one of the first two indigenous women elected to Congress, she spoke proudly of her own lack of formal education and her efforts at self-education, and was so critical of Sierran primary education that she was happy to say it was a good thing she escaped it. Chapter 3 of Thorp & Paredes (2010) contains results of interviews leading to a similar conclusion.