Globalization of production, manufacturing employment, and income inequality in developing nations.

Theories of income distribution in developing nations suggest contrasting expectations regarding how employment industrialization affects income inequality. However, past studies have not considered how the globalization of production shapes the relationship between manufacturing share of employment and income inequality in developing countries. Relatedly, social scientists argue that the globalization of production has exacerbated inequality, but past cross-national research focused on the Global South has yielded inconsistent findings regarding the trade-inequality link. In this article, I draw on the political economy literature focused on the distributional effects of global value chains (GVCs) in the developing world and argue that the rise of globalized production in recent decades has undermined the egalitarian characteristics of the manufacturing sector. While the sector was characterized by higher wages for low-skilled workers and a compressed wage distribution, I argue that rising competition, declining bargaining power of workers, and skill-biased industrial upgrading associated with GVCs has stretched wage distributions and heightened the skill premium in the manufacturing sector. Empirical analyses of cross-national panel data from broad samples of developing nations between 1970 and 2014 suggest that global integration has diminished the equalizing effect of manufacturing employment. I conclude by discussing the prospects for inclusive development in this era of globalization as well as the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.

The Rise of Sonless Families in Asia and North Africa.

A neglected consequence of declining fertility is the likely rise of families with children of one sex-only sons or only daughters. Increases in such families present important demographic shifts that may weaken patrilineal family systems. We assess whether sons-only and daughters-only families rose in Asia and North Africa from the early 1990s to around 2015. Using 88 surveys and two censuses, we examine how the number and sex composition of children of mothers aged 40-49 changed across 20 countries, representing 87% of the region's population and 54% of the global population. We also compare observed trends to sex-indifferent counterfactuals, quantify contributions of fertility declines with decompositions, and investigate subnational trends in China and India. Increases in sons-only families were universal where numbers of children fell. Growth of daughters-only families was suppressed in patrilineal contexts, but these sonless families still rose significantly in 13 of 18 countries where numbers declined. By 2015, over a quarter of families in the region had only sons and nearly a fifth only daughters. There was considerable variation across countries: recent levels ranged from 28.3% to 3.4% daughters-only and from 40.1% to 6.0% sons-only. China and the rest of East Asia had the highest shares.

The Decline of Arranged Marriage? Marital Change and Continuity in India.

This article evaluates whether arranged marriage declined in India from 1970 to 2012. Specifically, the authors examine trends in spouse choice, the length of time spouses knew each other prior to marriage, intercaste marriage, and consanguineous marriage at the national level, as well as by region, urban residence, and religion/caste. During this period, women were increasingly active in choosing their own husbands, spouses meeting on their wedding day decreased, intercaste marriage rose, and consanguineous marriage fell. However, many of these changes were modest in size and substantial majorities of recent marriages still show the hallmarks of arranged marriage. Further, instead of displacing parents, young women increasingly worked with parents to choose husbands collectively. Rather than unilateral movement towards Western marriage practices, as suggested by theories of family change and found in other Asian contexts, these trends point to a hybridization of customary Western and Indian practices.