John Sender

Biographic Data

ID120041
NAMEJohn Sender
GIVEN NAMESJohn
FAMILY NAMESender
SIGNATURESENDER J
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of London
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS39
TOTAL CITATIONS191
AUTHOR COUNT39
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1983
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX8

  • Finding Out Faster: Pre-Survey Scoping for a Study of Deprivation in Majakaneng, North West Province, South Africa

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John SenderARTICLEJournal of Southern African Studies2025

    We discuss scoping research carried out over a short period of time in Majakaneng in Bojanala District in the platinum belt in South Africa. The research aims to gather and analyse evidence on the effects of investments in high-value agricultural exports, in this specific case the production of blueberries, on the well-being of poor women. High-value agricultural exports have been identified as offering a particularly promising path to structural…

  • Desperate, deceived and disappointed: Women’s lives and labour in rural Ethiopia and Uganda

    Open AccessJohn Sender, Christopher CramerARTICLEJournal of Contemporary African…2022Cited by: 2References: 55

    Life history interviews from Ethiopia and Uganda, organised around experiences of wage labour, provide rich evidence on the working conditions of many poor, rural women and on what leads them to work for wages. The life histories confirm and illuminate arguments based on large-scale socio-economic surveys carried out in these two countries. Further, findings from the surveys and life histories challenge an influential literature that not only cel…

  • Classification and Roundabout Production in High-value Agriculture: A Fresh Approach to Industrialization

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, Jonathan Di John et al.ARTICLEDevelopment and Change2022Cited by: 2References: 48

    Developing countries are balance-of-payments constrained. In this context, high-value agricultural exports can make a greater contribution to structural change than development economists and developing country governments have typically acknowledged. This is thanks to dramatic recent changes in agricultural production, consumption and trade. These transformations are obscured by a simple classification system that has not adapted to changing pat…

  • Wage Employment in Africa

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    Most economists think there is little wage employment in Africa and doubt the potential for faster growth of paid employment. They favour supply-side measures encouraging self-employment. The statistical base of conventional views is extremely unreliable. Even the poor statistics that are available do not support pessimism about wage employment in African countries, which has been expanding (and as a share of total employment). Huge numbers of wa…

  • High-Yielding Variety Policies in Africa

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    Chapter 10 highlights policy priorities capable of generating large productivity improvements, balance of payments improvements, and big increases in employment, especially for rural women. Growth, structural transformation, and welfare improvements in African economies require a sustained high investment rate, led by public sector spending to maximize crowding in of private investment; they require state support for the development of ‘national …

  • The Trade Imperative

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    Economists from very different backgrounds often counsel against a fast growth of imports—and it is certainly true that the balance of payments constraint all too easily derails growth episodes. But the level of output is more important than an obsession with the obsessive pursuit of macroeconomic balance; macroeconomic policy has to serve productive goals rather than vice versa; and policy needs to enable rapid import growth to raise the overall…

  • Technical Change and Agricultural Productivity

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    The evidence does not support gloomy generalizations about an irreversible African environmental crisis or pessimistic arguments that barriers to adopting Green Revolution technologies are insuperable. Although evidence on agricultural technology in Africa is often unreliable, food output and grain yields do appear to have risen strongly in some African economies.. Huge variations in crop yields, including within similar agro-ecological zones, su…

  • Uneven, Contradictory, and Brutal Economic Development in Africa

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    Even where capitalist expansion brings about dramatic and progressive changes, it is always and everywhere contradictory, uneven, and brutal. All good things do not go together. African economic experiences have—similarly—been contradictory. That is one reason why efforts to fit African economic experiences into linear narratives of ‘tragic growth’ or ‘Africa Rising’ are doomed. African economic development is also extremely diverse. This variati…

  • Varieties of Common Sense

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    Policy officials are often influenced by two broad varieties of conventional wisdom: the set of ideas broadly associated with neoclassical economics; and those ideas flowing from third worldist, anti-imperialist, and structuralist development economics. We show how these apparently opposing perspectives often have a surprising amount in common. Reflexes of ‘impossibilism’ and ‘naive optimism’ are often shared across an ideological divide. Thus, p…

  • Unbalanced Development

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    Balance is a powerful idea in economics—in equilibrium economics, in strategies of balanced growth, and many other strategies. This chapter argues for a different understanding of the history of capitalism and, therefore, of policy and strategy. The idea of imbalance is a springboard to explore the ideas of Albert Hirschman. These include the concept of linkages and the dynamics of unbalanced growth (pressures, tensions, and disequilibrium as the…

  • Investment, Wage Goods, and Industrial Policy

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    Raising and sustaining long-run growth rates is made more difficult by the complexity of economic growth and by the complexity of growth theory debates. Nonetheless, the investment rate is central to long-run growth and development. Growth sustained by high investment rates will also involve structural change: a shift of resources into high-productivity economic activities. This chapter combines discussion of investment—why it matters, what econo…

  • Working Out the Solution to Rural Poverty

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.CHAPTERAfrican Economic Development2020

    Ideas about poverty and poverty reduction policy are clouded by misleading measures and unreliable evidence. National statistical organizations (NSOs) are under-resourced and the collection and dissemination of data are compromised by political pressures. Allegedly pro-poor policies have had an inegalitarian impact in rural Africa. Conventional views expecting that support spread across smallholder farmers will reduce poverty are based on skewed …

  • African Economic Development: Evidence, Theory, Policy

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, John Sender et al.BOOKAfrican Economic Development2020Cited by: 17References: 45

    This book challenges conventional wisdoms both about economic performance and about policies for economic development in African countries. Its starting point is the striking variation in economic performance: unevenness and inequalities form a central fact. The authors highlight not only differences between African countries but also variations within countries, differences often organized around distinctions of gender, class, and ethnic identit…

  • Vella Pillay: Revolutionary Activism and Economic Policy Analysis

    Vishnu Padayachee, John SenderARTICLEJournal of Southern African Studies2018Cited by: 1

    Between the late 1940s and the early 1990s, Vella Pillay made a major contribution to South Africa’s liberation struggle. This article focuses on three aspects of his contribution: as a revolutionary procuring funds and training for the ANC’s military struggle, as a leader of the anti-apartheid and boycott movements, and as a highly trained intellectual producing economic policy analyses. In the mid 1960s, Pillay was suddenly prevented from holdi…

  • Identifying the most deprived in rural Ethiopia and Uganda: A Simple Measure of Socio-Economic Deprivation

    John Sender, Christopher Cramer et al.ARTICLEJournal of Eastern African Studies2018Cited by: 5References: 36

    The Extreme Deprivation Index uses easily verifiable answers to ten questions about the ownership of the most basic non-food wage goods – things that poor people in a variety of rural contexts want to have because they make a real difference to the quality of their lives. Using this Index, we define rural Ethiopians and Ugandans who lack access to a few basic consumer goods as ‘most deprived’: they are at risk of failing to achieve adequate educa…

  • Fairtrade and Labour Markets in Ethiopia and Uganda

    Christopher Cramer, Deborah Johnston et al.ARTICLEThe Journal of Development Studies2017

    Drawing on four years of fieldwork in Ethiopia and Uganda, this paper addresses gaps in knowledge about the mechanisms linking agricultural exports with poverty reduction, the functioning of rural labour markets, and the relevance to the lives of the poorest people of Fairtrade. Statistical analysis of survey evidence, complemented by qualitative research, highlights the relatively poor payment and non-pay working conditions of those employed in …

  • Backward Capitalism in RuralSouthAfrica: Prospects for Accelerating Accumulation in theEasternCape

    Open AccessJohn SenderARTICLEJournal of Agrarian Change2016Cited by: 6References: 61

    The forces of production in ruralSouthAfrica and the performance of the agricultural sector form the central theme of this paper. It shows that the long-term lack of dynamism of capitalist development inSouthAfrica as a whole is reflected in and is responsible for failures of rural development. These failures have resulted in acute suffering, not least inEasternCape province, where barriers to dynamic capitalist growth remain very high. The paper…

  • Mistakes, Crises, and Research Independence: The Perils of Fieldwork as a Form of Evidence

    Christopher Cramer, Deborah Johnston et al.ARTICLEAfrican Affairs2015Cited by: 2

    Drawing on examples from rural Ethiopia and Uganda, this research note highlights some of the difficulties experienced in fieldwork. These difficulties do not justify the reluctance of increasingly risk-averse universities and funders to support independent fieldwork in Africa, but they do show that the rationale for research and the features of its design can provoke animosity and tensions. They also show that our own failure on occasion to appr…

  • Fairtrade cooperatives in Ethiopia and Uganda: Uncensored

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, Deborah Johnston et al.ARTICLEReview of African Political Economy2014Cited by: 10References: 1

    All members of the research team are listed at http://ftepr.org. However, it is important to emphasise that the material cited in this paper on the pattern of sales to smallholder coffee and tea organisations was mainly collected by Reta Hailu and Sam Bbosa.Notes on contributorsChristopher Cramer is Professor of the Political Economy of Development at SOAS, London. He has worked in sub-Saharan Africa for some 25 years. He works mainly on developm…

  • How to do (and how not to do) fieldwork on Fair Trade and rural poverty

    Christopher Cramer, Deborah Johnston et al.ARTICLECanadian Journal of Development…2014Cited by: 4References: 35

    The Fair Trade, Employment and Poverty Reduction (FTEPR) project investigated poverty dynamics in rural Ethiopia and Uganda. When designing fieldwork to capture poor people often missing from standard surveys, several methodological challenges were identified and, in response, four decisions were made. First, FTEPR focused on wage workers rather than farmers and improved on standard questionnaires when collecting labour market information. Second…

  • Poverty, Class and Gender in Rural Africa: A Tanzanian Case Study

    John Sender, Susan M Smith et al.BOOKPoverty, Class and Gender in…2012

    Focussing on a Fieldwork study of the West Usambaras in Tanzania, this study, first published in 1990, deals with processes of class formation and capitalist accumulation, and the dynamics of rural poverty and gender relations. Arguing that rural differentiation is systematically reinforced by the socialist state, the authors offer a critique of government intervention and discuss alternative, more effective forms of policy

  • Trade, industrialization and the state in the post-colonial period

    John Sender, Sheila SmithCHAPTERDevelop Capitalism Africa2010

  • Divorced, Separated, and Widowed Women Workers in Rural Mozambique

    Carlos Oya, John SenderARTICLEFeminist Economics2009Cited by: 9References: 15

    A remarkably high proportion of women wage workers in rural Mozambique are divorced, separated, or widowed. This paper explores the factors underlying the difference between the marital status of these wage workers and other rural women in Mozambique and establishes a strong relationship between labor-market participation and female divorce or widowhood. The association is likely to work in both directions. Moreover, contrastive exploration sugge…

  • Quantifying Poverty in Viet Nam: Who Counts

    Jonathan Pincus, John SenderARTICLEJournal of Vietnamese Studies2008Cited by: 10References: 4

    Poverty surveys in Vietnam systematically exclude mobile people, particularly migrants in wage employment. The Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) and its predecessors sample from official population lists and thus leave out individuals lacking permanent residence status. Moreover, VHLSS overemphasizes expenditure data and omits critical information on labor market participation. The article presents results from a small survey of w…

  • Lifting the blinkers: A new view of power, diversity and poverty in Mozambican rural labour markets

    Open AccessChristopher Cramer, Carlos Oya et al.ARTICLEThe Journal of Modern African…2008Cited by: 7References: 22

    This paper presents some results from the largest rural labour market survey yet conducted in Mozambique. Evidence from three provinces shows that labour markets have a significant impact on the lives of a large number of poor people, and that employers exercise considerable discretion in setting wages and conditions of casual, seasonal and permanent wage employment. The evidence presented comes from a combination of a quantitative survey based o…