Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between objective and subjective effects on household spending in a situation of economic crisis based on data derived from a survey conducted in 1985 in the industrial city of Monterrey in northern México. The analysis focuses first on historical developments in income through a longitudinal study of income distributions since these can be considered to be the historical conditions of the two types of deprivation studied. Using family budgets, we were able to describe actual and expected effects of the crisis in terms of the reductions in spending that it provoked. Finally, using regression analyses, the relations between both kinds of effects and the personal history of the respondents, taken to represent the individual counterpart of historical conditions, are examined. Neighborhood SES and occupational level are found to be significant predictors of both objective and subjective deprivation. The best predictor of subjective effects are the actual ones. The phenomenon of relative deprivation appears to be conditioned by the context of societal development in northern México.
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Menno Vellinga is a senior lecturer at the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the State University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. The author and co-author of several books on Latin America, his latest is an edited collection of original works onThe Prospects of Social Democracy in Latin America (Westview, 1992).
Hernan Vera is an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Florida. The author of a book on the Profession of Catholic Priests, and several dozen articles, he is currently working in the field of race relations in which a book coauthored with Joe Feagin (Routledge, 1994), is forthcoming.
Soon-Rae Lee is a 1993 University of Florida Ph.D. in Sociology. He is currently at the Department of Juvenile Justice of The Korean Institute of Criminology in Seoul, South Korea. His main interests are in the field of deviance and criminology.
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Vellinga, M., Vera, H. & Rae-Lee, S. Actual and expected deprivation: Northern Mexico in the 1980s. A research note. Studies in Comparative International Development 28, 51–66 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687121
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687121