The informal urban neighborhoods of Peru are not, it turns out, similar to one another. The migrant communities of Huancayo, the city that provided one-third of the survey sample of households in neighborhoods waiting to be titled (and zero percent of those already reached by the titling program), had a quite distinctive political economy. Impoverished by war and isolation, they had relatively few opportunities for daily employment outside the household. But in the 1990s a plethora of international NGOs supplied food rations and healthcare along with opportunities for home-based income generation, while farming provided urban households with an occasional but significant income. These arrangements suggest a more plausible explanation for how households of similar basic levels of nutrition, literacy, access to municipal services, and other indicators of relative well-being might have very different levels of regular employment outside the home.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1974