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Journal Article
The shale gas revolution in the United States induced an unprecedented commodity boom across northwestern India. Leveraging population-based discontinuities in the contemporaneous roll-out of India’s national rural electrification scheme, we show that access to electricity increased total employment...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A Case of Domestic Workers in Delhi
From the book:
COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Journal Article
– Evidence from India
This study analyses whether living in a locality with high crime against women affects the probability of early marriage — that is, marriage before the legal age of marriage of girls. Using a nationally-representative longitudinal dataset and tackling the potential endogeneity of local crime rates...
Working Paper
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– Indonesia and India compared
We examine the nature of labour market inequality in Indonesia and India, using a common conceptual approach drawing from the job ladder framework. In the framework, we differentiate between self-employment and wage-informal and between formal, upper tier informal, and lower tier informal jobs. We...
Blog
More than 960 million Indians will head to the polls in the world’s biggest election between April 19 and early June. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is seeking a third term in office. And the polls suggest it will achieve this objective.If one...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Theory and some evidence from India
Using the lens of a life-cycle model, we argue that an administrative failure of a wage payment delay in a workfare programme could adversely affect the welfare of the poor through two channels. First, it imposes an implicit consumption tax on the household. Second, it changes the status of labour...
Journal Article
– Exploring the distribution of women's work between income generation, expenditure-saving, and unpaid domestic responsibilities in India
Part of Journal Special Issue
Women’s Work
Working Paper
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The documented under-representation of marginalized groups in business ownership and the labour market is a concerning issue. This study explores how caste disparities in small-firm entrepreneurship impact on firm performance in India, focusing on the informal sector. Our examination shows a...
Working Paper
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Time-use statistics are sensitive to measurement error, especially errors that might be introduced based on whether the informant is reporting on herself or reporting on others in the household. In this paper, we use the nationally representative time-use survey in India and propensity score...
Working Paper
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This study is positioned in two strands of literature—intersectionality and social mobility. It is the first to measure (dis)advantage at the individual level as an outcome of the intersectionality of identities and parental circumstances. By linking circumstances at the parental level with (dis...
Working Paper
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We examine how village-level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. We distinguish between upper caste and own-group dominance and examine the mechanisms underpinning inequality in...
Working Paper
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There is a dearth of evidence on the evolution of occupational health in the developing world and on the extent to which it has been influenced by (1) the pattern of structural transformation in these economies and (2) integration with global markets.In this study, I compile a rich database on...
Book Chapter
Chapter in book: Wives and Widows at Work: Women’s Labour in Agrarian Bengal, Then and Now Compared with most other Indian states, women’s reported work participation rates have historically been low in West Bengal. This trend is more prominent in rural areas. Historians have tried to explain this...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Experimental evidence from an information dissemination intervention
This study assesses the impact of an information dissemination intervention on the local-level implementation of the rural public works program in India. One key feature of the intervention is to provide information to workers once their wages get credited into their accounts. Using administrative...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
This paper analyses the role of tertiary education on rural development. Using census data on villages in India for 2011, we find that skilled workers have had an important impact on rural prosperity. A 1 percentage point rise in the share of the village population with tertiary education raises per...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Rules versus discretionary budgets
Part of Journal Special Issue
Clientelist Politics and Development
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility in India, using a nationally representative data...
Working Paper
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We investigate the impact of the political representation of minority groups on the incidence of ethnic conflict in India. We code data on Hindu-Muslim violence and Muslim political representation in India and leverage quasi-random variation in legislator religion generated by the results of close...
Working Paper
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The study aims at bridging gaps in both theoretical and empirical literature pertaining to multigenerational persistence. From a theoretical standpoint, it argues that parental altruism is influenced by social heterogeneity rather than income-based heterogeneity. One’s position in the social...
Working Paper
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The extant literature on status-signalling primarily adopts Veblen’s theory of class to caste and racial identities. This study aims to adopt a more suitable theoretical lens that is more relevant not only for class identities, but also for other identities such as caste and race. By viewing...
Working Paper
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Using nationally representative data on employment and earnings, this paper documents a fall in wage inequality in India over the last two decades. It then examines the role played by increasing minimum wages for the lowest skilled workers in India in contributing to the observed decline. Exploiting...
Local governments in India—known as panchayats—are sometimes criticised for failing to deliver benefits earmarked for vulnerable regions or households to the intended recipients. Mis-targeting of benefits is often attributed to political clientelism, where funds are diverted opportunistically to...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Livelihoods and wellbeing in India during COVID-19
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This article studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. First, the study finds that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points during the pandemic...
Working Paper
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– An interpretative survey
When India became a republic in 1950, the economy was primarily agrarian, with three-fifths of output originating from agriculture. In the sixty years since independence, there has been a significant transformation of economic activity away from agriculture, with less than one-fifth of output now...
Working Paper
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– The case of ‘Solar Mamas’ who bring light
This paper examines multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa and argues that grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges can help governments and multilateral agencies craft inclusive...
Working Paper
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This paper studies the education gradient associated with health reporting errors for two highly prevalent non-communicable diseases among older adults in India. We leverage a novel data set—the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (2017–18) panel survey—to unpack the sources of health reporting error...
In recent decades, India has experienced rapid economic growth alongside radical affirmative action programs enacted since independence. This column explores what we know about the impact on social mobility. While there is some evidence of educational mobility, occupational mobility has not...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Tasks, Skills, and Institutions
Working Paper
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– A systematic literature review
This paper provides a systematic review of quantitative literature investigating the success of affirmative action policies in addressing socio-economic inequalities between ethnic groups in education and employment. We focus on two of the most influential national experiences: caste-based...
Journal Article
– Industrial aspirations and reverse labour migration
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. This study explores this kind of reverse transition, that is, when the Lewisian dream of having an industrial job comes to an...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
I study the impact of school consolidation on enrolment and achievement, using its staggered roll-out in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Across the years 2014, 2016, and 2017, Rajasthan merged many of its grade 1–5 schools with grade 6–10 schools to create grade 1–10 ‘model’ schools. Twenty-three per...
Blog
Ela Ramesh Bhatt, the founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India, passed away on 2 November 2022. Known as the ‘gentle revolutionary’, Ela-ben (as she is affectionately known) is recognized around the world for her Gandhian values, visionary ideals, pioneering work, and quiet...
Working Paper
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This paper examines the impact of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake on age at marriage and other assortative matching outcomes. Using the 2004–05 wave of the India Human Development Survey and employing a difference-in-differences strategy, we document that the earthquake reduced the age at marriage for...
Working Paper
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– Past and present
The paper examines the existing state of reservations, more specifically, reservation policies and reservations for government jobs for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in India. It discusses the progression and ramifications of these policies and how they have affected the democratization of...
Working Paper
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– A case of domestic workers in Delhi
Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated that poor women have been the worst sufferers in terms of pay cuts and job losses. Women are the hardest hit also at the household level. They have to bear the brunt of constrained household budgets and have also encountered increasing...
Working Paper
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We investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on income levels, poverty, and inequality in both the immediate aftermath and during the uneven recovery until December 2021 using high-frequency household survey data from India. We find that the average household incomes dropped sharply during the...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
I evaluate the impact of the right to education from the passing of the Right to Education Act in India in 2009. This Act guaranteed free education to children aged 6–14 years, including children with disabilities. Given that the school participation deficit associated with disability is large, I...
Working Paper
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– Interrogating capacity and response to COVID-19 in West Bengal
COVID-19 has brought to the fore the issue of state preparedness in mitigating health emergencies. This paper problematizes the received wisdom of greater state capacity in mitigating the severity of the pandemic. Based on a case study of West Bengal, a subnational state of India, it shows that...
Working Paper
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The affirmative action policy in India came into practice because of the generations of struggle undergone by the untouchable castes and other backward classes, who were historically excluded from education and administration. As society changed, it was inevitable that the vulnerable groups who had...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders’ quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to understand...
Working Paper
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– Guidelines for NEP implementation
This paper documents the state of elementary education in India and China since the 1960s, key lessons for India from China’s shift in focus from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’, and evidence-based guidelines for effective implementation of India’s New Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020). The divergent policy...
Working Paper
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– Uttar Pradesh’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
A rich and growing literature illustrates the paradox of COVID-19 responses by governments across the world. States with higher levels of authority and capacity have struggled to respond effectively to COVID-19, while states with low capacity and authority have been more effective in containing the...
Working Paper
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During the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Kerala, a state in southern India, successfully managed to contain the pandemic. As a result, the Kerala model of managing the COVID-19 pandemic was celebrated as a success across the globe. However, at the time of writing, it looks like the celebrations...
Blog
Credit constraints, a consequence of the widespread failure of credit markets in developing countries, are widely regarded as a key constraint to entrepreneurship. Using 2010-11 and 2015-16 National Sample Survey data, this article shows that policy actions of the Indian government to increase...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that...
Working Paper
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– Understanding it through the beginning and end of the Mahila Samakhya programme
This paper analyses the political economy of women’s-empowerment-related policy-making in India through a re-examination of the context of both the genesis and closure of a major programme, Mahila Samakhya. Mahila Samakhya, which embodied feminist philosophy and pedagogy, started in 1987 with the...
Working Paper
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This paper presents a critical analysis of official data related to COVID-19 in Bihar state, India, which points to the manipulation of data for political ends. The ruling party’s claim that the state managed the COVID pandemic brilliantly seems more politically motivated than scientific. We show...
Working Paper
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– Interrogating state capacity and its fault lines
The state of Maharashtra and the city of Mumbai have been referred to as the epidemic epicentre of India since the time of the plague of 1896 and influenza epidemic of 1918. During the COVID-19 pandemic too, the state experienced the highest cases with maximum fatalities. Against the structural...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Past episodes and future trajectories
From the book:
The Developer’s Dilemma
Blog
The Omicron variant resulted in a third major wave of Covid-19 in India, with the number of cases exceeding those in the second wave, albeit causing less severe illness on average. In this post, Kundu and Gisselquist draw on several nationally representative data sources to illuminate key Covid-19...
Journal Article
– Empirical Evidence from Indian Manufacturing Firms
This article provides empirical evidence on the impact of digitalisation on product upgrading in global value chains (GVCs). Analysis is done for a sample of Indian manufacturing GVC firms in the period 2001–15 from the firm-level database Prowess, using the methodology of System Generalised Method...
Working Paper
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This paper examines the profit-shifting behaviour of emerging multinational firms from India. It is found that the before-tax profitability of subsidiaries differs according to whether they were established directly or via an Offshore Financial Centre (OFC). The impact of the corporate tax rate on...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Hindu Succession Act in India
This paper examines the impact of the Hindu Succession Act on married women’s time use in India. The Hindu Succession Act was amended between 1976 and 2005 by giving equal inheritance rights to women for inheriting property. To estimate the effect of the equal inheritance reform, I devise a...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– India’s informal sector firms
Part of Journal Special Issue
What sustains informality
Working Paper
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– Evidence from the Indian informal sector
We examine the patterns and correlates of the productivity gap between male-owned and female-owned firms for informal enterprises in India. Female-owned firms are on average 45 per cent less productive than male-owned firms, with the clearest productivity gaps observed at the lower end of the...
Working Paper
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– Urban-to-rural labour transitions from the factory to the informal economy
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions through a feminist political economy lens and adopting a life-cycle approach to...
Working Paper
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This paper argues that new computer, smartphone, and universal ID technologies are reducing the incentives for political clientelism in the delivery of social programmes in India, especially by allowing party leaders to bypass local brokers to credit-claim for better service delivery and allowing...
Working Paper
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The impact of childbirth on women’s employment has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries. Constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and consequent fall in earnings are characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty’. This phenomenon is relatively less explored in...
Blog
– A curse or a blessing?
Much has been written on India as an outlier in Global Value Chains (GVC). Despite being one of the largest and fastest-growing markets located in direct proximity to ‘Factory Asia’ (Baldwin, 2008), India is documented to have low participation in global networks, especially amongst South Asian...
While studies have examined the association in socioeconomic status between parent and offspring, there has been relatively little research on multigenerational mobility, especially in the developing country context. Analysing data from the India Human Development Survey, this article shows that...
Working Paper
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– Exploring the distribution of women’s work between income generation, expenditure-saving, and unpaid domestic responsibilities in India
Based on primary data from India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying women’s low labour force participation. In developing countries, women engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers. Women are involved in expenditure-saving activities, i.e...
Working Paper
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The impact of childbirth on the labour market participation of women has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries, constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and earnings being characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty’. In the developing country context, and...
Working Paper
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– Rules versus discretionary budgets
Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics in delivery of programme benefits by local governments, or gram panchayats (GPs), and manipulation of GP programme budgets by legislators and elected officials at upper tiers in West Bengal, India.Using household panel survey data...
Journal Article
– Mandated political representation and murders
This study provides the first country-wide research evidence that an affirmative action policy may induce a backlash. I exploit the timing of the implementation of castebased electoral quotas across and within the states of India. The results show that the implementation of the electoral quotas...
Informality is a pervasive phenomenon in the labour markets of developing countries. Two billion workers, representing 61.2 per cent of the world’s employed population, are in informal employment. Emerging and developing countries account for more than 93 per cent of total global informal employment...
Blog
– Evidence from a randomized neighbourhood relocation policy in India
Caste in India plays an instrumental role in determining access to education, jobs, public spaces, and social networks. For instance, despite state governments providing incentives to encourage intercaste marriage, only 4.9% of marriages in India take place outside caste . While numerous affirmative...
Working Paper
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This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative to pre-pandemic, while their monthly earnings...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Inequality trends and dynamics, the bird’s-eye and the granular perspectives
From the book:
Inequality in the Developing World
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
The contact hypothesis posits that having diverse neighbours may reduce one’s intergroup prejudice. This hypothesis is difficult to test as individuals self-select into neighbourhoods. Using a slum relocation programme in India that randomly assigned neighbours, I examine the effects of exposure to...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
This paper analyses whether living in a locality with high crime against women affects the probability of early marriage—that is, marriage before the legal age of marriage of girls. We hypothesize that parents who perceive themselves to live in a high-crime locality would marry their daughters off...
Working Paper
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Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—that is, status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility in India, using a nationally...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a field experiment in India
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention that involves dissemination of publicly available...
Working Paper
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We measure multidimensional poverty in India using National Sample Survey Organization data from 2014–15 to 2017–18. We use income, health, education, and standard of living to measure the multidimensional poverty index (MPI). The MPI headcount declined from 26.9 to 13.75 per cent over the study...
Policy makers seeking inclusive growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural transformation, which is potentially inequitable, and keeping a check on rising economic inequality. How this dilemma is resolved by different countries and what factors influence the...
Working Paper
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– The role of occupational task content
We examine data for urban workers in the non-agricultural sector across three decades, 1983–2017, and find that earnings inequality increased during 1983–2004, was largely stable during 2004–11, and decreased during 2011–17. We explore whether decline in routine jobs and change in demand for skills...
Working Paper
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– The case of BRICS
As the world battles with the triple problems of social, economic, and environmental challenges, it has become important to focus both policy and research efforts on these. Therefore, this study examines the effect of wealth inequality on CO2 emissions in five emerging economies: Brazil, Russia...
Journal Article
The Indian labour market is characterized by a high level of informality, with large numbers of workers in poorly paid ‘lower-tier’ informal jobs, and somewhat better paid ‘upper-tier’ informal jobs, which do not have the same benefits and security of tenure as formal jobs. We examine the likelihood...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
A growing body of research shows that COVID-19 both reflects and exacerbates existing inequalities. However, there are significant gaps in this research area with respect to ‘horizontal’ or group-based inequalities in Global South countries. Lack of group-disaggregated data often contributes. In this...
Working Paper
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– India’s informal sector firms
How does informal economic activity respond to increased financial inclusion? Does it become more entrepreneurial? Does access to new financing options change the gender configuration of informal economic activity and, if so, in what ways and what directions? We take advantage of nationwide data...
Working Paper
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– Rational expectations of disadvantaged groups in India
This study uses data collected from school students in Mumbai to investigate how they perceive subjective expected returns for different levels of education in an environment that includes labour market discrimination. We are particularly keen to observe subjective returns to education for different...
Working Paper
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– Patterns, correlates, and consequences
The Indian labour market is characterized by a high level of informality, with large numbers of workers in poorly paid ‘lower-tier’ informal jobs, and somewhat better paid ‘upper-tier’ informal jobs, which do not have the same benefits and security of tenure as formal jobs. We examine the likelihood...
Working Paper
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Whether cash transfers have unintended behavioural effects on the recipient household’s labour supply is of considerable policy interest. We examine the ‘intent to treat effect’ of the Indira Gandhi National Old-Age Pension Scheme on prime-age women’s labour supply decisions in India, where female...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from an insurgency in India
India has employed a variety of military, political and economic measures to combat the long running insurgency in Kashmir with little evidence on what contributes to stability in the region. This paper uses a variety of tests to detect structural breaks in the time series for violence over the...
Journal Article
We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment among childcare workers in Chandigarh, India, to evaluate discriminatory attitudes of the Hindu workers toward Muslim children. We use a third-party allocation game that controls for selfish payoff-maximizing preferences across the treatments and focus...
Globally, governments are using lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19. This has disproportionately affected the poor, the homeless, and the migrants who are left without livelihoods, especially where the lockdown is country-wide, as in India. But has it affected women more than men? If so, in...
– An all too real dilemma for the poor in India (and elsewhere)
On March 24, in a speech to the nation, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, announced a 21-day lockdown. With only four hours’ notice, 1.3 billion people were expected to stay at home and not venture out for three weeks. All buses, trains and domestic air flights were suspended. But the...
Working Paper
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This paper explores the relationship between household exposure to riots and social capital in urban India using a panel dataset collected by the authors in the state of Maharashtra. The analysis applies a random-effect model with lagged covariates to estimate the exogenous effect of riots on social...
Working Paper
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– An investigation of India’s employment guarantee programme
Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries.We focus on one such administrative failure—the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a life cycle...
Background Note
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– The case of India
Several countries have enacted lockdown measures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to protect their health systems and reduce the number of mortalities. One of the most extreme national lockdown measures has been taken by the government of India, with over 1.3 billion persons put under a strictly...
Working Paper
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– Landholding patterns and women’s low work participation rates in West Bengal, India
Compared with most other Indian states, women’s reported work participation rates have historically been low in West Bengal. This trend is more prominent in rural areas. Historians have tried to explain this phenomenon in terms of culture and the ideology of domesticity.While persisting cultural...
Working Paper
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In societies where surnames are inherited from parents, we can use these names to estimate rates of intergenerational mobility. This paper explains how to make such estimates, and illustrates their use in pre-industrial England and modern Chile and India. These surname estimates have the advantage...
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– Theory and evidence from India
What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...
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– Two episodes
Developing countries face a trade-off between the twin objectives of structural transformation and inclusive growth. This is the ‘developer’s dilemma’. This study analyses the dilemma as it manifested itself in the Indian context, and identifies two distinct episodes over the post-independence...
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– Measurement (and downward mobility) pitfalls
Limited attention has been paid to how well social mobility measures debated and used to study industrial countries perform in analysis of low-income settings. Following brief, selective reviews of the axiomatic and econometric literatures, three mobility concepts illustrate how properties that...
Working Paper
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– A comparison across different selection models
This study focuses on estimating the returns to education in non-farm self-employed businesses in the Indian context, using nationwide individual- and household-level data provided by the India Human Development Survey for the year 2011/12. Given that different studies have used different types of...
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Building knowledge about migration governance and policy in the Global South is a priority for research and policy. The studies in this special section offer both new empirical insights and new frameworks for analysis, with key policy implications, that can enrich our discussion of these topics...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from Indian Experience
Part of Journal Special Issue
Migration Governance and Policy in the Global South
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India
In emerging economies, pro-social policy outcomes may be prevented by bureaucratic inefficiency, capture by elected or non-elected office holders, or by other hurdles. For local citizens, uncertainty about the true cause of such failures often prevails. We study the pro-sociality of politicians’...
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– A comparative approach with India
We analyse income and expenditure distribution in China in a comparative perspective with India. These countries represent extreme cases in the relationship of inequality to both wellbeing indicators. Income is more highly concentrated than expenditure in India, especially at the top of the...
– Are non-farm jobs the driver or a brake?
The increasing proportion of non-agricultural work in rural India has commonly been associated with widening income inequality. However, our simulations from the village of Palanpur in the north suggest that without this diversification inequality might well have increased even more. From the mid...
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is particularly difficult because of data and analytical challenges. While most middle-income countries produce comprehensive household surveys these...
– Five key policies assessed
When Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in spring 2014 the Indian economy was in the doldrums. There was a clear policy paralysis in India’s central government, in large part due to the high profile corruption cases that involved the central government bureaucracy and politicians at the...
– The potential electoral consequences of demonetisation
In the campaign leading up to the Lok Sabha elections in spring 2014, one of the more important promises that Narendra Modi made was to ‘clean up’ the economy by bringing back to India all the illicit money that was purportedly stashed away overseas. After coming into power, the government led by...
Working Paper
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– Empirical evidence from Indian manufacturing firms
This paper examines whether digitalization can be a driver of ‘upgrading’ in global value chains and help developing countries move into higher value-added activities. In particular, the paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of digital capabilities on product upgrading in Indian...
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– A review of levels and trends
This paper contributes to the literature by reviewing levels, trends, and structure of inequality since the early 1990s in India. It draws extensively on the existing literature, supplemented with analyses of multiple data sources, to paint a picture. It notes where different data sources suggest...
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– Model-based simulation and case-study evidence
The North Indian village of Palanpur has been the subject of close study over a period of six decades from 1957/8 to 2015. Himanshu et al. (2018) have documented the evolution of the village economy over this period in an exhaustive study entitled How Lives Change: Palanpur, India and Development...
– Shreya Bhattacharya - 2018 PhD Fellow
In the fall of 2018 UNU-WIDER welcomed 11 doctoral students from around the world as part of our PhD Fellowship Programme. The students, from Ghana, India, Malaysia, Brazil, Ethiopia and Kenya, came to UNU-WIDER for three months to work on their research under the guidance of a UNU-WIDER researcher...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
This paper investigates if residing in a joint family affects non-farm employment for married women in rural India. Our estimates based on a longitudinal survey of over 27,000 women conducted in 2005 and 2012, and using the conditional logistic regression and instrumental variable approach suggest...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
– Evidence from an insurgency in India
Implementing development programmes in conflict-affected areas is crucial for conflict as well as poverty reduction. The big question is how do you carry out these programmes successfully? Are there specific conditions under which development policies are effective? What is their impact on violence...
Following the introduction of economic reforms in the early 1990s, India today is achieving unprecedented per capita growth rates. Poverty reduction has also accelerated and is justly celebrated. There is great concern, however, that this growth is being accompanied by rising inequality. Inequality...
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– The bird’s-eye and the granular perspectives
India today is achieving per capita growth rates that are historically unprecedented. Poverty reduction has also accelerated. There is concern, however, that this growth is being accompanied by rising inequality. We report on a research project that examines inequality trends and dynamics at the all...
Working Paper
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Productivity and socio-economic progress are inter-connected. Economic growth funds policies that promote socio-economic progress, while the latter serves as a growth engine. A society with high mobility is one where individual achievements are influenced less by the individual’s parents and more by...
Working Paper
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Studies of the spatial dimensions of inequality in developing countries are mostly restricted to states, provinces, or districts, typically the smallest geographical units for which data are representative in national surveys. We introduce a procedure to calculate inequality between and within...
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– Using house prices to estimate inequality in Mumbai
This paper applies a novel inequality estimation method to household consumption expenditure in Mumbai, India. Since the richest households may be missing in survey data, this re-estimated inequality figure takes them into account by combining survey data with house price data. However, application...
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– Poverty, vulnerability, and mobility, 1987–2012
We analyse the Indian National Sample Survey data spanning the period 1987/88–2011/12 to uncover patterns of transition into and out of different classes of consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income growth has accelerated, accompanied by accelerating poverty decline. Underlying these...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Female Autonomy and Women’s Welfare
There are three main channels of women’s empowerment: legal or policy reforms, outside economic opportunities, and collective action. Legal (or policy) reforms are generally based on statutory laws that enact rules to be followed or prohibit certain practices. External economic opportunities for...
From the book:
Towards Gender Equity in Development
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. As a result of widespread mistreatment and overt discrimination, women in the...
Working Paper
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– A chapter in the Asian drama
This paper is a short history of the Indian economy since 1968. India today is a changed country from what it was half a century ago, when Myrdal published his Asian Drama. The stranglehold of low growth has been broken, its population below the poverty line has fallen markedly, and India has joined...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
Working Paper
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Interventions in remote, rural settings face high transaction costs. We develop a model of household decision-making to evaluate how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) address these implementation-related challenges and influence intervention effectiveness. To test our model’s predictions, we...
Working Paper
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There has been a phenomenal global increase in the proportion of women in politics in the last 20 years. While there is evidence that raising the share of women politicians has substantive impacts on the composition of government spending, there is scarcely any evidence of how it influences economic...
Working Paper
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– An RIF decomposition approach
Despite the relevance of geographical disparities in India, earnings inequality occurs mostly within states, but with a broad range of variability in its levels. We investigate the sources of such variability using RIF decompositions of the inequality gaps between most populous states and India. Our...
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– Evidence from Indian experience
This paper examines the patterns and trends in inter-state migration across Indian states and observes that migration is affected by demographic profile as well as the fiscal profile of states. Econometric estimation suggests that level of vertical federal transfers and its horizontal distribution...
– Evidence from Delhi University colleges
College is an important milestone in life that is believed to develop several aspects of an individual's human capital, broadly defined to include both cognitive and socio-emotional traits. Consequently, there is great emphasis on obtaining admission into a more selective college. This column draws...
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This paper investigates if residing in a joint family affects non-farm employment for married women in rural India. Our estimates based on a longitudinal survey of over 27000 women conducted in 2005 and 2012, and using the conditional logistic regression and instrumental variable approach suggest...
Working Paper
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In this paper, we study the impact of ethnic fragmentation on the provision of private and public schools, separately. The distinction is made because the two types of schools have different objective functions, a factor which can influence the relationship between ethnic fragmentation and public...
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This paper analyses the pattern and determinants of income risk and expectation in rural India. It uses unique primary survey data eliciting subjective income distribution from households in twelve villages in Bihar. It finds that expected future income is significantly and positively associated...
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– Evidence from an insurgency in India
India has employed a variety of military, political, and economic measures to combat the long running insurgency in Kashmir with little evidence on what contributes to stability in the region. This paper uses a variety of tests to detect structural breaks in the time series for violence over the...
– Are private facilities better?
In India, the percentage of women who delivered in a health facility increased from roughly 35% in 2000 to 79% in 2014. Despite this progress, given India’s massive population, 15% of global maternal deaths took place in India in 2015, suggesting substantial gaps in quality of care at the time of...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– clinical observations of uncomplicated births in Uttar Pradesh, India
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring quality of care
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– Clinical observations of uncomplicated births in Uttar Pradesh, India
Objective: To evaluate the quality of essential care during normal labour and childbirth in maternity facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India. Methods: Between 26 May and 8 July 2015, we used clinical observations to assess care provision for 275 mother–neonate pairs at 26 hospitals. Data on 42 items of...
Working Paper
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– The relationship between gender and jati in three Indian states
This paper examines the relationship between caste and gender inequality in three states in India. When households are grouped using conventional, government-defined categories of caste we find patterns that are consistent with existing literature: lower-caste women are more likely to participate in...
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– Experimental evidence on caste and tolerance for teacher absenteeism in India
This article contributes to the growing scholarship on how ethnic inequality can dampen the provision of public goods and services. On the one hand, it pushes beyond purely economic inequality to include status inequality between population groups. On other hand, it moves away from the provision of...
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One-third of married women are sterilized in India. This is largely due to family planning programs that put a strong emphasis on ‘permanent’ contraceptive methods rather than temporary ones. However, little is known about potential adverse effects on women’s wellbeing. We analyse the consequences...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Objective To evaluate the impact on the quality of the care provided for childhood diarrhoea and pneumonia in Bihar, India, of a large-scale, social franchising and telemedicine programme – the World Health Partners’ Sky Program. Methods We investigated changes associated with the programme in the...
Working Paper
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Drawing data from the India Human Development Survey 2011 and the year of the first election with reserved seats for women pradhans, I estimate the effect of the Panchayati Raj institutions on age and autonomy over marriage. Results indicate that women in local government decrease the likelihood of...
Working Paper
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– The possibilities and the realities
The paper discusses the practical possibilities of achieving increased downstream processing and the policies that are commonly used for this purpose. It reviews the reasons why forward vertical integration is not always an optimal choice for extractive industry companies. It finds little support...
Working Paper
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– A revival is long overdue
This paper makes the case for the systematic appraisal of public sector projects using shadow prices as the signals of social scarcities. In so doing, it attempts to redress the balance between estimating inputs and outputs, central though that task is, and valuing them correctly. The account of how...
Working Paper
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We exploit the variation in the admissions process across colleges of a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on: cognitive attainment using scores on standardized university exams; behavioural preferences such as risk, competitiveness, and...
Improving the position of women continues to be an important concern in development. As we strive to make better living standards possible for people of all walks of life, we need to identify and meaningfully address problems faced by individuals and groups. The unfortunate truth is that women...
– The case of the Assam insurgency
Girls in India face many challenges. From the moment they are conceived, they are less likely to be born as compared to boys. This presence of “missing girls” appears to be linked to access to ultrasound technology. Moreover, girls also get breastfed for a shorter duration and get fewer childcare...
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This paper brings labour back into the literature on legal empowerment against poverty. Employing a historical lens, I outline three waves of legal movements. Each wave is distinguished by its timing, the state-level target, and the actors involved. In all three waves, legal empowerment was won, not...
Working Paper
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– Status inequality and vote choice in the Indian states
What explains the popularity of right-wing parties amongst the poor? This paper argues that in hierarchical societies with high social-status inequality, poor high-status voters may ally with rich high-status voters if they believe their social-status is under threat. I demonstrate this in the...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A synthetic control analysis
Using the synthetic control method, we analyze the economic effects of a unique counterinsurgency response to the Naxalite insurgency in India. Of all the states affected by Naxalite violence, only one state, Andhra Pradesh, raised a specially trained and equipped police force in 1989 known as the...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
The development of institutions of self-governance in India, and specifically the 2005 reform—the National Rural Health Mission that introduced village health and sanitation committees—provide a unique opportunity to study the effects of the strengthening of the political agency on collective...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from the manufacturing sector in India
This paper is related to the literature on the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the labour market of host countries. Labour market literature has focused on the demand side of FDI; that is, increasing wage inequality by demanding more skilled workers or just increasing the overall...
Working Paper
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Is multi-party coalition government better for the protection of socially backward classes in India?
The paper investigates whether multi-party coalition government is better for the protection of socially backward classes, i.e. Scheduled Castes, in India. We have looked at the impact of types of government on the reduction of the gap between Scheduled Castes and Upper Castes in terms of various...
Working Paper
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Using data from various rounds of the nationally representative NSSO survey between 1988 and 2012, we first construct national, state, and district-level figures for overall, within and between consumption inequality. We find an increase in inequality in India but only since 2004. We also document...
Working Paper
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– Comparative evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam
We investigate whether there are racial and ethnic disparities in children’s education in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. We find that in all the four countries, and especially in Vietnam, children from small ethnic groups have lower education attainment and cognitive ability. The gap in...
Working Paper
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In India, caste shapes access to a variety of resources and outcomes mainly through its influence on inter-generational prosperity, but also the linked phenomenon of discrimination. This paper examines whether caste-based differences in access to formal agricultural loans reflect discrimination in...
Working Paper
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Research on caste-based inequalities in India has generally focused on differences between large categories such as the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and the remainder of the population. We contribute to the literature on horizontal inequalities in India by looking within these groupings...
Working Paper
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Mandated political representation over the last twenty years has had a different impact on the reporting of crime by the low castes than what is observed for the reporting of crime by women. I exploit the timing of the implementation of mandated political representation of the low castes to examine...
Working Paper
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– Caste, affirmative action, and stigma
This paper presents the results of an attitude survey administered to university students in India that attempts to delineate the social–psychological mechanisms of ‘externalization’ and ‘internalization’ to understand the possible consequences of stigma associated with caste-based affirmative...
Working Paper
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– An experimental investigation
This paper examines whether, in India, discriminatory practices by government-employed child caregivers along religious lines, lead to differential health outcomes among the care receiving children. Child caregivers participate in a novel allocation game where we incorporate treatments to...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Assam
Using a large-scale novel panel dataset (2005–14) on schools from the Indian state of Assam, we test for the impact of violent conflict on female students’ enrollment rates. We find that a doubling of average killings in a district-year leads to a 13 per cent drop in girls’ enrollment rate with...
Working Paper
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Participatory community programmes are a potentially important tool for social empowerment and economic development. How do participatory programmes that specifically target women affect community trust and cohesion? This question is important since the longterm success of such programmes might...
Working Paper
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– Gender balance of power and intra-household educational spending in India
We assess the effect of female bargaining power on the share of educational expenditures in the household budget in India. We augment the collective household model by endogenizing female bargaining power and use a three-stage least squares approach to simultaneously estimate female bargaining power...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
The persistent gap in economic outcomes between the upper and lower caste groups in India is typically explained through differences in endowments and the presence of discrimination. While there is sizable literature that examines caste gaps in physical and intellectual human capital, this paper...
Working Paper
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– Discrimination in the rental housing market in Delhi, India
Using an audit experiment carried out on of India’s largest real estate websites, we document striking variations between landlords’ treatment of upper-caste Hindus, Other Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, and Muslims. We find strong evidence of discrimination against Muslim applicants, both in...
Working Paper
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– Lessons learned and a way forward
There are several countries who have responded to concerns regarding historically disadvantaged groups, particularly ethnic and racial minorities and women, with not only anti-discrimination legislation, but also affirmative action policies. Although these policies are seemingly well intentioned...
Working Paper
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– Firefighting in the field
Heterogeneity in subject populations often necessitates choosing an elicitation task that is intuitive, easy to explain, and simple to implement. Given that subject behaviour often differs dramatically across tasks when eliciting risk preferences, caution needs to be exercised in choosing one risk...
Working Paper
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– A comparative political economy analysis
China and India will have to radically transform their electric power systems in order to decouple economic growth from unsustainable resource consumption. While the majority of transition literature has focused on the diverse socio-technical factors that could enable such a transformation, more...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Caste gaps in earnings in Indian small businesses
Using the 2004–2005 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs) and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in...
Working Paper
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– Learning some lessons
India’s policy responses to the food price crisis were strong. Exports of basic staples were banned. Domestic support prices of wheat and rice were raised substantially. The urea price increases in global markets were absorbed through enhanced fertilizer subsidies. The government launched the...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Experimental evidence from India
We conduct a lab experiment to assess whether gender of dictators and recipients, and distributional preferences affect allocations in a modified dictator game where both parties perform a cognitive task and the resulting pie to be split is the sum of both parties’ earnings. Our key results are...
Blog
The celebration of the 30th Anniversary of UNU-WIDER presented the ideal opportunity to look back, take stock, and plan ahead. Where else can a group of early career researchers have the chance to present at a conference including Nobel Laureates such as Joseph Stiglitz, Martti Ahtisaari and Amartya...
Working Paper
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– Caste Gaps in Earnings in Indian Small Businesses
Using the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs), and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in...
Working Paper
pdf
– Experimental Evidence from India
We conduct a lab experiment to assess whether gender of dictators and recipients, and distributional preferences affect allocations in a modified dictator game where both parties perform a cognitive task and the resulting pie to be split is the sum of both parties’ earnings. Our key results are...
Blog
Just over a year ago, in March 2014, UNU-WIDER published a report entitled: What do we know about aid as we approach 2015? It notes the many successes of aid in a variety of sectors, and that in order to remain relevant and effective beyond 2015 aid must learn to deal with, amongst other things, the...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from India
Crimes against the historically marginalized Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC and ST) by the upper castes in India represent an extreme form of prejudice and discrimination. In this paper, we investigate whether changes in relative material standards of living between the SCs/STs and upper...
Working Paper
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– 1983 to 2009-10
This paper undertakes an assessment of the evolution of inequality in the distribution of consumption expenditure in India over the last quarter-century, from 1983 to 2009-10, employing data available in the quinquennial ‘thick’ surveys of the National Sample Survey Office. We find that plausible...
Working Paper
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We study a model of human capital driven growth, where the parent’s human capital serves as a productive input in the child’s human capital production only when that of the former exceeds a minimum level required to intellectually contribute to the child’s learning. Private and public expenditures...
Blog
Why does a mother from a poor African village not send her daughter to school, but instead marries her off to an old man as a second or third wife? This way poverty is inherited from parent to child. Or why does a boy from a remote village in a developed country, such as a Finland, drop out from...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Post-Multi-Fibre Arrangement India and some theoretical issues
The phased elimination of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement has been one of the most compelling trade policy reforms of the early twenty-first century, and has brought in significant changes in the industrial structures of the countries of the global south. The textile and clothing industry is the largest...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Andhra Pradesh, India
This paper explores the intergenerational effects of parental health shocks using longitudinal data from the Young Lives project conducted in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is found that health shocks to poorer parents reduce investments in children thereby reducing their future earnings, and...
Working Paper
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– An axiomatic approach with an empirical illustration
A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g. the mean or the median), the amalgam...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Role of Land Reform and Demographic Changes
Part of Journal Special Issue
Land and Property Rights
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Land and Property Rights
Journal Article
– Some evidence from Andhra Pradesh
Present in India since the 1960s, the Naxalite insurgency has steadily spread across the country. Counterinsurgency measures lagged behind and did not follow any systematic process till the early 2000s with the exception of Andhra Pradesh, which in 1989 established the Greyhounds, an anti-Naxalite...
Working Paper
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– Concepts, with Examples from India
The incredibly low levels of learning and the generally dysfunctional public sector schooling systems in many (though not all) developing countries are the result of a capability trap (Pritchett et al. 2010). Two phenomena reinforce persistent failure of schooling systems to produce adequate...
– Is There a Case to Finance Them?
One reason for unsatisfactory public service delivery in Indian cities is that city finances are in poor condition. Recent research shows that given the fragmented institutional arrangements for land in India's cities, there is a case for transferring revenues from land leasing and sales to cities...
Book Chapter
From the book:
Food Price Policy in an Era of Market Instability
Working Paper
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– Trends and Measurement
This paper discusses different approaches to the measurement of global interpersonal in equality. Trends in global interpersonal inequality during 1975-2005 are measured using data from UNU-WIDER’s World Income Inequality Database. In order to better understand the trends, global interpersonal...
Working Paper
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– State Health Insurance Scheme of Andhra Pradesh, India
The objectives of the study are three-fold: to investigate who are vulnerable to welfare loss from health shocks, what are the household responses to cope with the economic burden of health shocks and if policy responses like state health insurance schemes are effective in reducing the economic...
Blog
17 October 2013 David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers, and Michael Woolcock When asked why she wrote novels about poverty rather than gather what we would now call ‘hard’ data, the Victorian novelist George Eliot famously responded that ‘a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even...
Working Paper
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– the Case Study of India
India did not experience any food price spikes during 2007–08 when global food prices erupted. It was partly due to India’s ban on exports of wheat and common rice. But the fiscal stimulus that the government provided in 2009 in the wake of G8 countries’ call to avert economic recession, coupled...
Journal Article
– Evidence from the Punjab Insurgency
Part of Journal Special Issue
Entrepreneurship and Conflict
Working Paper
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– Some Evidence on Intergenerational Occupational Mobility from India
Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005, we examine intergenerational occupational mobility in India, an issue on which very few systematic and rigorous studies exist. We group individuals into classes and document patterns of mobility at the rural, urban and all-India levels...
Working Paper
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– Theory and Evidence from West Bengal, India
We provide a theory of political clientelism, which explains sources and determinants of political clientelism, the relationship between clientelism and elite capture, and their respective consequences for allocation of public services, welfare, and empirical measurement of government accountability...
Blog
– Emerging Challenges for Post-2015 MDGs
Rolph van der Hoeven and Peter van Bergeijk One of the most important trends that emerged since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is the rapid growth of some large developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil. Figure 1 illustrates the shift of the economic weight of...
Working Paper
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This paper reviews the evidence on the ‘inclusiveness’ of the growth in consumption expenditure that has occurred in India over the last four decades or so. The notion of dynamic inclusiveness is framed in terms of imagined normative allocations of the inter-temporal product of growth, as dictated...
Working Paper
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India addressed the requirement for pro-poor service delivery in rural regions by introducing decentralization and affirmative action policies. In order to measure the social preferences of local decision makers, we conducted field experiments which simulated the selection of needy beneficiaries for...
Blog
Tony Addison With our temperatures now well above zero, we head for the official end of the Finnish winter on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday). As reported last month, the annual bird migration is well under way. Arriving too, are UNU-WIDER’s many visitors on our PhD internship and visiting scholar...
Blog
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a glimmer of better days to come. I heard birdsong for the first time last week, and the great annual bird migrations into our northern lands are now underway...
Blog
– Making Growth more Inclusive, Part 2
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But there is now much concern about whether impressive growth rates are yielding enough poverty reduction. The present debate about their poverty lines is a...
Book Chapter
– Negotiating Closed Doors and Windows of Opportunity
From the book:
Urbanization and Development in Asia
Blog
Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The temperature is well below zero (minus 20oc). But we are now gaining light, having past the shortest day of the year in December. Our mood also brightened...
Blog
– What Does This Mean for the Fight Against Global Poverty? Part I
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But there is now much concern about whether impressive growth rates are yielding enough poverty reduction. The present debate about their poverty lines is a...
Blog
Tony Addison With the end of the year fast approaching, we bring you the last Angle of 2011. Here in Helsinki, the shortest day of the year is nearly upon us when we will have six hours of daylight. In the Finnish arctic the sun does not rise, the polar night lasting 51 days. Little snow yet—perhaps...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from West Bengal
We use data on inter-generational gains in educational attainment by some 500,000 individuals in 200 West Bengal villages to explore gender-differentiated impacts of land reform on human capital accumulation at the individual level. While there are significant gains (of about 0.3 years for males) in...
Working Paper
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– Is There a Case for Public Land Leasing and Sales to Finance India’s Cities?
In this study an attempt has been made to assess the potential of land as a municipal financing tool in four Indian cities, to enable better public service delivery and attainment of the MDGs. The institutional arrangements for land use are fragmented in India’s cities between the urban development...
Working Paper
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This paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated. Prior to acquisition, the farmers are leasing in land from a landlord, either a private owner or a local government. There are three sets of...
Working Paper
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– Role of Land Reform
This paper uses data from a household survey to estimate changes in land distribution in rural West Bengal between 1967-2004 and decompose these into contributions of different factors. There was a substantial drop in land per household and land per capita, while within-village inequality rose. The...
Journal Article
– A Comparative Perspective to the Asian Giants
Part of Journal Special Issue
Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Journal Article
– Brazil and the CIBS in a Comparative Perspective
Part of Journal Special Issue
Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Journal Article
– China and India
Part of Journal Special Issue
Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Journal Article
Part of Journal Special Issue
Southern Growth Engines and Technology Giants
Entrepreneurship and innovation are two of the most pervasive concepts of our times, yet there are still gaps in our understanding of the interactions between entrepreneurship and innovation, particularly in developing countries. This book is an attempt to fill this gap. It focuses on the...
Blog
Wim Naudé and Adam Szirmai Nobody can be left in any doubt as to the importance of innovation for prosperity on reading[i] that ‘People living in the first decade of the twentieth century did not know modern dental and medical equipment, penicillin, bypass operations, safe births, control of...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A Fourier Flexible functional form and Stochastic Frontier Approach
The Indian financial sector has undergone a significant structural transformation since the initiation of financial liberalization during 1990’s. It brought significant changes in the financial sector in general and banking in particular. While there have been significant changes in the financial...
Book Chapter
– Evidence from the Indian Software Sector
From the book:
Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Economic Development
Working Paper
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– Country Role Models of Development Success?
The paper discusses views on China and India as country role models. In so doing the article recounts the economic and political reforms pursued by the two countries. The paper also outlines the outstanding reforms and the bottlenecks that could jeopardize economic performance and development going...
– Impacts, Prospects and Implications
The rise of China and India is rapidly reshaping the world economy, with far-reaching implication for every national and regional government, business community, and individual citizen. Arising from the UNU-WIDER research project 'Southern Engines of Global growth', this volume explores the...
Blog
– Lessons for Developing Countries
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan China and India have become global economic powers. Even at the market exchange rate, China overtook Japan in 2010 as the second largest economy. China’s trade and financial activities, India’s emergence as a technology and innovation hub, and both countries...
Policy Brief
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– China, India, Brazil and South Africa
This Policy Brief focuses on links between the developing countries of Brazil, India, China and South Africa and the global economy, with a special emphasis on the implications of China’s spectacular growth on developing economies and the rest of the world. The issues considered include changing...
Journal Article
– A Disaggregated Analysis
The paper analyses export productivity and trade specialisation in China, Brazil, India and South Africa. The investigation calculates a time-varying export productivity measure using highly disaggregated product categories. The modelling shows that export productivity is determined by real income...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Bangalore (India)
This paper aims at economic analysis of economic globalization and urban growth of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, as they are related to ICT sector. Overall analyses offer new insights and evidences for ICT sector as a major contributor for degree of economic globalization and urban...
Blog
It's imperative to demolish myths around the economic achievements of China and India and get a better sense of the real challenges. The author of the book, 'Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India' (Princeton University Press, 2010) discusses here some of the...
Working Paper
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– Negotiating Closed Doors and Windows of Opportunity
This paper examines land tenure in informal urban settlements in India from a gender perspective through field research conducted in Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA). The author describes the formal and informal tenure arrangements that were in place in...
China, India, Brazil, and South Africa are reshaping the world economy. These Southern Engines countries have experienced a dramatic transformation in their productive and trade capabilities, consequently turning into global super powers. The current age of globalization, in which the Southern...
Working Paper
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– A Case Study of India
South Asia has the highest rate of child malnutrition in the world, despite rapid economic growth compared to other regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. Known as the ‘South Asian enigma’ this feature is partly attributed to the low status of women in South Asian societies. This paper examines this...
Working Paper
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Do local improvements in infrastructure provision improve city competitiveness? What public finance mechanisms stimulate local infrastructure supply? And how do local efforts compare with national decisions of placing inter-regional trunk infrastructure? In this paper, we examine how the combination...
Book Chapter
From the book:
Urbanization and Development
Book Chapter
– New Approaches to Development Strategy Based on the Service Sector
From the book:
The Rise of China and India
Book Chapter
– Are China and India Reshaping the World?
From the book:
Southern Engines of Global Growth
Book Chapter
– What Opportunities for Other Developing Countries?
From the book:
Southern Engines of Global Growth
Book Chapter
– What Lessons Have Been Learnt since the East Asian Crisis in 1997/98?
From the book:
Southern Engines of Global Growth
Working Paper
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– Lessons from the Indian Software Sector
It is commonly believed that the business environment in developing countries does not allow productive technology-based entrepreneurship to flourish. In this paper, we draw on the experience of Indian software firms where entrepreneurial growth has belied these predictions. This paper argues that...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from India
This paper probes the drivers, dimensions, achievements, and outcomes of technological innovations carried out by SMEs in the auto components, electronics, and machine tool sectors of Bangalore in India. Further, it ascertains the growth rates of innovative SMEs vis-à-vis non-innovative SMEs in...
Journal Article
– Is India following the Footsteps of Asia or Africa?
Part of Journal Special Issue
FDI, Employment, and Growth in China and India
Working Paper
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There is enough consensus to show that India’s economic performance since 1991 is a direct result of the economic liberalization measures that have been put in place. One of the outcomes of this improved performance is the growth of innovations in the country. This was accompanied by or caused by...
The project centers on the inter-linkages between the major developing countries of Brazil, India, China and South Africa and the global economy, with a special emphasis on the implications of China's growth on smaller economies and the rest of the world. The research areas include changing patterns...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from China and India
This paper examines the country specific effect of policy reform on infrastructure spending in China and India. In China we have examined how marketization and decentralization has affected the composition of provincial public expenditure and in the case of India we have examined the impact of...
Working Paper
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– Accidents, Design and Replicability
This paper examines India’s development strategy, and to what extent it may be considered a success. It provides a brief history of why and how the strategy was adopted, as well as of its implementation, including the role of initial conditions, such as human capital, geographical location, and...
Book Chapter
From the book:
Vulnerability in Developing Countries
Working Paper
pdf
For many in Latin America, the increasing participation of China and India in international markets is seen as a looming shadow of two ‘mighty giants’ on the region’s manufacturing sector. Are they really mighty giants when it comes to their impact on manufacturing employment? This paper attempts to...
Working Paper
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– Long Term Forecasts for Regional Integration
Economic emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India has fundamentally altered the economic landscape of Asia and its relation to the global economy. Using the new dynamic global model, we present forecasts for Asian expansion over 2025. These baseline growth forecasts elucidate...
Working Paper
pdf
– Brazil and the CIBS in a Comparative Perspective
Schumepterian growth theory stresses the role of structural change in long run growth. Countries which increase the share of technology-intensive sectors in their economic structures benefit more from technological learning and innovation. In addition, they are more able to respond to changes in the...
– Growth, Trade, Investment and Institutional Developments
There has been considerable media coverage of China’s trade and financial activities, on India’s emergence as a technology and innovation hub, and on the commerce and investment interactions between China, India, Brazil, and South Africa and other developing nations. For example, China has been...
Working Paper
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– The Roles of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa
Software technology is gaining prominence in national information technology (IT) strategies due to its huge potential for socioeconomic development, particularly through the support it provides in the productive sectors of the economy, delivery of public services and engagement of citizens. In...
Working Paper
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– A Comparative Study
The Indian economy has observed significant trade reforms since the mid 1980s, and the Indian manufacturing sector has rapidly increased its integration with the world economy. In this paper, we ask the question: did the increased trade integration create or destroy jobs in the Indian manufacturing...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Brazil, China, and India
We compare economic efficiencies in Brazil, India, and China, where economic efficiency measures the gap between potential and actual output for a given input combination and technological factor. We use stochastic production frontier models to measure the contributions of factors of production and...
Journal Article
Part of Journal Special Issue
The Rise of China and India
Journal Article
– A Comparative Study of China and India
Part of Journal Special Issue
The Rise of China and India
Working Paper
pdf
– CIBS, Capital Flows, and Exchange Rates
This paper discusses the movement of capital flows to and from the exchange rate regimes and monetary policies of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS). Furthermore, we compare the level of financial stability, and the composition and duration of capital flows of the countries on a policy...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Quantitative Analysis
Following the economic liberalization in India, the service sector has gained prominence in the economy as it accounts for the largest share of GDP and, also that the share of this sector in GDP has been growing very rapidly. Empirical data reveal two significant trends in the service sector...
Working Paper
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– What Opportunities for Other Developing Countries?
This paper examines the implications of the liberalization of capital outflows in China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS) for other developing countries. It focuses on their prospects of attracting not only foreign direct investment (FDI), but also portfolio capital flows from CIBS. To inform...
Working Paper
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– Lessons for the Emerging Economies
Can we use neoclassical growth model to single out the important transmission channels through which external factors or ‘primitives’ affected the Indian economy and caused the remarkable growth of the period 1982–2002? In this paper, we answer the question by applying the new technique of business...
Working Paper
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– Economy Wide Approaches
The main purpose of this paper is to look at the incorporation of gender and the informal sector within a general equilibrium framework for India. Moreover, we clarify some important links between a gender aware informal sector based social accounting matrix (SAM) and general equilibrium models such...
Working Paper
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– Engines of Growth?
This paper attempts to analyse the economic implications of the rise of China, India, Brazil and South Africa, for developing countries situated in the wider context of the world economy. It examines the possible impact of their rapid growth on industrialized countries and developing countries...
Working Paper
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– New Approaches to Development Strategy Based on the Service Sector
Industrialization occupies a central place in the rich tapestry of development theory and practice. Although that place has varied over time, many have agreed with Nicholas Kaldor that the kind of economic growth that leads to high real income per capita can only occur through industrialization...
Working Paper
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This paper discusses the livelihood dynamics in the fragile landscape of the semi arid tropics (SAT) of Andhra Pradesh. SAT is home to the poorest of the poor who live in conditions of persistent drought, subsistence agriculture and poor access to markets. This paper is a case study focusing...
Working Paper
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– Estimates for Rural India
This paper measures the vulnerability of households in rural India, based upon the ICRISAT panel survey. We employ both ex ante and ex post measures of vulnerability. The latter are decomposed into aggregate and idiosyncratic risks and poverty components. Our decomposition shows that idiosyncratic...
Working Paper
pdf
The segmentation of global manufacturing and services provided China and subsequently India with a golden opportunity to make full use of their absolute advantage—low cost yet educated labour—to integrate into the world economy within a comparatively shorter period of time than some earlier...
Working Paper
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– A Comparative Study of China and India
A comparative study is undertaken that explores Chinese and Indian pharmaceutical industries under different patent regimes. It is found that relative to India, which had implemented process patent until 2005, China with a product patent regime since 1993 suffers from both lower drug accessibility...
Working Paper
pdf
– China and India
Both China and India, the emerging giants in Asia, have achieved significant economic development in recent years. China has enjoyed a high annual GDP growth rate of 10 per cent and India has achieved an annual GDP growth rate of 6 per cent since 1981. Decomposing China and India’s GDP growth from...
Working Paper
pdf
– Are China and India Re shaping the World?
Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the...
Working Paper
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This paper analyses the patterns of export productivity and trade specialization profiles in the China, Brazil, India and South Africa, and in other regional groupings. In doing so, the investigation calculates a time varying export productivity measure using highly disaggregated product categories...
Working Paper
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– Are the Southern Engines of Growth Different?
Using a panel of 139 countries over the period 1992-2003, we analyse the links between export productivity, economic growth and financial development indicators. We then investigate whether the links observed in China, India and Brazil systematically differ from those observed in other countries in...
Working Paper
pdf
– A New or Old Phenomenon?
The burgeoning literature on outward foreign direct investment from emerging markets has largely focused on analysing the motives of investors as reported by parent companies. This paper, instead, focuses on firm-level investments originating from China, India or South Africa in fifteen host...
Working Paper
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Moderate undernutrition continues to affect 46 per cent of children under 5 years of age and 47 per cent of rural women in India. Women’s lack of empowerment is believed to be an important factor in the persistent prevalence of undernutrition. In India, women’s empowerment often varies by community...
Working Paper
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– Implications for the WTO-Multilateral Trading System
The rise of the emerging southern economies – China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS) – as both economic and political actors, is having significant and far-reaching impact on the world economy. Notwithstanding the increasing amount of study and research, there are still important knowledge...
Working Paper
pdf
– Threat or Opportunity
By exploring the export performances and specialization patterns of China and India, we assess their trade competitiveness and complementarity vis-à-vis each other as well as with the rest of the world. Our analysis indicates that (i) India faces tough competition from China in the third markets...
Working Paper
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– Very Long Cycles or Short Spurts?
This article views the four economies of the South in a long run historical perspective of 1500-2000. It contrasts the history and the initial endowments of the two Northern hemisphere economies China and India which are land scarce and labour abundant with the two Southern hemisphere economies...
Book Chapter
From the book:
Achieving the Millennium Development Goals
Book Chapter
From the book:
Achieving the Millennium Development Goals
Book Chapter
From the book:
Achieving the Millennium Development Goals
Book Chapter
From the book:
Development Finance in the Global Economy
Book Chapter
– An Analytical Study of Macroeconomic and Institutional Issues
Book Chapter
– An Empirical Assessment of the Indian Economy
Book Chapter
– Relative Rankings of States using Fuzzy Models
From the book:
Globalization and the Poor in Asia
Book Chapter
– On the Margins or Frontiers of Globalization
From the book:
Globalization and the Poor in Asia
Book Chapter
– Lessons from South Indian Small Scale Fishery
From the book:
Globalization and the Poor in Asia
Book Chapter
From the book:
Personal Wealth from a Global Perspective
Book Chapter
From the book:
The International Mobility of Talent
Blog
by Meghnad Desai The emergence of four economies from the ‘South’ as important players in the global economy has attracted attention. These four economies, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS) were thought, for different reasons, to be hopeless ‘basket cases’ during the second half of the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from China, India, and Brazil
We use large survey data sets of firms provided by the World Bank for China, India, and Brazil—Investment Climate Surveys—to address the important question: what determines the locational choice of firms among cities in these countries. We find that capital cities in all countries are attractive for...
Working Paper
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– Implications for the MDG Poverty Target
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major investments in the social sector; but how much they will...
Working Paper
pdf
– An Empirical Assessment of the Indian Economy
This study is an attempt towards an integration of financial development and its effect on the real sector via the transmission mechanism with special reference to developing and emerging market economies. It finds two cointegrating relations between the financial development, output growth and...
Book Chapter
– The Experience of a Large Populated Country - India
From the book:
Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure
Book Chapter
– A Comparison of the Experiences of India and China
From the book:
Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure
Book Chapter
– Lessons from the Right to Food Movement in India
From the book:
Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure
Working Paper
pdf
– Lessons from the Right to Food Movement in India
In April 2001 the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) approached the Supreme Court of India arguing that the government has a duty to provide greater relief in the context of mass hunger. The litigation has now become the best known precedent on the right to food internationally. This paper...
Working Paper
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By 2000, over one-third of Silicon Valley’s high-skilled workers were foreign-born, and overwhelmingly from Asia. These US-educated engineers are transforming developmental opportunities for formerly peripheral regions as they build professional and business connections to their home countries. In a...
Working Paper
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– Bottlenecks in Delivering the Expected Outcome
Over the past decade, a series of events in India have brought the question of food security into sharp focus. Vast famine-affected areas versus surplus production and stocks of grains, the impact of globalization and World Trade Organization laws on agriculture and farmers, the media’s spotlight on...
Working Paper
pdf
– India under Current Compulsions
Food insecurity at the household level has become unacceptable in India where the economy is growing at high rates and food sufficiency is already achieved at the macro-level. Food security has always been an important issue in the Indian political economy and was addressed by numerous poverty...
Working Paper
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– A Comparative Analysis across Regions
This study analyses the changes in prevalence of undernutrition between the 1980s and 1990s at the national and sub-national levels in India and focuses on the rural-urban comparisons. The study exploits the demographic information available in household surveys to derive a household-specific norm...
Working Paper
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This paper reviews the principal source of India’s wealth distribution statistics, which is constituted by the five decennial Reserve Bank of India National Sample Survey Organization Surveys on Debt and Investment of 1961-62, 1971-72, 1981-82, 1991-92, and 2002-03. The data available are described...
Working Paper
pdf
– Lessons from South-Indian Small-Scale Fishery
We study the diffusion of a capital intensive technology among a fishing community in south India and analyze the dynamics of income inequality during this process. We find that lack of asset wealth is an important predictor of delayed technology adoption. During the diffusion process, inequality...
Working Paper
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– A Comparison of the Experiences of India and China
A comparative study of the public distribution systems of foodgrains in India and China is expected to reveal lessons and experiences that are valuable to policymakers. This is particularly important for developing countries in their endeavour to ensure food security. This paper undertakes such an...
Working Paper
pdf
– On the Margins or Frontiers of Globalization?
It is often argued that an important reason why globalization may lead to GDP growth but fail to reduce poverty is because the poor are unable to participate in the new market opportunities and are marginalized. In this paper we examine the experience of resource-poor farmers in south India, who...
Working Paper
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– Prospects of Meeting the MDG Target
This paper uses two large repeated cross-sections, one for the early 1990s, and one for the late 1990s, to describe growth in school enrolment and completion rates for boys and girls in India, and to explore the extent to which enrolment and completion rates have grown over time. It decomposes this...
Working Paper
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This paper investigates the extent to which the decline in child mortality over the last three decades can be attributed to economic growth. In doing this, it exploits the considerable variation in growth over this period, across states and over time. The analysis is able to condition upon a number...
Working Paper
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– Building State Capability
The northeast region of India remains fraught with severe violence, poor growth and acute frustration among its youth. Success of policies to resolve the region’s crisis has proved less than encouraging. What could be the way out of the violence–poor growth trap? This paper argues that a key...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Experience of India, a Large Populated Country
India accounts for 16.7 per cent of the world’s food consumers. With the exception of China, India’s size in terms of food consumers is many times larger than the average size of the rest of the countries. At the time of independence in 1947, India was in the grip of a serious food crisis, which was...
Working Paper
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– A Firm-Level Panel Study for India
Traditionally, firms in India have shown a low preference towards debt financing, despite its advantages. Using panel data from 450 firms during 1992-93 and 2003-04, we attempt to identify factors which could explain the pattern of financing of manufacturing firms in India and the key determinants...
Working Paper
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– A Kaldorian Analysis
This paper uses a Kaldorian framework to examine the evidence of deindustrialization in developing countries at low levels of income, the jobless growth in these economies and the fast expansion of the informal sector. The questions are specifically examined for the Indian economy, using state level...
Working Paper
pdf
In this paper an attempt is made to assess the impact of economic reforms on the incidence of poverty by decomposing the change in poverty ratio between two time points into growth/mean effect, inequality effect and the population shift effect. Based on the National Sample Survey data an analysis...
Working Paper
pdf
– Relative Rankings of States Using Fuzzy Models
The net impact of globalization on developing countries, and more specifically on the poorer sections of population in these countries, is complex and context dependent, and hence needs to be analysed empirically. This study in the context of globalization attempts to develop regional level indices...
Working Paper
pdf
– Implications for the MDG Poverty Target
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major investments in the social sector; but how much they will...
Book Chapter
– A Case Study of Indian Small Automotive Component Unit
From the book:
New Economy in Development
Book Chapter
From the book:
Linking the Formal and Informal Economy
Book Chapter
– Getting Behind Jobless Growth in India
From the book:
Informal Labour Markets and Development
Book Chapter
– A Case Study of Delhi Slum Dwellers
From the book:
Informal Labour Markets and Development
Book Chapter
– Concept, Definition, and Measurement Issues in India Empirical Studies of Policies and Interlinking
From the book:
Linking the Formal and Informal Economy
Working Paper
pdf
– Child Labour and Capability Deprivation in India
This paper explores the hypothesis that the phenomenon of child labour is explicable in terms of poverty that compels a household to keep its children out of school and put them to work in the cause of the household’s survival. In exploring the link between child labour and poverty in the Indian...
Journal Article
– Theory and Evidence from India
Part of Journal Special Issue
Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional disparities exist. This project will investigate the...
Journal Article
For some time now, there has been growing dissatisfaction with the conceptual basis of India’s official poverty statistics, with specific reference to the manner in which the Planning Commission has sought to address the ‘identification’ problem in poverty measurement. Unfortunately, this has evoked...
Book Chapter
– Testing Theories of Risk-Sharing in the ICRISAT Study Region of South India
From the book:
Insurance Against Poverty
Book Chapter
From the book:
Insurance Against Poverty
Book Chapter
– Theory and Evidence from India
From the book:
Spatial Disparities in Human Development
Book Chapter
From the book:
Spatial Disparities in Human Development
Many developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional disparities exist. This project will investigate the...
Working Paper
pdf
– India and Japan in Comparative Perspectives
The objective here is to understand how the mobility of technical talent might be changing the structural relationship between rich and poor countries. This paper examines the under-researched relationship between India and Japan in the context of globalization, migration, and developmental impact...
Working Paper
pdf
Over the last decade, India has been one of the fastest growing economies, and has experienced considerable decline in overall income poverty. However, in a vast country like India, poverty levels vary significantly across the different states. In this paper, we analyze the differences between...
Working Paper
pdf
– Theory and Evidence from India
We argue that spatial inequality of industry location is a primary cause of spatial income inequality in developing nations. We focus on understanding the process of spatial industrial variation—identifying the spatial factors that have cost implications for firms, and the factors that influence the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Implications for a Developing Country
India’s capital account displays a sharp swing in external financing from official assistance to private capital transfers in the 1990s. This paper examines the implications of this transition for the country. An analysis of the private resource transfer reveals that unlike official flows, private...
Book Chapter
– Distribution Dynamics of Economic Growth Across Indian States
From the book:
Growth, Inequality and Poverty
Book Chapter
– Has Liberalization Helped?
Book Chapter
– A Regional Study of Indian Agriculture
Working Paper
pdf
– Some Dynamics and Explanations of Unequal Growth across Indian States
This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over the period 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by tracking the evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and time series analyses. The findings reveal twin-peaks...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Regional Study of Indian Agriculture
Trade liberalization, by aligning domestic prices with world prices, is envisaged to bring welfare gains to a country. In the case of Indian agriculture, owing to the vastness and diversity of the sector, the impact is likely to be profoundly unequal across regions especially when liberalization is...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Firm-level Economic Analysis of Selected Indian Industries under Economic Liberalization
The economic liberalization in India was expected to boost the economy, particularly the industrial sector through faster technological development. The Schumpeterian hypothesis, which studies the relationship between market structure variables such as firm size and market concentration and their...
Journal Article
Poor rural and urban households in developing countries face substantial risks, which they handle with risk-management and risk-coping strategies, including self-insurance through savings and informal insurance mechanisms. Despite these mechanisms, however, vulnerability to poverty linked to risk...
Working Paper
pdf
– Realities of the Myths of the Indian Experience
While there is an increasing realization of the potential that IT offers for human welfare, IT-induced productivity and growth are confined to the developed world. It is argued that even though the international digital divide is a reality, there are certain specific characteristics of the new...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Case Study of the Automotive Component Industry
This paper endeavours to study the impact of technology on the competitiveness of the Indian small-scale automotive component units. The effect of technology is measured by directly introducing it in the production function along with the conventional inputs. For the purpose of analysis, we have...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Indian Firms
The paper identifies and analyses the factors that influenced the export performance of firms in the post-liberalization era of the Indian economy. The study is based on primary data collected from fifty-one firms located in the national capital region. Entrepreneurial characteristics, historical...
Journal Article
Part of Journal Special Issue
The New Economy
Working Paper
pdf
– Testing Theories of Risk-Sharing in the ICRISAT Study Region of South India
Panel data from villages in rural south India have been used for leading econometric studies on risk-sharing in village economies. The work has influenced debate on safety net design world-wide and has driven scholarly agendas on household economics. This paper critically surveys work to date and...
Journal Article
– A Dynamic Panel Data Approach
Conventional wisdom on capital structure choices has been by and large confined to the United States and a few advanced countries having institutional similarities. In this paper we make an attempt to provide some insight into the capital structure choice of developing countries through a case study...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India—two economies that account for a third of the world’s population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper calibrates the impact each has on different welfare indicators and on the personal...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Case of Food Subsidies in India
This paper investigates the effect of a food subsidy programme in India on child malnutrition by addressing the following linked questions using household survey data that includes information on usage of the public distribution system. First, does the food subsidy induce higher expenditures on food...
Book Chapter
– A Gender Analysis of Community Forestry in South Asia
From the book:
Group Behaviour and Development
Book Chapter
– Political Activism, Community Identity, and Group Behaviour
From the book:
Group Behaviour and Development
Working Paper
pdf
– Misspecified Policies and Estimates
Specification counts in the formulation of any economic problem, estimation of its magnitude and its assessment. This is particularly so for problems in the context of economic development. Solutions for poverty alleviation in developing countries like India are often formulated under misspecified...
Working Paper
pdf
The standard method of testing for efficient risk-sharing in village economies does not allow one to identify vulnerable households, only to make statements about the average risk in the village, or of sub-groups identifiable on the basis of observables. Here, by working directly with inter...
Working Paper
pdf
– an Application of Choice Models to Urban India
This paper examines consumer preferences for the attributes of alternative sources of water supply in Chennai, based on a household survey where respondents were given the description of a set of options. Their decision to choose one of the options is examined using discrete choice models. Whether...
Working Paper
pdf
– Convergence Empirics of Economic Growth across Indian States
This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over the period 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by tracking the evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and time series analyses. The findings reveal twin-peaks...
Working Paper
pdf
– Institutions, Entitlements and Aspects of Inequality in Access
The main contributions of the paper can be divided into five areas. (a) It tries to explain conceptually, the institutional arrangements for water supply in Chennai and whether the state government’s decision about improving the performance of the water utility depends on particular political...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper assesses the contribution of software to India's economic development, paying particular attention to the role of software in the absorption of labour and the development of human capital in the economy. India's specialization in software has been driven by two sorts of wage advantages...
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