This paper contributes to the historical political economy literature, which considers the fiscal imperatives of the state to be amongst the driving forces behind the emergence of representative systems of government, by examining the impact on democracy of a government's reliance on alternative...

This paper surveys the status of food security in the South Asian countries, particularly India. Particular attention has been paid to small landholders (those households owning less than 2 hectares of land). Using NSS data from 1993–94 and 2004–05 the paper shows that small landholders are...

Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple...

In recent decades economists have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to...

Using data from metropolitan U.S. labor market areas, we quantify empirical associations between entry by small firms and a vector of economic performance measures encompassing levels, volatilities, and growth rates of several income and employment variables. Distinct and robust associations are...

In Is corruption influenced by economic growth? Are legal institutions such as the 'Right to Information Act (RTI) 2005' in India effective in curbing corruption? Using a novel panel dataset covering 20 Indian states and the periods 2005 and 2008 we estimate the causal effects of economic growth...

We reconsider the theory of ambiguous property rights in China. In a static game context, this ownership allocation is good because a local entrepreneur can probably get services provided by local bureaucrats at lower costs than a private owner; but bad because once knowing the firm’s...

This paper discusses Vietnam’s economic development for the three decades since the early 1980s, and the changing role that the state played in this process. The success of the first major liberalization step (Doi Moi ) is attributed, in large part, to the microeconomic/structural reforms that...

This paper uses data from Peru, Pakistan and Ghana to simultaneously analyse child labour and child schooling, and compares them between these countries .We use a multinomial logit estimation procedure that analyses the participation and non participation of children in schooling and in...

While the global environment waits for the world to reach some form of agreement on climate policy, developing countries such as India are entering a phase of higher economic growth. The decisions on investment in energy systems that will be made in India in coming years will have an important...