This paper has the objective of showing that identity based voting will lead to improvements in household welfare through increased access to welfare programs. Using newly available data from rural India, we establish that identity based voting will lead to enhanced participation in welfare...

Attempts to maintain prices different from those that would otherwise be determined by supply and demand are virtually guaranteed to result in illegal behaviour, including in the case of laws that determine the salaries of civil servants. In Indonesia, private sector salaries are highly...

The paper develops a simple model of the Soeharto 'franchise', in which the coercive power of government was deployed in the interests of the president, his family, his business cronies and key officials within the franchise. The franchise prospered by generating rents that could be harvested...

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...

In India an important policy initiative has been the devolution of financial responsibilities to village level local governments called the Panchayats. The Preamble to this initiative is two fold. First such devolution would not only lead to increased public expenditure but also such...

This paper examines the design of the fiscal 'equalisation', or 'balancing', arrangements introduced in Indonesia in 2001, when many functions were devolved from the central to regional governments. This new and needlessly complex system of fiscal transfers was introduced hurriedly, and lacked...

This paper models the behavior of states in a federal country wising to attract foreign firms to locate within their own individual jurisdictions. The essential intertemporal character of this decision is modeled as a multi-stage game to attract such foreign investment in these states. It is...

Matching mechanisms have been proposed to mitigate underprovision of public goods in voluntary contribution models. This paper investigates Pareto-improving equilibria under various matching schemes with two heterogeneous players. First, this matching mechanism avoids free riding and each player...

This paper presents a broad overview of fiscal issues confronting developing countries. Three of these are (i) developing countries have low tax/GDP and expenditure/GDP ratios compared to developed countries, even though developing countries need more public expenditure; (ii) developing country...

Given that the phenomenon of capture of public programs by sections the population is rampant in developing countries, households can indulge in a strategy to improve their odds of participating in public programs by bribing the suppliers of such programs. This is an important issue affecting...