Unpredictable rainfall is an important risk for agricultural activity, and farmers in developing countries often receive incomplete insurance from informal risk-sharing networks. The demand for, and effects of, offering formal index-based rainfall insurance is studied through a randomized...

Rural decentralisation and panchayati raj institutions (PRIs) are a profound change in the Indian rural institutional scene. They may ultimately offer a better option for rural development and poverty alleviation. However, it was a mistake to think that PRIs would emerge as caring institutions...

So what’s social policy got to do with economic growth? Quite a lot, it would appear, if one takes the results of cross-country growth regressions at face value, as they are by many social policy analysts, even as they criticize the findings of the economic policy part of the very same...

Fiscal policy measures are a key means by which governments can influence distribution and poverty, but in fact the relationships between fiscal policy and poverty are not well understood. The most commonly used technique for assessing the distributional impact, benefit incidence analysis, is...

Medical ethics did not become a recognized subject in the syllabus of Britain's medical schools until 1993. This Witness Seminar transcript records the development of international ethical codes, the response to them over the period 1963-93 by students and doctors and the extent of resistance...

The paper is a report of a survey done in Chitradurga District, Karnataka to know the functioning of NREGA and awarness of people about this Act.