The debate around retrenchment of pension systems became really popular in the 1990’s after the pioneering experience of Chile in 1981.The disastrous outcomes of the Chilean reform were widely known by the 2000’s although no relevant steps backwards were taken. This paper analyses...

If poverty and nutrition are issues also of social justice and the commitment that a democratic state makes to its citizens (namely, ridding the country of hunger and malnutrition and also of ensuring food security) then the discipline of economics needs to pose its problem differently. The...

The existing literature on Indian growth finds no evidence of convergence across states. This represents a puzzle given the relatively free flows of capital, labor and commodities across state borders. A new data set of district level income and socio-economic data is used to explore the...

This study presents a comprehensive picture of poverty chnages in China in the period of 1978-95. Using two micro data sets from Household Income Surverys of 1988 and 1995, the author examines poverty distribution among various localities and population sub-groups. [Discussion Paper No. 2001/21].

This paper examines the differences in welfare, as measured by per capita expenditure (PCE), between social groups in rural India across the entire welfare distribution. The paper establishes that the disadvantage suffered by two historically disadvantaged groups – Scheduled Castes (SCs)...

This paper estimates the effect of access to transportation networks on regional economic outcomes in China over a twenty-period of rapid income growth. It addresses the problem of the endogenous placement of networks by exploiting the fact that these networks tend to connect historical...