In the rural areas of developing countries, teacher absence is a widespread problem. This paper tests whether a simple incentive programme based on teacher presence can reduce teacher absence, and whether it has the potential to lead to more teaching activities and better learning. In 60...

Social scientists often emphasize how ‘culture’ and ‘social norms’ can be important determinants of economic behavior and development. This raises questions of the relative importance of economic incentives and these other more social variables, like culture, and of how...

A new 18-country opinion survey sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found that "while majorities of citizens generally support the continued use of existing nuclear reactors, most people do not favour the building of new nuclear plants." At a time when the nuclear power...

This paper proposes a rating based scheme for encouraging user participation in adhoc mobile phone mesh networks. These networks are particularly attractive for remote/rural areas in developing countries as they do not depend on costly infrastructure and telecom operators. We evaluate our scheme...

The research reported here was guided by three questions: (1) What are the current and potential patterns of mobile phone, landline, PC, and Internet café use among urban microentrepreneurs? (2) Are mobile phones, PCs, and Internet cafés related to the stability or growth of urban...

The main argument of this paper is that in many situations, dicult puzzles of governance can be solved in dramatically new ways using modern IT systems. Nationwide centralised databases, coupled with ubiquitous high-speed Internet access, and pervasive computational power, has put a new set of...

There has been a clear change in the cultural milieu of the IT city Bangalore in the last few years. And while this may not be only due to the call centres that have sprouted providing high-paying jobs to thousands of young people, they are certainly a significant influence.