Various issues related to delays and cost overruns in publically funded infrastructure projects are investigated. The study is based on, by far, the largest data-set of 850 projects across seventeen infrastructure sectors. The focus is on the causal factors behind time and cost overruns. [CDE WP...

A fresh wave of globalisation since the early 1990s has created both hope and despair. Failure of state has reaffirmed faith in market based institutions. Expansion in trade across national borders and opening the national markets to the world is recommended for speedy and sure economic growth....

A brief outline of the economic and financial structure of the State and the various financial inclusion initiatives taken by the Reserve Bank is highlighted. But there are some policy challenges in sustaining the growth momentum. [Speech delivered at the G. B. Pant University of Agricultural...

Is the high degree of gender inequality in developing countries in education, personal autonomy, and more explained by underdevelopment itself? Or do the societies that are poor today hold certain cultural views that lead to gender inequality? This article discusses several mechanisms through...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? Why don’t financial markets develop to pool these risks? This paper uses a series of randomized field experiments to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an...

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...

This paper analyses interrelationships between ‘economic development’, ‘health’, and ‘environment’ in a simultaneous equations framework. The endogenous variables chosen for the model are GDPPC (per capita gross domestic product), LE (life expectancy),...

This essay provides a game-theoretic, endogenous view of institutions, and then applies the idea to identify the sources of institutional trajectories of economic development in China, Japan, and Korea. It stylizes the Malthusian-phase of East Asian economies as peasant-based economies in which...