This paper describes the structure and the distribution of health care financing in 13 territories that account for 55% of the Asian population. Survey data on household payments are combined with Health Accounts data on aggregate expenditures by source to estimate distributions of total health...

Gender Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure are two gender-based indicators provided by the United Nations Development Program. Population share of the genders enter the formulation of these indicators in such a way that it favours the better performing gender. This can lead to...

Middle-income countries (MICs) are now home to most of the world’s extreme poor—the billion people living on less than $1.25 a day and a further billion people living on between $1.25 and $2. At the same time, many MICs are also home to a drastically expanding emerging middle or...

Historically, urbanization has been a great force of economic transformation, modernization and social change in the developed world. On the flip side, migration has been blamed for the woes of modern cities overlooking the fact that urban planning and governance are equally responsible. Indian...

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 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)...