A developing economy like India is often characterised by a labour market with demand and supply of labour and a wage that even if competitively determined may not be adequate for the poor household to reach their target income; what they consider as means of a decent living. Envisaging...

This study examines the impact of India's Public Distribution System (PDS) on poor households in terms of income gains, reductions in the incidence and severity of poverty, as well as nutritional improvements. The study suggests that the welfare gains of PDS in terms of income transfer were very...

This paper provides an explanation for the observed persistence in income inequality across households in terms limited parental altruism. It is postulated that the degree of parental altruism is ‘limited’ by the financial status of the parent. [CDE WP 101].

This paper offers a conceptualisation of social security and income redistribution schemes which highlights the strong overlaps between the two. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to disentangle the two in practice. The major conclusion is that any assessment of one cannot proceed without taking...

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but the author find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less...

Over the last decade, India has been one of the fastest growing economies, and has experienced considerable decline in overall income poverty. However, in a vast country like India, poverty levels vary significantly across the different states. In this paper, we analyze the differences between...

Available evidence suggests high intergenerational correlation of economic status, and persistent disparities in health status between the rich and the poor. This paper proposes a novel mechanism linking the two. Health human capital is introduced into a two-period overlapping generations model....

In this paper, we analyze the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone’s income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while...