The essay is begun with a reference to a television programme on one of the Hindi news channels - titled Burqe me Atankvad which was telecast sometime in mid-2005. The complex and turmoil-ridden and tortuous interrelationship between gender, national and other multiple identities are explored....

Boosting women’s relative control of income and other economic resources has so many consequences that positively enhance both gender equality and development that female economic empowerment may be close to being a “magic potion.†[Paper presented at the 100th Annual Meeting of...

This study underscores the need to connect the dots if the practice of son preference and its manifestation, discrimination against daughters, is to be addressed. Clearly, it is not only about implementing the PCPNDT Act but also the various laws that can indeed play a central role in moulding...

The paper discusses the participation of poor participate in growth, and how different forms of growth connect to poverty. Also the paper discusses important policy levers, in relation to agriculture, urbanization, social protection and fiscal reform

Fiscal policy measures are a key means by which governments can influence distribution and poverty, but in fact the relationships between fiscal policy and poverty are not well understood. The most commonly used technique for assessing the distributional impact, benefit incidence analysis, is...

Most studies on poverty alleviation and reduction programmes emphasize structural bottlenecks, asymmetric information, and rent seeking behaviour. This paper provides an analytical characterization of the beneficiaries in a situation of much structural and conditional rigidity, where all...

So what’s social policy got to do with economic growth? Quite a lot, it would appear, if one takes the results of cross-country growth regressions at face value, as they are by many social policy analysts, even as they criticize the findings of the economic policy part of the very same...

The ambitious development plans for the Lancang-Mekong River Basin (LMRB) could have serious environmental, social, cultural and even geopolitical ramifications that could in turn destabilise the Mekong Subregion (MS). On the premise that frameworks for regional cooperation offer a viable route...