India's states have significant developmental expenditure responsibilities. While the "fiscal crisis" which engulfed India's states in the late nineties led to higher deficits and debt levels, it was also associated with a rapid increase in expenditure levels, and it might be thought that this...

India's approach to social security stresses the provision of subsidized food and public works. Targeted, unconditional cash transfers are little used, and have been little evaluated. An evaluation of cash transfers for the elderly and widows based on national household survey data and surveys...

Using Census and NSS data this paper studies the evolution of Gender Bias (GB) in the age group 0–6 in India and its association with education and higher prosperity. GB is pervasive and has grown over time with higher prosperity and resultant demographic transition and enhanced education. The...

The Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) — the largest food subsidy programme in India — has been a dismal failure in targeting the poor. The present paper examines its performance in three Indian states — Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, based on primary data collected for...

In a developing economy with an ethnically diverse society, such as India's, household welfare and its distribution within the household unambiguously depend on how much time each member of the household spends on productive activity. In this paper we examine the welfare impact of reducing the...

This paper begins by highlighting some key characteristics of the demographic transition and child education and their relation to household poverty status in India as evidenced by our analysis of Census data (1951–2001) and those from NSS surveys in 1993–94 and 2004–05. Although total...

Studies, which have discussed some of the important issues concerning the measurement of trade costs, have conceded that the literature is still in the early stages of understanding and measuring what the real costs are. It is in this context, decomposing trade costs into 'natural' costs,...

The paper aims to investigate the differential impact of increased financial development on industrial output, across state and industry categories. Using an unbalanced panel of 15 Indian states, 22 industries at the 2-digit level, and an 11-year period spanning 1992-2002, the paper's most novel...

In a recent study, Jensen and Miller (2011) propose a new measure of undernutrition, based on a calorie share of staples threshold. Among the merits of this measure are that (i) it dispenses with calorie norms, and (ii) relies on a behavioural approach to estimate this threshold. What our...

Given that the phenomenon of capture of public programs by sections the population is rampant in developing countries, households can indulge in a strategy to improve their odds of participating in public programs by bribing the suppliers of such programs. This is an important issue affecting...