Abstract In spite of rapid economic growth in the past three decades, poverty rates in India remain high, especially in certain regions and among the socially excluded groups. However, what has happened to poverty in India, especially after the onset of economic reforms in 1991, has been...

Abstract The caste system – a system of elaborately stratified social hierarchy – distinguishes India from most other societies. Among the most distinctive factors of the caste system is the close link between castes and occupations, especially in rural India, with Dalits or Scheduled Castes...

Abstract Banerjee and Iyer (henceforth, BI) (American Economic Review, 2005) find that districts which the British assigned to landlord revenue systems systematically underperform districts with non-landlord based revenue systems, especially in agricultural investment and productivity and mainly...

Affirmative action has been at the heart of public policies towards the socially disadvantaged in India. Compensatory discrimination policies which have been adopted for the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) since independence were recommended for Other Backward Classes (OBC) by...

This paper is an assessment of what we know about the political determinants of economic growth. It begins by setting out the stylized facts of economic growth. The paper suggests that there is a need to shift away from much of the previous literature's emphasis on the determinants of long-run...

This paper offers an overview of the strengths and limitations in current empirical research on the measurement of state capacity. The paper also surveys the fast emerging literature on the determinants and effects of state capacity. We argue that existing measures on governance quality used in...

We propose and implement a new technique for measuring the total magnitude of a growth episode: the change in output per capita resulting from one structural break in the trend growth of output (acceleration or deceleration) to the next. The magnitude of the gain or loss from a growth episode...

The increasing realisation that governance quality is a fundamental element of long-run development has led to its consideration as a desirable development goal in its own right. To contribute to such a process, this paper provides a framework to set, measure and monitor governance goals in the...

There has been increasing ‘flexibilisation’, in the formal labour markets of both developed and developing countries. Labour institutions and globalisation are often taken to be causally related to this phenomenon, but the evidence remains inconclusive. In India, there has been an increasing...

What drives income diversification among rural households in developing countries? A large literature has examined whether household income diversification is a means of survival or a means of accumulation, which has so far remained inconclusive. This paper attempts to evaluate which explanation...