This study has uniquely established that financing women though Self Help Groups has a significant role in empowering women, which is a smart economics indeed in achieving the objective of economic development of the weaker sections. The findings of this study establish using the statistical...

This paper investigates the theoretical and empirical foundations of the links between inclusive institutions, innovation and economic growth. Its first contribution to the literature is to provide a non-scale R&D-based growth model incorporating negative externalities linked to low...

Access to finance by the poor is a sine qua non for poverty reduction through economic development thereby driving inclusive growth which can further lead to sustainable growth. This study using adequate data covering pre and postliberalisation period from 1974-75 to 2007-08 in the Indian...

This study while validating the increasing role for financial intermediaries in economic development has attempted to highlight the importance of reduction of transaction costs for financial deepening and consequent economic growth. It is elucidated that higher transaction costs of borrowing for...

Microfinance across the globe is being practiced as a tool to mitigate poverty and chiefly as an empowerment tool to uplift the downtrodden. The paper has uniquely established that Self Help Groups in India have been significantly successful in achieving the objective of economic development of...

There are many situations in which a principal delegates decisions to a better-informed agent but does not choose to give full discretion. This paper discusses one reason why this might be desirable: the agent may have tastes that differ from those of the principal. Limiting the agent's...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that the severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered political centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

This research examines theoretically and empirically the economic origins of ethnolinguistic diversity. The empirical analysis constructs detailed data on the distribution of land quality and elevation across contiguous regions, virtual and real countries, and shows that variation in elevation...