This paper presents new evidence on the links between public-infrastructure provisioning and time allocation related to the water sector in India. An analysis of time-use data reveals that worsening public infrastructure affects market work, with evident gender differentials. The results also...

For the past generation Norway has supplied Europe and other regions with oil, taking payment in euros or dollars. It then sends nearly all this foreign exchange abroad, sequestering its oil-export receipts - which are in foreign currency - in the "oil fund" to invest mainly in European and US...

This working paper provides a survey of the theoretical underpinnings for the various employment guarantee schemes, and discusses full employment policy experiences in the United States, Sweden, India, Argentina, and France. The theoretical and policy developments are delineated in a historical...

This paper establishes the financial feasibility of an employer-of-last-resort (ELR) program in a small developing country like Tunisia. It argues that an ELR-led economic development policy is vastly superior to the traditional import substitution industrialization (ISI), export-led, and...

The aging of the American population will be a critical public policy issue in the years ahead. This paper surveys the recent literature on the economics of aging, with a special emphasis on government spending on the aged. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the proportion of the elderly in...

There is now widespread recognition that in most countries, private-sector investment has not been able to absorb surplus labor. This is all the more the case for poor unskilled people. Public works programs and employment guarantee schemes in South Africa, India, and other countries provide...

This paper analyzes the real (direct) and financial crowding out in India between 197071 and 200203. Using an asymmetric vector autoregressive (VAR) model, the paper finds no real crowding out between public and private investment; rather, complementarity is observed between the two. The...

The monetarist counterrevolution and the stagflation period of the 1970s were among the theoretical and practical developments that led to the rejection of fiscal policy as a useful tool for macroeconomic stabilization and full employment determination. Recent mainstream contributions, however,...

This paper argues that John Maynard Keynes had a targeted (as contrasted with aggregate) demand approach to full employment. Modern policies, which aim to close the demand gap,ʺ are inconsistent with the Keynesian approach on both theoretical and methodological grounds. Aggregate demand tends...

To put an economy on an equitable growth path, economic development must be based on social efficiency, equity, and job creation. It has been shown that unemployment has far-reaching effects, all leading to an inequitable distribution of well-being. But many economists assume that unemployment...