Spurred by a recent Supreme Court order, many Indian states have introduced cooked mid-day meals in primary schools. This article reports the findings of a recent survey which suggests that this initiative could have a major impact on child nutrition, school attendance and social equity....

Commodity taxes have three distinct roles: (1) revenue collection, (2) interpersonal redistribution, and (3) resource allocation. The paper presents an integrated treatment of these three concerns in a second-best general equilibrium framework, which leads to the "generalized Ramsey rule" for...