Lending to the rural poor in developing economies, although crucial from the perspective of poverty management, is often subjected to severe informational problems. The literature on group lending with joint liability attempts to resolve these problems by making failure more costly for the...

The ‘Expert Committee on Built Heritage’ marks an important step as the first official acknowledgement of the need to preserve heritage buildings and sites in Calcutta. However, it neglects the question of economic viability of preservation programmes. One reason for this is incomplete...

The paper aims at isolating the effect of group-participation on women empowerment using primary data on 1500 individual women collected during 2007-08 from two districts of West Bengal, India, namely Hooghly and South 24-Parganas. Since the impact evaluation exercise typically suffers from the...