There has been increasing pressure from governments and NGOs to restrict the international trade in waste in the belief that each nation should address its own waste disposal problems. In this paper we develop a Material Balance Flow Model to investigate if free trade in non-toxic waste can...

This paper links the foreign economic engagement of India's states with the literature on federalism, thereby contributing to an understanding of the political economy of FDI inflows in a parliamentary federal system. More specifically, it studies subnational governments' international...

Observers have long been ambivalent about democratic representation by parties with a regionalist orientation. We estimate the causal effect of regionalist party representation on political violence in India and find that regionalist parties that win power cause local violence, but not through...

The study finds that clientelism may lead to under-provision of services which are deemed to be suitable for decentralisation. Water distribution and drainage services, managed from lower level of municipality, are likely to be affected by clientelism and consequent under-provision. Water...

This paper provides an overview and analysis of India’s public spending on internal security, especially in the category of police services. It describes and evaluates the central government’s spending on internal security, its levels, patterns and, where possible, its outcomes. It then...

We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision to local governments in India, using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralization reforms. We find that devolution of the responsibility for health functions from...

The paper focuses on evaluation of the few turn around strategies available with the Indian Railways to improve its operating ratio. The strategies examined are (a) choice of electric traction and the pace of electrification (b) improvement of utilization of network capacity (c) bench marking of...

Using rural household survey data from West Bengal, we find that voters respond positively to excludable government welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with these voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced...

Some politicians argue for the splitting and combining of states to increase government productivity, but there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the optimal size of a state. Using data from Indian states, I test a model of the optimal size of the state. I find that size and preference...