By providing 100 days of guaranteed employment to every rural household, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) can challenge the hegemony of the landed elite as major employers in the Indian countryside and raise market wages which have long been depressed. This paper shows that...

Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries. We focus on one such administrative failure - the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India's iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a...

Federal crop insurance began in 1938 as a focused program to correct certain perceived market failures. It has transformed into a massive wealth transfer scheme that is frequently the subject of supposed legislative reforms. Yet each wave of changes has, for the most part, moved the program...

In most of the countries, gender equality is an important national goal. This is particularly so in some human development sectors (especially education and health). For several low-income countries, gender issues are also important in the agriculture sector. Finally, several government...

By providing 100 days of guaranteed employment to every rural household, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) can challenge the hegemony of the landed elite as major employers in the Indian countryside and raise market wages which have long been depressed. This paper shows that...

Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries. We focus on one such administrative failure - the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a...

In many post-Soviet countries, more than half of all households use small land plots to produce significant agricultural output even though their members have paid jobs or collect state pensions. Existing studies suggest that in Russia such “second agriculture” helps smooth consumption....

Does existing inequality hinder redistributive policies that aim to help the poor? This paper answers this question under a widely used redistributive policy in developing countries--public works schemes. Using district-level data on land ownership distributions and the implementations of the...

The importance of approached theme lays in the equality notion as a multidimensional term embracing economic, cultural and social dimensions alike. There are strong reasons to believe that a reduction of gender inequality is important in the promotion of economic growth and in the reduction of...

A developing economy like India is often characterised by a labour market with demand and supply of labour and a wage that even if competitively determined may not be adequate for the poor household to reach their target income; what they consider as means of a decent living. Envisaging...