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Blog
More than 960 million Indians will head to the polls in the world’s biggest election between April 19 and early June. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is seeking a third term in office. And the polls suggest it will achieve this objective.If one...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Theory and some evidence from India
Using the lens of a life-cycle model, we argue that an administrative failure of a wage payment delay in a workfare programme could adversely affect the welfare of the poor through two channels. First, it imposes an implicit consumption tax on the household. Second, it changes the status of labour...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Experimental evidence from an information dissemination intervention
This study assesses the impact of an information dissemination intervention on the local-level implementation of the rural public works program in India. One key feature of the intervention is to provide information to workers once their wages get credited into their accounts. Using administrative...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Rules versus discretionary budgets
Part of Journal Special Issue
Clientelist Politics and Development
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility in India, using a nationally representative data...
Local governments in India—known as panchayats—are sometimes criticised for failing to deliver benefits earmarked for vulnerable regions or households to the intended recipients. Mis-targeting of benefits is often attributed to political clientelism, where funds are diverted opportunistically to...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Livelihoods and wellbeing in India during COVID-19
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This article studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. First, the study finds that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points during the pandemic...
In recent decades, India has experienced rapid economic growth alongside radical affirmative action programs enacted since independence. This column explores what we know about the impact on social mobility. While there is some evidence of educational mobility, occupational mobility has not...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Tasks, Skills, and Institutions
Blog
Ela Ramesh Bhatt, the founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India, passed away on 2 November 2022. Known as the ‘gentle revolutionary’, Ela-ben (as she is affectionately known) is recognized around the world for her Gandhian values, visionary ideals, pioneering work, and quiet...
Blog
Credit constraints, a consequence of the widespread failure of credit markets in developing countries, are widely regarded as a key constraint to entrepreneurship. Using 2010-11 and 2015-16 National Sample Survey data, this article shows that policy actions of the Indian government to increase...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Past episodes and future trajectories
From the book:
The Developer’s Dilemma
Blog
The Omicron variant resulted in a third major wave of Covid-19 in India, with the number of cases exceeding those in the second wave, albeit causing less severe illness on average. In this post, Kundu and Gisselquist draw on several nationally representative data sources to illuminate key Covid-19...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– India’s informal sector firms
Part of Journal Special Issue
What sustains informality
Blog
– A curse or a blessing?
Much has been written on India as an outlier in Global Value Chains (GVC). Despite being one of the largest and fastest-growing markets located in direct proximity to ‘Factory Asia’ (Baldwin, 2008), India is documented to have low participation in global networks, especially amongst South Asian...
While studies have examined the association in socioeconomic status between parent and offspring, there has been relatively little research on multigenerational mobility, especially in the developing country context. Analysing data from the India Human Development Survey, this article shows that...
Informality is a pervasive phenomenon in the labour markets of developing countries. Two billion workers, representing 61.2 per cent of the world’s employed population, are in informal employment. Emerging and developing countries account for more than 93 per cent of total global informal employment...
Blog
– Evidence from a randomized neighbourhood relocation policy in India
Caste in India plays an instrumental role in determining access to education, jobs, public spaces, and social networks. For instance, despite state governments providing incentives to encourage intercaste marriage, only 4.9% of marriages in India take place outside caste . While numerous affirmative...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Inequality trends and dynamics, the bird’s-eye and the granular perspectives
From the book:
Inequality in the Developing World
Policy makers seeking inclusive growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural transformation, which is potentially inequitable, and keeping a check on rising economic inequality. How this dilemma is resolved by different countries and what factors influence the...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from an insurgency in India
India has employed a variety of military, political and economic measures to combat the long running insurgency in Kashmir with little evidence on what contributes to stability in the region. This paper uses a variety of tests to detect structural breaks in the time series for violence over the...
Globally, governments are using lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19. This has disproportionately affected the poor, the homeless, and the migrants who are left without livelihoods, especially where the lockdown is country-wide, as in India. But has it affected women more than men? If so, in...
– An all too real dilemma for the poor in India (and elsewhere)
On March 24, in a speech to the nation, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, announced a 21-day lockdown. With only four hours’ notice, 1.3 billion people were expected to stay at home and not venture out for three weeks. All buses, trains and domestic air flights were suspended. But the...
Journal Special Issue
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Building knowledge about migration governance and policy in the Global South is a priority for research and policy. The studies in this special section offer both new empirical insights and new frameworks for analysis, with key policy implications, that can enrich our discussion of these topics...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from Indian Experience
Part of Journal Special Issue
Migration Governance and Policy in the Global South
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is particularly difficult because of data and analytical challenges. While most middle-income countries produce comprehensive household surveys these...
– Five key policies assessed
When Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in spring 2014 the Indian economy was in the doldrums. There was a clear policy paralysis in India’s central government, in large part due to the high profile corruption cases that involved the central government bureaucracy and politicians at the...
– The potential electoral consequences of demonetisation
In the campaign leading up to the Lok Sabha elections in spring 2014, one of the more important promises that Narendra Modi made was to ‘clean up’ the economy by bringing back to India all the illicit money that was purportedly stashed away overseas. After coming into power, the government led by...
Displaying 32 of 69 results