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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
– Shreya Bhattacharya - 2018 PhD Fellow
In the fall of 2018 UNU-WIDER welcomed 11 doctoral students from around the world as part of our PhD Fellowship Programme. The students, from Ghana, India, Malaysia, Brazil, Ethiopia and Kenya, came to UNU-WIDER for three months to work on their research under the guidance of a UNU-WIDER researcher...
– Evidence from an insurgency in India
Implementing development programmes in conflict-affected areas is crucial for conflict as well as poverty reduction. The big question is how do you carry out these programmes successfully? Are there specific conditions under which development policies are effective? What is their impact on violence...
Following the introduction of economic reforms in the early 1990s, India today is achieving unprecedented per capita growth rates. Poverty reduction has also accelerated and is justly celebrated. There is great concern, however, that this growth is being accompanied by rising inequality. Inequality...
There are three main channels of women’s empowerment: legal or policy reforms, outside economic opportunities, and collective action. Legal (or policy) reforms are generally based on statutory laws that enact rules to be followed or prohibit certain practices. External economic opportunities for...
– Evidence from Delhi University colleges
College is an important milestone in life that is believed to develop several aspects of an individual's human capital, broadly defined to include both cognitive and socio-emotional traits. Consequently, there is great emphasis on obtaining admission into a more selective college. This column draws...
– Are private facilities better?
In India, the percentage of women who delivered in a health facility increased from roughly 35% in 2000 to 79% in 2014. Despite this progress, given India’s massive population, 15% of global maternal deaths took place in India in 2015, suggesting substantial gaps in quality of care at the time of...
Improving the position of women continues to be an important concern in development. As we strive to make better living standards possible for people of all walks of life, we need to identify and meaningfully address problems faced by individuals and groups. The unfortunate truth is that women...
– The case of the Assam insurgency
Girls in India face many challenges. From the moment they are conceived, they are less likely to be born as compared to boys. This presence of “missing girls” appears to be linked to access to ultrasound technology. Moreover, girls also get breastfed for a shorter duration and get fewer childcare...
Blog
The celebration of the 30th Anniversary of UNU-WIDER presented the ideal opportunity to look back, take stock, and plan ahead. Where else can a group of early career researchers have the chance to present at a conference including Nobel Laureates such as Joseph Stiglitz, Martti Ahtisaari and Amartya...
Blog
Just over a year ago, in March 2014, UNU-WIDER published a report entitled: What do we know about aid as we approach 2015? It notes the many successes of aid in a variety of sectors, and that in order to remain relevant and effective beyond 2015 aid must learn to deal with, amongst other things, the...
Blog
Why does a mother from a poor African village not send her daughter to school, but instead marries her off to an old man as a second or third wife? This way poverty is inherited from parent to child. Or why does a boy from a remote village in a developed country, such as a Finland, drop out from...
Blog
17 October 2013 David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers, and Michael Woolcock When asked why she wrote novels about poverty rather than gather what we would now call ‘hard’ data, the Victorian novelist George Eliot famously responded that ‘a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even...
Blog
– Emerging Challenges for Post-2015 MDGs
Rolph van der Hoeven and Peter van Bergeijk One of the most important trends that emerged since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is the rapid growth of some large developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil. Figure 1 illustrates the shift of the economic weight of...
Blog
Tony Addison With our temperatures now well above zero, we head for the official end of the Finnish winter on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday). As reported last month, the annual bird migration is well under way. Arriving too, are UNU-WIDER’s many visitors on our PhD internship and visiting scholar...
Blog
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a glimmer of better days to come. I heard birdsong for the first time last week, and the great annual bird migrations into our northern lands are now underway...
Blog
– Making Growth more Inclusive, Part 2
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But there is now much concern about whether impressive growth rates are yielding enough poverty reduction. The present debate about their poverty lines is a...
Blog
Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The temperature is well below zero (minus 20oc). But we are now gaining light, having past the shortest day of the year in December. Our mood also brightened...
Blog
– What Does This Mean for the Fight Against Global Poverty? Part I
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But there is now much concern about whether impressive growth rates are yielding enough poverty reduction. The present debate about their poverty lines is a...
Blog
Tony Addison With the end of the year fast approaching, we bring you the last Angle of 2011. Here in Helsinki, the shortest day of the year is nearly upon us when we will have six hours of daylight. In the Finnish arctic the sun does not rise, the polar night lasting 51 days. Little snow yet—perhaps...
Blog
Wim Naudé and Adam Szirmai Nobody can be left in any doubt as to the importance of innovation for prosperity on reading[i] that ‘People living in the first decade of the twentieth century did not know modern dental and medical equipment, penicillin, bypass operations, safe births, control of...
Blog
– Lessons for Developing Countries
Amelia U. Santos-Paulino and Guanghua Wan China and India have become global economic powers. Even at the market exchange rate, China overtook Japan in 2010 as the second largest economy. China’s trade and financial activities, India’s emergence as a technology and innovation hub, and both countries...
Policy Brief
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– China, India, Brazil and South Africa
This Policy Brief focuses on links between the developing countries of Brazil, India, China and South Africa and the global economy, with a special emphasis on the implications of China’s spectacular growth on developing economies and the rest of the world. The issues considered include changing...
Blog
It's imperative to demolish myths around the economic achievements of China and India and get a better sense of the real challenges. The author of the book, 'Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India' (Princeton University Press, 2010) discusses here some of the...
Blog
by Meghnad Desai The emergence of four economies from the ‘South’ as important players in the global economy has attracted attention. These four economies, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS) were thought, for different reasons, to be hopeless ‘basket cases’ during the second half of the...
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