Meeta Keswani Mehra

• PhD in Economics
• Chair at Jawaharlal Nehru University

River systems originating from the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) are dominated by runoff from snow and glacier melt and summer monsoonal rainfall. These water resources are highly stressed as huge populations of people living in this region depend on them, including for agriculture, domestic use, and energy production. Projections suggest that the UIB r...

https://www.essoar.org/doi/abs/10.1002/essoar.10510398.1

This paper formulates a growth model to study the interlinkages among quality of schooling, human capital and technical progress of a stylised developing economy such as India. The simulation results reveal that under the technology regimes of innovation and imitation, the quality of schooling triggers a child quantity–quality trade-off wherein par...

Adaptation to changing and new environmental conditions is of fundamental importance to sustainability and requires concerted efforts amongst science, policy, and practice to produce solution-oriented knowledge. Joint knowledge production or co-production of knowledge have become increasingly popular terms to describe the process of scientists, pol...

The original version of this article contained the Appendix. The Appendix has been removed and published online as electronic supplementary material.

This paper characterizes the solution to differential games in the context of electoral competition between two political parties/politicians, in the presence of voters and a special interest group. The basic structure of the analytical model is similar to Lambertini (https://amsacta.unibo.it/4884/1/415.pdf, 2001, Dynamic games in economics. Spring...

The strategic manipulation of fiscal policy in the context of winning elections is a hotly debated issue in economics and political economy. This paper is a theoretical analysis of the manipulation of fiscal policy by an electorally motivated incumbent politician who derives utility from voting support and dis-utility from primary deficit. The incu...

Using the pooled-mean group method (PMG), this paper attempts to trace the political transfer cycles in parliamentary and assembly elections in India from 1980-81 to 2010-11. It is found that the political transfer cycles are more pronounced in the year before parliamentary elections and in the year of assembly elections in the case of loans from t...

The paper analyses complex interactions between intra-industry trade (IIT) and environment by extending Krugman's model of monopolistic competition and trade. It is found that an increase in exogenous environmental tax by a country leads to a fall in its output (the scale effect) and aggregate pollution, and an increase in its number of varieties (...

The theory predicts that IPRs tend to raise income inequality by generating a more skewed distribution of wages. Stronger IPRs increase the demand for skilled labor force as it raises the return on R & D activities. This causes a relative increase in skilled labor wages, creating a wage bias in favor of skilled labor against unskilled labor, thus a...

Many of the most promising low-carbon technologies currently have higher costs than the fossil-fuel based technologies. It is only through incremental learning from research, development and deployment that these costs can be reduced. Government intervention in the innovation process through fiscal policy instruments can be useful to accelerate thi...

This chapter presents an Indian perspective on low-carbon growth through increasing energy efficiency and renewable energy. The chapter begins by providing a snapshot of the energy sector in India, followed by a discussion on the state of the electricity sector, with focus on the move toward renewable sources in grid as well as off-grid power modes...

Using the method of optimal control, when an incumbent politician derives utility from voting support and dis-utility from budgetary deficit, the equilibrium time paths of both voting support and budgetary deficit are characterized in a finite time horizon under complete information. The incumbent politician may be an opportunist, in that she/ he i...

The paper explores the potential effect of intergovernmental grants (IGG) on sub-national (local) environmental policy in a federal structure. In the model, a politically-inclined local government receives campaign contributions from the polluters’ lobby in return for lower pollution taxes. A benevolent federal government uses IGG as an incentive t...

Since its initiation of the financial sector reforms through a newly established global cooperation process in the post-2008 financial and economic crises, the G20 expanded its agenda to include development pillars as the global economy began to recover in 2010. It actively extended its attention to the recycling of surplus country savings for inve...

The paper utilizes a model of endogenous growth with vertical innovation (´ a la Aghion-Howitt) to examine how the inclusion of a production related pollution externality affects the prospect for long-run growth of a closed economy. It is derived that the social optimum exhibits the possibility of long-run sustainable growth, such that consumption,...

We examine human capital's contribution to economy-wide technological progress through two channels -- imitation and innovation -- innovation being more skilled-intensive than innovation. We develop a growth model considering an endogenous ability-driven skill acquisition decision of an individual. We show that skilled labor is growth enhancing in...

Global warming caused by accumulation of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is a public bad, addressing which requires collective action by all the countries of the world. Under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), most countries have negotiated the Kyoto Protocol for GHG emissions control to stabilize climate change. Several...

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to examine the interdependencies between trade and environment policies, as they get jointly determined in a political‐economy model of a small open economy. In theoretical literature, government is usually modeled as benevolent. In real economies, however, it is not a pure social welfare maximizer. Lobbies have...

The paper aims to analyze the problem of regulating a pollution-generating single product monopolistic firm in the presence of information asymmetry about the firm?s cost performance. Following Boyer and Laffont (1999), incentive-based optimal regulation of the firm?s price/ output and the environmental performance is characterized when costs are i...

Excessive emissions of certain trace gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and chlorofluorocarbons are likely to result in global warming due to increased concentration of these greenhouse gases (GHGs). Therefore, measures to control GHG emissions are essential and the current international debate is on how to arrive...

The paper re-examines the hypothesis: free movement of capital from capital-rich Northern" to capital-poor Southern" countries worsens the global environment. Assuming that national governments regulate the pollution level optimally, by trading-o? the marginal beneit of pollution against its marginal cost, it is found that, North is generally a lar...

The paper examines the effect of freer North–South trade in goods on pollution, commodity terms-of-trade and national welfare, utilizing a factor endowment framework. North and South are distinguished in terms of the relative endowment of a pollution causing natural resource: South is relatively more resource abundant. Compared to the analysis of C...

This paper examines the context within which the energy sector in the Asian region has evolved over the past 25 years. It aims to evaluate the sustainability of this process, in terms of the linkages of the sector with economic growth, improvements in energy access, and environmental impacts.The evaluation points to a mixed performance, with develo...

The paper examines the effects of freer North-South trade in goods on pollution and national welfare. North and South are distinguished in terms of the relative endowment of a pollution causing natural resource: South is relatively more resource abundant. Taking into account the commodity terms-of-trade effect of environment policy change, unlike C...