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Publications (88)
We study the evolution of consumption‐poverty measures for post‐independence India, including 20 years since extensive economic reforms began in 1991. Progress against poverty was negligible until the mid‐1970s, after which a downward trend in poverty measures emerged. The pace of poverty reduction accelerated in the post‐reform period, despite ris...
India is uniquely placed to help reduce global poverty and boost prosperity. The country has the largest number of poor people in the world, as well as the largest number of people who have recently escaped poverty. There is an emerging middle class but the majority of people are still vulnerable to falling back into poverty. What lessons do the pa...
India is uniquely placed to help reduce global poverty and boost prosperity. The country has the largest number of poor people in the world, as well are the largest number of people who have recently escaped poverty. There is an emerging middle class but the majority of people are still vulnerable to falling back into poverty. What lessons do the p...
This paper provides an overview of poverty and well-being trends in India since the mid-1990s. Poverty reduction
since 2005 has been much faster than the earlier decade, as a result of broad-based growth across most geographic areas. Underlying this is a pattern of high mobility in economic status that has led to an emerging middle class. Still, a...
This paper uses panel data to analyze factors that contributed to the rapid decline in poverty in India between 2005 and 2012. The analysis employs a nonparametric decomposition method that measures the relative contributions of different components of household livelihoods to observed changes in poverty. The results show that poverty decline is as...
Mass public information campaigns have promised to empower poor people, but do they deliver on that promise? We designed and implemented a trial information campaign in poor rural areas of India, in the form of an entertaining movie that teaches people their rights under a large national antipoverty program. In randomly assigned villages, the movie...
Workfare has often seemed an attractive option for making self-targeted transfers to poor people. But is this incentive argument
strong enough in practice to prefer unproductive workfare to even untargeted cash transfers? A nonparametric survey-based
method is used to assess the cost-effectiveness of a large workfare scheme in a poor state of India...
In an economy that is transforming rapidly, both economically and spatially, the boundaries between rural and urban areas have become blurred. In practice, the rural-urban divide is more accurately characterised as a rural-urban gradation. Labour market outcomes vary along this gradation. Not integrating the gradation in our data and analysis leads...
Inequality in opportunities across people – when different groups (e.g., caste, gender, or class) have unequal chances of acquiring assets, earn unequal returns to assets (for similar effort), or have unequal access to basic services — is of concern for intrinsic reasons and also because it may have an instrumental impact on the development process...
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta & The World Bank
A survey in Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh-states that have extended social pension coverage beyond "below poverty line" families and increased pension amounts-provides a window into the challenges of scaling up such programmes. The survey reveals that increased coverage and higher pension amounts do not render the social pension regressive in it...
This paper assembles data at the all-India level and for the village of Palanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to document the growing importance, and influence, of the non-farm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s. The suggestion from the combined National Sample Survey and Palanpur data is of a slow process of non-farm diversifica...
In 2005 India introduced an ambitious national anti-poverty program, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The program offers up to 100 days of unskilled manual labor per year on public works projects for any rural household member who wants such work at the stipulated minimum wage rate. The aim is to dramaticall...
This paper studies the evolution of the rural non-farm sector in India and its contribution to the decline of poverty. It scrutinizes evidence from a series of nationally representative sample surveys and confronts findings from these sources against the experience of poverty decline in a western Uttar Pradesh village, Palanpur, which has been the...
India’s approach to social security stresses the provision of subsidized food and public works. Targeted, unconditional cash transfers are little used, and have been little evaluated. An evaluation of cash transfers for the elderly and widows based on national household survey data and surveys on social pension utilization in two of India’s states,...
Although poverty in India remains disproportionately rural at the aggregate level, urban poverty is growing in importance. Efforts to address urban poverty should note its spatial distribution. This paper shows that the incidence of poverty in India’s small towns is markedly higher than in large metropolitan areas. It is also in small and medium-si...
Note: This work was submitted to Agricultural Economics as part of a cluster of papers organized by Ben Davis, Kostas Stamoulis, Tom Reardon, and Paul Winters. We are grateful to participants of the workshop “Household-Level Linkages Between Farm and Non-farm Rural Income Generation Activities” held at the Food and Agricultural Organization, Octobe...
This paper examines the recent decentralization of governance in Indonesia and its impact on local infrastructure provision. The decentralization of decisionmaking power to local jurisdictions in Indonesia may have improved the matching of public infrastructures provision with local preferences. However, decentralization has made local public infra...
Summary In a recent article in World Development, van den Berg and Jiggins [van den Berg, H. & Jiggins, J. (2007). Investing in farmers: The impacts of farmer field schools in relation to integrated pest management. World Development, 35(4), 663-686] (to be referred to in the discussion below as the "BJ paper") challenge the validity of results in...
This article attempts to determine the long-term productivity and sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs by measuring trends in total factor productivity for production systems in both states since the advent of the Green Revolution. These measurements over time and across systems have resulted in three major fin...
Minimum wages are generally thought to be unenforceable in developing rural economies. But there is one solution - a workfare scheme in which the government acts as the employer of last resort. Is this a cost-effective policy against poverty? Using a microeconometric model of the casual labor market in rural India, the authors find that a guarantee...
Analysis of data from various Bangladesh Household Expenditure Surveys suggests considerable progress at poverty reduction during the 1990s. About 50 percent of the country’s population lived below the poverty line in 2000 compared to 59 percent in 1991–2. Poverty in rural areas continues to be higher than in urban areas, but the gap between rural...
Bangladesh boasts a wide array of targeted food assistance programs that strive to achieve a number of important developmental objectives. Findings from the 2000 Household Income and Expenditure Survey suggest that these programs are reasonably well-targeted towards the poor. Most of the pro-poor targeting is due to targeting the poor within commun...
This article assesses the impact on poverty and the likely cost of an employment guarantee scheme providing 100 days of work to the rural people during the lean season. At the current statutory wage rate, the scheme may help reduce rural poverty to 23 per cent (30 per cent year round), at a cost of 1.7 per cent of GDP. But, given the extra cost of...
India’s state governments are significant, in some cases dominant, funders of a number of areas critical for enhancing growth and reducing poverty: in 2000/01, 57 per cent of India’s total government capital expenditure was financed by the states, as was 97 per cent of irrigation maintenance, 39 per cent of road maintenance, 90 per cent of public h...
Farmer Field Schools (FFS) are an intensive training approach introduced in the last decade in many developing countries to promote knowledge and uptake of ecologically sensible production approaches, and in particular, integrated pest management which minimises pesticide use. Because of the high training cost, the viability of the program depends...
This paper examines monopoly power in the market for groundwater (irrigation water extracted by private tubewells), a market
characterized by barriers to entry and spatial fragmentation. In Pakistan's Punjab region, groundwater and tenancy contracts
are often interlinked, with share-tenants gaining access to water through the use of their landlord'...
This paper evaluates the impact of farmer field schools, an intensive participatory training program emphasizing integrated
pest management. The evaluation focuses on whether program participation has improved yields and reduced pesticide use among
graduates and their neighbors who may have gained knowledge from graduates through informal communica...
India's states have significant developmental expenditure responsibilities. While the "fiscal crisis" which engulfed India's states in the late nineties led to higher deficits and debt levels, it was also associated with a rapid increase in expenditure levels, and it might be thought that this would have increased the development effectiveness of t...
How can increased spending on priority social and infrastructure sectors be financed in India? While increased tax revenue is part of the answer, as is increased private sector financing of infrastructure, expenditure restructuring will also be important. But how much can be saved by expenditure restructuring? We examine salaries, including pension...
Using survey-data from Peru, this paper evaluates the impact of a pilot farmer-field-school (FFS) program on farmers' knowledge of integrated pest management(IPM) practices related to potato cultivation. We use both regression analysis controlling for participation and a propensity score matching approach to create a comparison group similar to the...
This article attempts to determine the long-term productivity and sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs by measuring trends in total factor productivity for production systems in both states since the advent of the Green Revolution. These measurements over time and across systems have resulted in three major fin...
that inhabit a particular region since the determinants of welfare are highly varied. For rural development, who produces in agriculture matters for efficiency and welfare, for instance small holders as opposed to large commercial farmers. Where agricultural production takes place also matters, for instance in better endowed versus marginal areas....
A study evaluated the impact of Farmer Field Schools in Indonesia, an intensive participatory training program emphasizing integrated pest management. Focus was on whether program participation improved yields and reduced pesticide use among graduates and neighbors who gained knowledge through informal communications. It used a modified "difference...
Who benefits from the large electricity subsidy provided to farmers in Karnataka? This note looks at the distribution of the annual subsidy, finding it to be quite inequitable. By far the largest beneficiaries are medium and large farmers and the great majority of the rural population receive no benefits at all.
Regionally disaggregated estimates of poverty within India's states are typically not computed because of inadequate sample sizes available for geographic or administrative units below the state level. This paper attempts to ameliorate the sample size problem by pooling the 1999-00 NSS 55th round central and state sample data. We use the pooled dat...
Rural development policy addresses the welfare of rural households and communities. With a majority of the world's poor located in rural areas, the resilience of rural poverty in industrialized countries, and a significant share of environmental degradation the byproduct of rural poverty, the design of effective rural policies remains an important...
This paper proposes an explanation of the configuration of mutual insurance groups and of the quality of insurance within each group on the basis of two types of transaction costs: “association” costs in establishing links with insurance partners and “extraction” costs in using these links to implement insurance transfers. We show that optimal insu...
Many economists have advocated and applied total social factor productivity (TSFP) (i.e., total factor productivity estimated with both market and non-market inputs and externalities, and with all factors valued at social prices) as a single all-embracing measure of agricultural sustainability. This paper reviews the conceptual and practical issues...
This article attempts to determine the long-term productivity and sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs by measuring trends in total factor productivity for production systems in both states since the advent of the green revolution. These measurements over time and across systems have resulted in three major fin...
This paper examines the recent decentralization of governance in Indonesia and its impact on local infrastructure provision. The decentralization of decisionmaking power to local jurisdictions in Indonesia may have improved the matching of public infrastructures provision with local preferences. However, decentralization has made local public infra...
fo r groundwater--irrigation water extracted using private tubewells--a market characterized by barriers to entry and spatial fragmentation. Simple theory predicts that tubewell owners should price discriminate in favor of their own share-tenants. Our analysis of individual groundwater transactions over an 18 month period confirms such price discri...
Evidence from Pakistan's Punjab indicates that monopoly power in the market for groundwater (irrigation water extracted using private tubewells) results in a substantial resource misallocation. But despite this substantial misallocation of groundwater, a welfare analysis shows that monopoly pricing of groundwater has limited effects on equity and e...
Using data from Pakistan's Punjab, Jacoby, Murgai, and Jacoby, Murgai, and Rehman also provide evidence
Rehman examine monopoly power in the market for that monopoly pricing of groundwater leads to
groundwater-irrigation water extracted using private compensating-albeit small-reallocations of canal
tubewells-a market characterized by barriers to en...
Agricultural extension programs or pilots based on the Farmer Field School (FFS) approach are being implemented in many developing countries in Asia and Africa. Evidence from the Philippines and Indonesia, two key areas in implementing this extension effort, shows that fiscal unsustainability of the FFS if applied on a large scale is a risk that ca...
The way jurisdiction over land is distributed among members of a community has a powerful influence over how efficiently land is used, the incidence of poverty, and the level of inequality in the community. Yet much land in less developed countries is underutilized and/or misused from a sustainability standpoint: lack of access to land or unfavorab...
In the Northern Andes, one of the riskiest agriculture climates in the world, farmers use sharecropping to obtain seed, their most costly input. With survey data from Peru, this paper calculates that the cost of seed, when it is provided though sharecropping, is two times higher than the market price. We test the hypothesis that risk-averse farmers...
The practice of mutual insurance is conditioned by two types of transaction costs: "association" costs in establishing links with insurance partners and "extraction" costs in using these links to implement insurance transfers. Data on insurance-motivated water exchanges among households along two irrigation canals in Pakistan show that households e...
The impact of global climate change on developing countries is analyzed using CGE-multimarket models for three archetype economies representing the poor cereal importing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The objective is to compare the effects of climate change on the macroeconomic performance, sectoral resource allocation, and household...
Author's Introduction: "Irrigation has been a fundamental source of growth in Pakistan's agriculture. The security, flexibility, and enhanced water supply provided by irrigation has directly spurred adoption of high yielding varieties, multiple cropping, and input intensification. However, surface irrigation in much of Pakistan has been crippled by...
The impact of global climate change on the less developed countries is analyzed using archetype CGE-multimarket models for three economies representing the poor cereal importing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The objective is to predict the differential impact of climate change across continents on macroeconomic variables, sectoral res...
Abstract Proxy means test methods are increasingly being used by governments as substitutes for the more expensive ,and administratively difficult means test methods to target poverty alleviation programs. In India as well, the 2002 Below Poverty Line (BPL) census replaced the previously used “exclusion” criteria method with a proxy means test in o...
Analysis of time series data on poverty in India has revealed a clearly discernable link between urban poverty decline and rural poverty decline. Previous analysis, focusing on the pre-reform period, had failed to identify an impact of urban development on rural poverty. This paper examines one possible route through which urban development might h...