This paper explores the problem of court congestion in Indian lower courts. We use several measures to capture court congestion. These include: caseloads per capita and per judge, the number of cases older than a year per capita and per judge, and congestion rates calculated as the ratio of...

It is argued that parents provide help with housing downpayments in order to encourage the production of grandchildren, and that such a subsidization emanates from the ?demonstration effect:? a child?s propensity to furnish parents with attention and care can be conditioned by parental example....

This paper focuses on the interactions between local communities having at least some degree of informal claims over natural resources and external agents, particularly firms interested in commercial resource exploitation. The paper makes three contributions to the existing literature. First,...

Minority rights play a significant role in development policy, especially within inhomogeneous societies. The justification of minority rights is linked to the justification of human rights. The study develops elements of a new typology of minorities against the background of the question of...

The availability of efficiency estimation software - freely distributed via the internet and relatively easy to use - recently inflated the number of corresponding applications. The resulting efficiency estimates are used without a critical assessment with respect to the literature on...

Since 1986, Vietnam has moved from a centrally planned towards a market-oriented system through several major economic and trade reforms. First positive results of the reform process became visible in the early 1990s when poverty declined significantly. The Vietnamese agricultural sector has...

We model group formation as a response to relative deprivation. We employ two measures of relative deprivation. We show that in the case of each of these measures the process of deprivation-induced self-selection into groups reaches a steady state, and that the steady-state distribution differs...

Over the last two decades, many countries around the world have been enthusiastically embarking on the path of decentralization. Decentralization has been advocated as a powerful means to improve the provision of health care services and health outcomes in developing countries. However, due to a...

This paper addresses the issue of environmental and ecological impacts of nutrient flows within and between countries by reviewing and presenting data on nutrient balances and global nutrient movements. The results for nutrient depletion in agricultural soils during 1996-1999 show that in most...

In 1996 the Tanzanian government initiated community health insurance schemes to improve the access to health care and to protect people against the financial cost of illness in an environment with shrinking budgets for the health sector. This study aims to evaluate the role of the community...