The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was enacted on 23rd of August 2005 and got presidential assent on 5th of September 2005 expressing the consensus of the State to use fiscal and legal instruments to address the challenges of unemployment and poverty. Today the problem of...

Since rural women remain untouched by rural development their empowerment is a must for ensuring and mobilizing their greater participation in developmental activities. Women empowerment is synonymous with the achievement of equality of men and women. In the concept of empowerment the word power...

Public works programs (PWPs) in sub-Saharan African countries have re-emerged as an important policy to stimulate employment generation in addition to their protective role such as consumption smoothening. The paper reviews evidence on the extent to which empirical research can substantiate the...

Violence against women is persisting in many parts of the world. At the same time, there is a global trend of increased female labour force participation. In this paper we study the effect on intimate partner violence of a large public work program in India that explicitly encourages female...

Many developing countries use employment guarantee programs to combat poverty. This paper examines the consequences of such employment guarantee programs for the human capital accumulation of children. It exploits the phased roll-out of India's flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment...

Programs that provide lower-skill employment are a popular anti-poverty strategy in developing countries, with India's employment-guarantee program (MGNREGA) employing adults in 23% of Indian households. MGNREGA has reduced rural poverty, but some have raised concerns that guaranteeing...

Using establishment-level employment and operating data, we examine the impact of the Indian government's employment guarantee program on labor and firm behavior. We exploit the staggered implementation of the program for identification and find that the program led to a 10% reduction in...

Most countries around the world implement some form of a safety net program for poor households. A widespread concern is that such programs crowd out private-sector jobs. But they could also improve workers' welfare by allowing them to take on more risk, for example through self-employment. This...

How can social problems be solved? The complicated and rapidly changing problems of modern society require all the actors of the economy to create social values to solve problems. Social enterprises create social value in the field of business and solve many social problems through employment....