Biomass (in modern context, biofuels) have been the oldest source of energy and still accounts for about 10 per cent of total world energy consumption. With the steeply rising prices of fossil fuels in the last few years and the increasing concerns about environmental pollution and global...

The fertiliser industry in developing countries is facing challenge and uncertain future due to their commitments to the WTO. This is part of the reason that the developing countries are pushing for reducing of subsidies given by the developed countries to their agriculture which is much bigger...

Education is increasingly being viewed as central to issues of development like productivity, income distribution, employment, and knowledge as an input to production. This book deconstructs the interface between economic theory and education in order to unravel how education contributes to...

Using data from the 14 major states of India, we investigate whether state governments' fiscal policy choices are tempered by political considerations. Our principal findings are twofold. First, we show that certain fiscal policies experience electoral cycles: state governments raise less...

This paper addresses several important issues related to crime. First, we construct a violent crime index taking into account seven different types of crimes. We use an aggregator function to define a crime index that attaches crime-specific weights which can be interpreted as severity of each...