India's huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982-99. It finds that household electrification...

Public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor people's agency and...

Workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries. This has seemed an attractive idea for self-targeting transfers to poor people. This incentive argument does not imply, however, that workfare is more cost-effective against poverty than even poorly-targeted options, given hidden costs...

The paper examines the ways in which recent economic growth has been uneven in China and India and what this has meant for inequality and poverty. Drawing on analyses based on existing household survey data and aggregate data from official sources, the authors show that growth has indeed been...

"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...

There has been much debate about how much India's poor have shared in the economic growth unleashed by economic reforms in the 1990s. Datt and Ravallion argue that India has probably maintained its 1980s rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s. However, there is considerable diversity in...

December 1999 - Nonfarm economic growth in India had very different effects on poverty in different states. Nonfarm growth was least effective at reducing poverty in states where initial conditions were poor in terms of rural development and human resources. Among initial conditions conducive to...