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...

This paper examines the effects of age and tenure on job satisfaction. We estimate a generalized dynamic random effects ordered probit model using the British Household Panel Survey. Contrary to previous literature, we find that age has no significant impact on job satisfaction for females, and...

We propose a different methodology to assess the financial performance of banks: Multiple Indicator, Multiple Cause (MIMIC) Variable model. We also consider other existing methodologies in the literature for estimation of bank performance. The result shows that the influence of funds in...

The state of Tamil Nadu, located in South India, has been identified as a state with gender equality as is evident from a balanced sex ratio, higher age of marriage of women, lower fertility rates and higher female literacy. Using district level and village/town level data from Census 2001, we...

The paper examines the temporal relationship between revenues and expenditures for the four southern states during 1980 to 2005. Using an error-correction model and Granger causality test, it finds that the tax-spend hypothesis is supported by the analsysis. The spend-tax hypothesis is valid for...