This paper argues that the most important environmental challenge within the Asia-Pacific region is that of uninternalised externalities. While developed countries have put in place mechanisms of governance and regulatory structures that internalise most of their domestic environmental external...

Using pooled household level data for the Indian states of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh we find that the size of landholdings is a negative predictor of participation in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Program (NREGP). In state level analysis this pattern survives in Rajasthan but...

Analyses the structure of costs in the cement, lime and plaster industry of India. Using aggregative data for the period 1960‐61 to 1982‐83 a generalised translog cost function is estimated. It is discovered that (1) this industry has been characterised, by and large, by allocative...

In the extant literature either income or consumption expenditures as measured over short periods of time has been regarded as proxies for the material well-being of households. However, economists have long recognized that a household’s sense of well-being depends not just on its average...

This paper studies the evolution of the competitive structure of the two-wheeler industry in India. The evolution of the industry's competitive structure is traced using Kendall’s Index of Rank Concordance and the Evans-Karras test of convergence. The industry seems to be characterized by...

If public expenditure and public revenue are I(0) public debt is sustainable but if these are I(1) and not cointegrated or have a cointegrating vector dierent from [1, -1] the public debt is said to be unsustainable. Extant work indicates that India’s public debt is unsustainable. We...

Poverty, particularly rural poverty, has been one of the enduring policy challenges in India. Surely the most important objective of the reforms process would have been to make a significant dent on rural poverty. It is from this that a program of accelerated growth must draw its rationale. In...

This paper tries to assess why lowering interest rates is proving to be hard in India. It singles out the role of three factors: (i) high public debt and the structure of this debt, (ii) the overhang of non-performing assets; and (iii) the policy being pursued with respect to accumulation of...

This paper reports on mean consumption, poverty (all three FGT measures) and inequality during January to June 2004 for rural India using National sample Survey (NSS) data for the 60th Round. Mean consumption at the national level is much higher than the poverty line. However, the Gini...

This paper analyses vulnerability in Fiji, the Kyrgyz republic, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. In incorporating measures of vulnerability there is no major departure from the perspective of MDG 1 Analyses of vulnerability, like that in the present paper, emphasize the fact that the debates around...