Using official data this paper evaluates India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) according to the following criteria: a) average number of days of employment per household; b) percentage of households completing 100 days of employment under NREGS; c) percentage of expenditure...

We lay out the IMF's rationale for its role in the international economy; particularly in helping those countries that are going through balance of payments crises. We then try to decipher whether the actual lending pattern of the IMF conforms to this rationale. This is done in the context of...

The principal objective of this paper is to test whether public expenditures on education, health and development activities have been effective in reducing poverty in India. For sensitivity and robustness of the results, three different measures of poverty belonging to the...

This paper argues that the notion of sustainability as used in the extant literature is incomplete because of two reasons: (i) a neglect of the spatial dimensions of sustainability and (ii) the absence of a link between sustainability on the one hand and change in behavior on the other. This...

Transboundary and international environmental problems are a pressing concern for the global community and call for innovative institutional design to address them. Whereas the developed countries value the international environment highly they realize that some of the solutions must originate...

Using NSS data for 1993-94 and 2004-05 this paper highlights the impact of growing incomes, social and household decisions of households, and regional and ethnic factors on patterns of household level fertility in India. These have helped determine the composition of India’s young (aged 9 to...

In this paper we propose a new method of splitting up the Bid-Ask Spread of the wholesalers in grain markets into its three constituent components: the order processing costs, the adverse information cost and the inventory holding cost. It is argued that the extant methods of splitting up this...

A central issue in the context of the environment is that of its sustainability. This presumes the development of an index that encapsulates both the current state of the environment as well as its potential to provide support for future human activity. Once the broad contours are accepted the...

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...

We extend the analysis of Jha and Murthy (2003) to relate consumption to environmental degradation (conceived of as a composite) within a cross-country framework. We use the method of Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to construct an Environmental Degradation Index (EDI) for each country and...