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Summary There has been a major expansion of social security programs in India during the last 15 years or so, along with wider recognition of economic and social rights. This paper discusses five programs that can be seen as partial foundations of a possible social security system for India: school meals, child care services, employment guarantee, food subsidies, and social security pensions. The record of these programs varies a great deal between Indian states, but there is growing evidence that they make an important contribution to human well-being, and also that the achievements of the leading states are gradually spreading to other states as well. Much scope remains for extending these efforts: despite the recent expansion, India’s social security system is still very limited in international perspective. The paper also discusses some general issues of social policy in India, such as the arguments for universalization versus targeting and the value of a rights approach to social security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Sen’s entitlement thesis rooted in social contract theory has been used to explain access to food, and is used by states to design social protection programs as transfer entitlements to diffuse food insecurities. Social protection programs have now burgeoned in several countries as a strategy to enable the poor to overcome risks, vulnerabilities and poverty. These social protection programs have inclusion and exclusion errors, which current theorization attributes mainly to political clientalism, social vulnerability, elite capture, targeting inefficiency, leakages and corruption, lack of information transparency and improper designing of social protection programs. This paper argues that the errors are due to a more fundamental assumption made in application of social contract and entitlement-based approach to social protection programing. It identifies an uncritical application of Sen’s entitlement thesis to social protection programs, as leading to inclusion and exclusion errors. The main problematic, the paper shows is that the social contract-led entitlement thesis works within the domain of formal rights situated within the state-citizen relations, and as such, misses out on the non-formal entitlements and non-state influences that impact materialization of social protection programs in practice. Evidences from flood prone Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, India indicate that non-state rules linked with clientele and patronage relations, moral and local political economies trump over formal rights to mediate social protection entitlement outcomes. Rather than abstract state-citizen social contract, it is the moral contracts of reciprocal exchanges with influential patrons embedded in the moral economy of the villages that ultimately ground the social protection entitlement claims of poor villagers. Conceptualizing this process of access as cultures of entitlement, the paper builds a framework for reinterpretation of entitlements and their outcomes, suggesting a recalibration of application of Sen’s entitlement thesis to social protection programs. In conclusion it argues that Sen’s entitlement thesis which is pitched at transfer of economic resources through social protection from the state to the poor is inadequate. Learning from social movements currently leading the transparency and accountability struggles in India, it calls for an instituting and recognition of accountability as new cultural resource and entitlement. In conclusion it argues that information, and accountability as new cultural entitlements, when mobilized through collective agency of the poor can potentially challenge the current cultures of entitlements evidenced in this paper that presently underlie social protection outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper contributes to the impact evaluation of GIs by carrying out a case study of Basmati rice in India. Although Basmati rice is not yet an official GI, its long standing reputation for quality and GI-like protection by major importing countries except the United States (US) has rendered it a mirror image of a GI good. The analysis is based on a survey of 299 Basmati and nonBasmati rice farmers in Uttarakhand, one of the Northern states [1] India, officially Republic of India is a republic comprised of 28 constituent states and seven Union territories. These states and union territories are partially self-governing states or regions united by a central (federal) government. In India, this self-governing status of the component states is typically constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision of the central government. 1 of India. The empirical strategy of the paper is three-pronged. First, a net income analysis has been carried out to elicit the net benefits of Basmati rice as opposed to nonBasmati rice and another competing crop in that region such as sugarcane. The findings show that Basmati rice is more profitable than the nonBasmati varieties but less so than sugarcane. In the second stage, the endogeneity-corrected Heckman selection model reveals that Basmati adoption has increased welfare of the households. Finally, a Tobit model is estimated to investigate the determining factors of Basmati adoption among the farmer households. The determining factors are found to be access to extension training facilities, a credible hedge against risk, and the availability of household labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper attempts to quantify the impact of fiscal decentralization in India on its social infrastructure and on rural development. Overall, the results in this paper indicate that Government of India within a federal framework has been fostering development equitably across its states, particularly through health and education expenditures aimed at improving human capital development. In this context, the importance of the two tier centre-states decentralization should be noted. However, the third tier of local governance, particularly the state-rural local bodies decentralization has been dismal and has not achieved significant results across states, which warrant the attention of the central and state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the available studies on commodity chains and upgrading pursue a narrow economic view. This paper points to the need for mapping the social linkages of production and movement of commodities. In relation to upgrading, the paper emphasizes the importance of looking at their social implications. Toward these goals, the paper advances the idea of socially embedding the commodity chain. The idea is demonstrated by examining, from a long-run historical perspective, the global coir yarn commodity chain of southern India. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Viewing chronic poverty in terms of extended duration, severity and multidimensional deprivation, this paper uses existing literature to draw attention to those people in India for whom poverty is intractable. Two sets of approaches are used: an area-based approach and an historically marginalized groups-based approach. The area-based approach maps the location of the chronically poor by identifying states and regions that have been especially vulnerable to poverty in terms of severity and multidimensionality. It focuses on drylands and forest-based regions. The historically marginalized groups approach draws attention to groups who have suffered multiple deprivations for long periods. Chronic poverty is disproportionately high among casual agricultural laborers, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. In conclusion, the paper briefly reviews the factors that contribute to chronic poverty and the efficacy of policies to reduce such deprivation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Son preference is widespread in a number of developing countries despite substantial improvements in education levels and economic development. One potential explanation for the persistence of this phenomenon is that individual household members like the mother derive large non-monetary benefits from giving birth to a son and therefore prefer boys to girls. Qualitative evidence suggests that such benefits exist and may depend on the child’s age. This paper uses large nationally representative datasets from India and tests whether having a son leads to higher decision-making powers for mothers than having a daughter. Since the number and gender composition of children is likely to be non-random for families that want a son, I focus on first-born children for whom the sex ratio of girls relative to boys is normal. The main analysis also focuses on young children of up to six months, which gives parents little time to adjust desired birth-spacing intervals that could be systematically correlated with decision-making powers and child gender. The results show little evidence of consistently large female benefits shortly after birth, and any positive impacts of having a son disappear after the first six months. There are also no large benefits for adult sons. These empirical patterns do not support qualitative evidence suggesting that women benefit from the birth of a son through larger decision-making powers in the household because of increased respect by other household members. The benefits also do not heavily depend on the child’s age, which is not consistent with a channel predicting a better bargaining position for women with adult sons who start taking over the running of the household. Overall, these results extend our understanding of individual-specific incentives for son preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary It is well known that consumption patterns change with income. Relative price changes would therefore affect rich and poor consumers differently. Yet, the standard price indices are not income-specific, and hence, they cannot account for such differences. In this paper, we study consumption inequality in India, while fully allowing for non-homotheticity. We show that the relative price changes during most of the period from 1993 to 2012 were pro-poor, in the sense that they favored the poor relative to the rich. As a result, we also find that conventional measures significantly overstate the rise in real consumption inequality during this period. The main lesson from our study is the importance of accounting for non-homotheticity when measuring inequality. The price index literature has, as of yet, paid relatively little attention to this. In our application, however, it turns out that the allowance for non-homotheticity is quantitatively much more important than much discussed adjustments, such as those for substitution in consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary In the context of climate change and its effect on poverty, previous studies have shown that productivity shocks in agriculture, such as rainfall variability, affect wages adversely. None of the studies, however, consider the heterogeneity in the impact of these shocks on agricultural wages by gender, a feature which has been studied for demand shocks in urban labor markets for developed countries. Using National Sample Survey data for India from 1993 to 2007, a district-level panel dataset is created to examine how a rainfall shock affects the gender wage gap. The study shows that both female and male wages are positively related to rainfall shocks. Hence, future studies must study the impact of labor market shocks in rural areas on both female and male wages separately. It also finds that the female-to-male wage ratio is significantly positively associated with a rainfall shock in regions where rainfed rice is cultivated, i.e., low (high) rainfall reduces (increases) the female-to-male ratio. The study demonstrates that this result is due to a positive association of demand for female labor with rainfall in these rainfed rice-growing regions. This finding is consistent with the greater marginal value of female labor in rice cultivation, which is also a crop highly sensitive to rainfall variability under rainfed conditions. The paper concludes that the effect of a rainfall shock on the gender wage gap depends upon the gender roles underlying the technology of production, which varies across cropping systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The paper looks at productivity differentials across women and men managed farms in India. • We find that productivity on women managed farms is on an average 11% lower than male managed farms. • This gap reduces to 7% once crop choice, input usage, location and farmer characteristics are controlled for. • Semi-parametric decomposition shows that productivity differential remains largest in lower part of the value distribution. • Heterogeneity analyses shows inadequate experience among women managers as a contributor to the residual productivity gap. In India, role of women as farm managers has been veiled behind image of men as primary decision makers on farms. Data shows that approximately 8% farm households had women farm managers in India in 2004, and this number increased to 11% in 2011. This rising phenomenon of farm management by women begets an in depth understanding about these farms, including, differentials in productivity levels across men and women managers. This paper uses three measures to capture productivity – production value, profit value and crop specific yields. Results show that total farm production and profits are lower by approximately 11% in households where women manage farms. This falls to 7% when controls for crop choice, input usage, location and farmer characteristics are included. The main mediating factors in explaining the productivity gap are crop choice and input usage, explaining almost 45% of the productivity gap. Further, the paper provides suggestive evidence on mechanisms contributing to the remaining productivity difference that cannot be explained by differences in observed characteristics. It shows that inadequate experience of women farm managers in agricultural production processes can be an important factor behind the remaining gap. The study makes two contributions to the literature – one, it is the first quantitative study in the Indian context on gender differentials in farm productivity and second, it applies semi-parametric decomposition techniques to look at the productivity differentials along the entire distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] This paper develops a framework of theories of bureaucratic action in development. [•] Tree planting among foresters in India is a partially successful policy. [•] Outcomes are driven by complex, multi-causal processes. [•] Interplay between self-regarding behavior and a logic of appropriateness. [•] Single-issue reforms unlikely to succeed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] This paper examines returns to education in India for consumption and wages. [•] The returns appear high at the individual level for both men and women. [•] Yet comparing across cohorts the returns are low for men and zero for women. [•] The results are robust to measurement error and school quality. [•] There are higher returns in the regular wage market but that employs few people. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper studies the relationship between mothers’ employment and children’s schooling in India. Using the second National Family Health Survey, the results of a multilevel probit model show that the correlation between mothers’ employment and their children’s schooling is negative. Women in poorer households are more likely to work but, given the negative correlation, their additional income does not seem sufficient to enable children’s school attendance. A sensitivity analysis on wealth deciles shows that this negative relationship disappears in urban areas and becomes weaker in rural areas at the top wealth deciles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Although identifying household-level poverty dynamics would have important implications for poverty reduction policies empirical evidence is still scant. This paper employs a novel semiparametric panel data estimator that combines the advantages of estimation methods in the existing literature and applies it to a uniquely long panel data set to examine poverty dynamics in three villages in rural semi-arid India. Structural immobility is pervasive. The currently poor are likely to remain poor, suggesting a structural poverty trap. While all households face static asset holdings, higher castes, larger landholders, and more educated households are significantly less likely to be poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper utilizes individual level earnings data from urban India to examine the evolution of wages during 1983–2004 across the entire wage distribution. Quantile regression analysis reveals that the effects of many covariates are not constant across distribution. Returns to secondary and tertiary education not only increased in the 1990s but also became more heterogeneous suggesting wage inequality may increase further in near future as more workers get higher education. Moreover, the quantile regression decomposition suggests that the increase in returns has been the driving force behind the increase in wages in both the 1980s and 1990s. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper empirically examines the different comparative advantages of China and India, in relation to their different skill distribution patterns. By utilizing industry export data on China and India from 1983 to 2000, we find that a country with a greater dispersion of skills (i.e.,India, especially in the earlier years) has higher exports in industries with shorter production chains, while a country with a more equal dispersion of skills (i.e., China, especially in the later years) has higher exports in industries with longer production chains. The causal relationship is fairly robust and skill sorting mechanism seems to work behind. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Plantings of unapproved genetically modified seeds (GM) happen in many developing countries including Brazil, China, and India even though the law does not permit it. Is regulation impossible and what does that imply for safe use of GM seeds? This paper examines these questions in the case of unapproved GM cotton plantings in Gujarat, India. We find that enforcement was possible and that there are no obvious bio-safety implications. The popularity of unapproved seeds (confirmed by contingent valuations), the de-facto intellectual property of legal seeds and the federal polity of India contributed to non-compliance. This could matter for future innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Effective state–business relations are a set of highly institutionalised, responsive and public interactions between the state and the business sector. This paper examines the impact of effective state–business relations on economic growth across Indian states over the period 1985–2006. We propose a measure that captures the various dimensions of effective state–business relations at the sub-national level, and estimate standard growth regressions using dynamic panel data methods. Our results show that effective state–business relations contribute significantly to economic growth and appear to be driven by the intensity of the interactions between the state and the private sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Dominant development policy approaches recommend women’s employment on the grounds that it facilitates their well-being. However, empirical work on the relationship between women’s employment status and well-being as measured by freedom from marital violence yields ambiguous results. Motivated by the ambiguity, this paper uses data from Uttar Pradesh, to examine the effect of women’s employment and asset status as measured by their participation in paid work and house ownership, respectively, on spousal violence. Unlike the existing literature, we treat women’s work status as endogenous and find that engagement in paid work and house ownership, are associated with reductions in violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper assesses degradation of forests managed by local communities (Van Panchayats (VPs)), relative to state protected and open access forests in the Indian state of Uttaranchal. It is based on ground-level ecological measures of forest quality (including canopy cover, biomass, lopping, and regeneration) in forest areas adjoining a random sample of villages, and controls for unobserved village heterogeneity, possible endogeneity of management regimes and cross-forest spillovers. Controlling for these factors, VP forests are found to be 20–30% less lopped, and similar on other dimensions. The lopping differences are greater the longer the forest has been under a VP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Community-based development projects are often argued to strengthen social capital. This paper investigates the impact of a women’s empowerment program in India on trust and cooperation, using data on 2,000 households. The program significantly increases trust and stimulates contributions to educational and infrastructural community projects. The effect on informal assistance among households is less consistent. The findings suggest substantial spillovers on the wider community. Households who do not participate in the program themselves but who live in a program village are significantly more trusting and more likely to engage in collective action than households in control villages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The larger part of the economy in most developing countries is outside the regulative control of the state. When defined in this way, it has two types of expression: first, self-employment (with some wage-work) in unregistered or unincorporated small enterprises; second, unregistered and unregulated activity and workers inside and around large registered organizations such as firms, public sector enterprises, and the state itself. This paper reviews the literature, mainly but not exclusively from India, with three objectives. First, it questions what brings order to such economic activity and how economic and social insecurity is instituted. Second, it examines the counter intuitive proposition that social security rights are de facto, if not de jure, dependent upon work rights. Third, it explores the dynamics of, and responses to, informalization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper examines public–private partnerships (PPPs) for development through the example of telecenters in two Indian states. How might a developmental state position itself with respect to civil society under a PPP model of service delivery? We find that each state’s political economy is reflected in its PPP strategy, but that in both states the emerging middle classes rather than the poor benefit most from ongoing telecenter projects. Outsourcing development services to private entities need not “privatize” the state but does alter the way in which citizens “see” the state. Service delivery through telecenters becomes a symbol of government efficiency and responsiveness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper studies the product cycle and neo-technology theories of trade in the context of generic pharmaceuticals. It analyzes the export performance of 131 Indian pharmaceutical firms for the period 1989–2004. The results indicate that technology proxied by foreign patent rights has a positive impact on exports. This suggests that developing countries with innovation skills for process innovations are capable of penetrating international markets in the later stages of the product cycle by using patents, which were the barriers to trade in the early stages of the product cycle. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: In this paper, we test whether economic growth decreases child labor by bringing together data from the National Sample Survey of India and state-level macrodata to estimate a bivariate probit model of schooling and labor. Our results lead us to conclude that contrary to popular wisdom, growth actually increases rather than decreases child labor because it increases the demand for child workers. The level of state NDP, village wages, and household incomes are seen as the conduits through which growth influences the supply side of the child labor market. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Indian State of Kerala presents a paradox of development, with its remarkable social achievements and relative industrial backwardness. This paper describes Kerala's industrial backwardness as due to a path-dependent process of industrialization. A policy decision in the 1930s-marked by a priority for investments in chemical-based industries and the identification of hydroelectricity as a potential basis for industrialization-continue to have implications for industrial growth in Kerala today. With the policy decision in the 1930s, industrial structure in Kerala came to be locked into a pattern that offered very little potential for interindustry interlinkages and industrial growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent paper has suggested that the entry of transnational corporations (TNCs) favorably affected the productivity of Indian software, by inducing greater human capital formation in the industry, which in turn raised the productivity of existing investments. This note suggests an alternative causation that may lie behind the favorable effect of TNCs on the evolution of Indian industry. Factor market competition by local and foreign firms bid up the price of scarce human capital. Leading domestic producers in the industry responded to this scarcity by developing the offshore model and the complementary organizational capabilities suited to it and to introduce process methodologies and organizational practices that economized on human capital. These growing firm capabilities we argue lie behind the growing productivity of the Indian software sector. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the determinants of private saving in the process of economic development, in the light of the Indian experience. It is found that the saving rate rises with both the level and the rate of growth of disposable income. The real interest rate on bank deposits has a significant positive impact, but the magnitude of the impact is modest. Public saving seems to crowd out private saving, but less than proportionately. Furthermore, the spread of banking facilities in the economy and the inflation rate have a positive impact and changes in the external terms of trade a negative impact on private saving. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The evolution of the Indian software sector is explained by the larger context of uneven and combined development. The imperatives of a market-driven global order suggest an open-ended process of development, making some economic and technological convergence realizable but also generating contradictions at various levels. This paper focuses on differential innovative capability, the uneven diffusion of technical education in India, and the increasing economic integration of the software industry as sources of uneven development. The combined nature of the development process is reflected in the coexistence of the successful software sector with several lagging sectors with all of them being functionally integrated as part of Indian social formation. To cope with the contradictions of such change a balanced development will be critical. To make development more inclusive deep structural problems that plague those outside the orbit of the successful software industry must be resolved. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• The impact of rainfall shocks on school enrollment has changed in the past 30 years. • By 2007, positive rainfall shocks lead to a decrease in school enrollment. • School enrollment rises after a negative rainfall shock. • These effects are more pronounced for girls and older children. Despite long-standing international agreements like the Millennium Development Goals, 264 million children in developing countries are not enrolled in school, and children in rural areas remain twice as likely to be out of school as children in urban areas. One potential explanation for this pattern is that children's education in rural areas is vulnerable to weather shocks, but there is no consensus about whether rainfall shocks help or harm school enrollment in the existing literature. This paper explores whether changes in the relationship between rainfall shocks and schooling outcomes over time can explain the different results in the literature by using household survey data from India across three decades. My study finds that adverse rainfall shocks have an increasingly stronger positive impact on school enrollment over time, whereas enrollment is increasingly falling after positive rainfall shocks. This effect is stronger for girls than for boys, more pronounced for older children, and is consistent with an increase in the importance of opportunity costs of a child's time in more recent years. Children may have to drop out of school when employment opportunities are more readily available after a positive rainfall shock, but are able to go to school when jobs are scarce. These results offer a potential explanation for the different results in the literature, where studies on countries with higher economic development tend to find results consistent with an opportunity cost story, whereas this is not the case for studies on countries with a lower level of development. The results suggest that policymakers need to pay close attention to the obstacles faced by girls and older children to make access to education universal, and should develop policy tools that incentivize households to send their children to school even when employment opportunities are readily available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]