Executive Summary This paper reviews budget expenditure trends in Tamil Nadu and the key indicators of fiscal performance, during the period 1980/81-1998/99. The review indicates the emergence of large and persistent current and fiscal deficits from 1987/88. Revenue financed expenditures have grown rapidly as successive five year plans have led to increasing magnitudes of committed non-plan dev...

The purpose of this paper is to understand the progress of water rights and irrigation pricing reform in Heihe River Basin (HRB) and their influence on irrigation application. The data came from a village and household level survey conducted in 2009 and 2014 in five counties in Zhangye City, HRB. The main component of reforming water rights was issuing water certificates to individual farmers. ...

This study examines the financial impacts of electricity subsidy on tubewell owners and water buyers, and proposes alternative subsidy policy options that could balance the efficiency and equity. The results suggest that the subsidy plays a key role in stabilising production by providing financial incentives to tubewell owners to stabilise extraction cost under the declining watertables. The re...

In order to recycle and dispose of all people's expired drugs, the government should design a subsidy policy to stimulate users to return their expired drugs, and drug-stores should take the responsibility of recycling expired drugs, in other words, to be recycling stations. For this purpose it is necessary for the government to select the right recycling stations and treatment stations to opti...

While a growing body of literature finds positive impacts Start-Up Subsidies (SUS) on labor market outcomes participants, little is known about how the design these programs shapes their effectiveness and hence to improve policy. As experimental variation in program unavailable, we exploit 2011 reform current German SUS for unemployed which strengthened caseworkers’ discretionary power, increas...

The claim by global trade modelers that the potential contribution to global economic welfare of removing agricultural subsidies is less than one-tenth of that from removing agricultural tariffs puzzles many observers. To help explain that result, this paper first compares the OECD and model-based estimates of the extent of the producer distortions (leaving aside consumer distortions), and show...

the forefront of institutional reform in the water sector. It was also the first to significantly raise irrigation service fee on public irrigation systems. The Maharashtra State Water Policy of 2003 was a landmark of sorts. In 2005, the state passed two important pieces of legislation: one, Maharashtra Management of Irrigation Systems by Farmers (MMISF) Act, and two, Maharashtra Water Resource...

I examine inefficiencies in Japanese water utility companies. Efficiency in this context is defined as a firm’s capacity to maximize output given a fixed level of inputs. The findings suggest that the average operation rate, customer density and size variables are associated with lower levels of inefficiency (or higher levels of efficiency), while water purification (a conditioning variable cap...