Three main changes in thinking about poverty have gained increasing currency over the past decade. First, the concept of poverty has broadened, with increasing attention to issues of vulnerability, inequality and human rights. Second, the causal structure has broadened to include causal variables, such as social, political, cultural, coercive and environmental capital. Third, the causal structu...

Water saving agricultural technologies are a potentially important but under utilized lever to conserve groundwater in India. Technologies like laser levelers have high private returns and lead to water savings, yet the adoption rates are not very high. In order to provide insight for the design of policies to promote adoption, we conducted a survey based study about factors that influence the ...

We provide a dynamic theory of endogenous constitutions by relating the emergence of political institutions to different development patterns. These scenarios give rise to different constitutional designs depending on the relative power and interests of the different population groups during the transition. We focus in particular on efficiency and redistribution aspects the public sector. Const...

Over the past several decades, significant efforts have been made to regulate the use of resource and pollution in most industrialized countries, and the stringency of pollution regulations has continued to increase globally. At the same time, physical and social infrastructures are influenced by changes in the use of resources which contribute to the wealth of many regions. Technical progress ...

As part of the great doctrinal event that Benedict XVI’s encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate represents, bringing to fore central role love and truth, gift gratuitousness should play sound comprehensive reflections over human action, this article addresses unpopular task highlighting those technical solutions —as proposed Encyclical— might be questionable from standpoint economics. The does n...

Affirmative action policies have been proposed and used in both developed and developing countries to raise the well-being of disadvantaged minority groups. Among the most radical of these policies has been to mandate political representation for minorities. This paper examines the effect of political reservation for minorities on poverty in India. The Indian constitution stipulates that the sh...

social cohesion represents the interaction and linkage of the society, is a most important reason of different institutional performance to achieve economic development. the purpose of this paper is to estimate social cohesion and the relation of social cohesion with economic development for 85 selected developed and developing countries in 2010. in this research the social cohesion index have ...

Does Culture Matter? This paper reviews the literature on culture and economics, focusing primarily on the epidemiological approach. The epidemiological approach studies the variation in outcomes across different immigrant groups residing in the same country. Immigrants presumably differ in their cultures but share a common institutional and economic environment. This allows one to separate the...

The objective of this paper is to summarise essential aspects and types of structural change that may contribute to the development of a general theory. First a brief ontological introduction presents the underlying worldview and clarifies the meaning of key terms. Second the basic general mechanisms of structural change are explored and relations among them are pointed out. Finally some consid...

This study measures the monetary value households place on preventing malaria in Tigray, Ethiopia. We estimate a household demand function for a hypothetical malaria vaccine and compute the value of preventing malaria as the household’s maximum willingness to pay to provide vaccines for all family members. This is contrasted with the traditional costs of illness (medical costs and lost producti...