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Financial inclusion through microfinance has become a powerful force in improving the living conditions of poor farmers, rural non-farm enterprises and other vulnerable groups. In its unique ability to link the existing extensive network of India’s rural bank branches with the Self Help Groups (SHG), the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has covered up to 97 million poor households by March 2010 under its Self Help Group Bank Linkage Programme. Policy-makers have proclaimed SHGs as ‘‘the most potent initiative ... for delivering financial services to the poor in a sustainable manner." This book presents a comprehensive scientific assessment of the impact of th...
An indispensable reference to the development of the Chinese economy—past, present, and future. —DALE W. JORGENSON, Samuel W. Morris University Professor, Harvard University Since China undertook economic reform and opened its economy to the world in the late 1970s, its economy has been growing at an average annual rate of over 9 percent for more than four decades. No other economy in recorded history has grown at such a high rate and for such a long period as China has done. The questions that naturally arise are: Was the Chinese economy a miracle? Or was it a mere bubble? Will the Chinese economy begin to stagnate like the Japanese economy did in the 1990s, and perhaps decline? Will it...
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests presents an innovative synthesis of research in different disciplines to argue that cooperation stems not from the stereotypical selfish agent acting out of disguised self-interest but from the presence of "strong reciprocators" in a social group. Presenting an overview of research in economics, anthropology, evolutionary and human biology, social psychology, and sociology, the book deals with both the theoretical foundations and the policy implications of this explanation for cooperation. Chapter authors in the remaining parts of the book discuss the behavioral ecology of cooperation in humans and nonhuman primates, modeling and testing strong reciprocity in economic scenarios, and reciprocity and social policy. The evidence for strong reciprocity in the book includes experiments using the famous Ultimatum Game (in which two players must agree on how to split a certain amount of money or they both get nothing.)
This book provides an innovative framework to analyze the process of industrial upgrading and diversification, a key feature of economic development. Based on this framework, it provides concrete advice to development practitioners and policy makers on how to unleash a country's growth potential.
This groundbreaking book powerfully humanizes the little-known urban workers who have been left behind in China’s single-minded drive to modernize. Dorothy Solinger traces the origins of their plight to the mid-1990s, when the Chinese government found that state-owned factories were failing in large numbers in the face of market reforms just as the country was about to enter the World Trade Organization. Under these circumstances, leaders urged firms to lay off tens of millions of previously lifetime-employed, welfare-secure, under-educated, middle-aged employees. As these dislocated people were left without any source of livelihood, the regime settled on a tiny welfare effort, the Minimum...
Focusing on the gap between democratic ideals and performance, three European academics study the common experience and even more common perception of the corrupt behavior of bureaucrats in post-communist Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The authors conducted focus-group studies, one-on-one interviews, and large-scale surveys to reveal plentiful details about the ways ordinary citizens cope in their day-to-day dealings with low-level officials and state employees, whose decisions can have a critically important impact on people's lives. c. Book News Inc.
This book offers an innovative examination of how ‘low–technology’ industries operate. Based on extensive fieldwork in India, the book fuses economic and sociological perspectives on information sharing by means of informal interaction in a low-technology cluster in a developing country. In doing so, the book sheds new light on settings where economic relations arise as emergent properties of social relations. This book examines industrial innovation and microeconomic network behaviour among producers and clusters, perceiving knowledge diffusion to be a socially-spatial, as much as a geographically spatial, phenomenon. This is achieved by employing two methods – simulation modelling,...
How game theory can offer insights into literary, historical, and philosophical texts ranging from Macbeth to Supreme Court decisions. Game theory models are ubiquitous in economics, common in political science, and increasingly used in psychology and sociology; in evolutionary biology, they offer compelling explanations for competition in nature. But game theory has been only sporadically applied to the humanities; indeed, we almost never associate mathematical calculations of strategic choice with the worlds of literature, history, and philosophy. And yet, as Steven Brams shows, game theory can illuminate the rational choices made by characters in texts ranging from the Bible to Joseph Hel...
The reform in Asian financial sectors—especially in banking and stock markets—has been remarkable since the currency crisis of 1997–98. East Asia is now a major player in international finance, providing serious competition to the more traditional financial centers of London and New York. Financial Sector Development in the Pacific Rim provides a rich collection of theoretical and empirical analyses of the growing capital markets in the region. Bringing together authors from various East Asian and Pacific nations, this volume examines the institutional factors influencing financial innovation, the consequences of financial development, widespread consolidation occurring through mergers and acquisitions, and the implementation of policy reform. Financial Sector Development in the Pacific Rim offers the comparative analysis necessary to answer broad questions about economic development and the future of Asia.
Whereas there is plenty of work looking at macroeconomic effect of public spending on growth and poverty in Africa as well as studies of the impact of spending or investment in one economic sector on outcomes in that sector or on broader welfare measures, this book fills a much needed gap in the research looking how the composition of public spending affects key development outcomes in the region. The book brings together recent analysis on the trends in, and returns to, public spending for agricultural growth and rural development in Africa. Case studies of selected African countries provide insights on the contributions of different types of public expenditures for poverty, growth and welfare outcomes, as well as insights into the constraints in gaining development mileage from investments in the agricultural sector.