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This book explores the role of public action in eliminating deprivation and expanding human freedoms in India. The analysis is based on a broad and integrated view of development, which focuses on well-being and freedom rather than the standard indicators of economic growth. The authors placehuman agency at the centre of stage, and stress the complementary roles of different institutions (economic, social, and political) in enhancing effective freedoms.In comparative international perspective, the Indian economy has done reasonably well in the period following the economic reforms initiated in the early nineties. However, relatively high aggregate economic growth coexists with the persistenc...
Fatal Misconception is the disturbing story of our quest to remake humanity by policing national borders and breeding better people. As the population of the world doubled once, and then again, well-meaning people concluded that only population control could preserve the “quality of life.” This movement eventually spanned the globe and carried out a series of astonishing experiments, from banning Asian immigration to paying poor people to be sterilized. Supported by affluent countries, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, the population control movement experimented with ways to limit population growth. But it had to contend with the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception a...
Drawing on empirical, interdisciplinary research, this book presents a critical review of some of the major issues that are of interest to researchers, policymakers and planners in developing as well as advanced countries, including specifically in India. It provides an in-depth review of some of the major development policy issues in education in general, and in India in particular, over the past 2-3 decades. Besides presenting an overview of the educational developments in India that reflects issues such as growth, equity, efficiency, foreign aid, decentralization, center-state relations, financing, and cost recovery, the book puts forward in-depth analyses of education poverty, interrelat...
This paper examines the assertion that returns to schooling increase as an economy transitions to a market environment. This claim has been difficult to assess as existing empirical evidence covers only a few countries over short time periods. A number of studies find that returns to education increased from the "pre-transition" period to the "early transition" period. It is not clear what has happened to the skills premium through the late 1990s, or the period thereafter. The authors use data that are comparable across countries and over time to estimate returns to schooling in eight transition economies (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Slovak Republic, and Sloven...
Fifty years ago, health outcomes in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia were not far behind those in Western Europe and well ahead of most other regions of the world. But progress since then has been slow. While life expectancy in the ECA region today is close to the global average, the gap with its western neighbors has doubled, and other middle-income regions have all surpassed ECA. Some countries in the region are doing better, but full convergence with the world’s most advanced health systems is still a long way off. At the same time, survey evidence suggests that the health sector is the top priority for additional investment among populations across the region. The exper...
New in Paperback. While everyone agrees that Social Security is a vital and necessary government program, there have been widely divergent plans for reforming it. Peter A. Diamond and Peter R. Orszag, two of the nation's foremost economists, propose a reform plan that would rescue the program both from its projected financial problems and from those who would destroy the program in order to save it. Since the publication of the first edition of this book in 2004, the Social Security debate has moved to the center of the domestic policy agenda. In this updated edition of Saving Social Security, the authors analyze the Bush Administration's proposal for individual accounts and discuss the so-c...
Future growth in the countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) will increasingly depend on innovation. And innovation requires skills. This makes it important, as countries plan for recovery, to undertake reforms to reduce the skills shortages that the previous growth episode exposed. Education systems have a very important role to play in creating the right skills. But education systems in the region fall short of the demands of their economies in two major ways. The first is that despite high levels of enrollment they do not produce enough graduates with the right skills. Students graduate with diplomas, not with skills, because the quality of the education for many students is po...
This book revisits skills development policies and points to new directions for making training programs more effective and responsive in increasingly competitive labor market.