Drawing on nearly 250 years of Indian colonial history, new research examines how direct British rule and landlord-based land tenure shaped access to schools, health centres, roads, and agricultural productivity across Indian districts. Updated analy...
Low prices paid to suppliers in global supply chains can raise concerns about unequal sharing of gains from exporting. New research on India’s garment sector shows that these low prices can reflect both mutually beneficial agreements and surplus capt...
While gig drivers' demographic profiles, earnings, and work experiences differ markedly across India, Indonesia, and Kenya, a common thread emerges: the flexibility to work more hours allows drivers to increase their monthly earnings, and, in some co...
Raghuram Rajan discusses how India's economy grew through services exports, why that model may be more resilient to AI than critics assume, and what policymakers need to get right on human capital, universities, and digital access to stay ahead.
After adjusting for labour input differences, the apparent agricultural productivity gap in India is largely a formal-informal sector divide. Differences in education and labour hours fully explain the productivity gap between informal sector and agr...
In India, a guaranteed income programme acted as insurance rather than a substitute for credit, reducing downside risk for small farmers and increasing their willingness to borrow – unlocking large credit-financed gains in investment, productivity, a...
As women become scarcer in India, some of the social and economic conditions that sustain strong son preference begin to weaken, pointing to a ‘self-correcting’ mechanism within the missing women crisis.
