Policy

Does information and communication technology adoption lead to any broad differences in women’s labour force participation behaviour in India? We use the India Human Development Survey to examine employment decisions of women and find that its adoption leads to improvement in employment measures only for urban women.

There has been increased attention to food insecurity in India and globally since the 1990s. However, the food insecurity experienced by university students has not been widely discussed. We examine the scale and depth of the problem of student food insecurity and outline four key considerations that will need to be borne in mind in policy efforts to address the issue. Future work on this problem should be comparative, engaged with policy, informed by its complexity, and attuned to the significance of young people’s agency.

The study of the inter-district convergence of per capita incomes in any state or country is crucial to policy agenda as it exposes the scenario of real income distribution. The present paper examines inter-district convergence of per capita income in West Bengal using the neoclassical growth and panel unit root models; the second is an advanced approach compared to the first. The results in line with the two approaches show that the districts are not converging in terms of income; rather the districts are diverging between 1993 and 2014. It is an alarming knock to the state since divergence in income leads to rising inequality across districts; it will hamper the development of the state.

Many have argued that the current Sri Lankan crisis was caused by the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war, and the country’s overdependence on predatory Chinese lending. Sri Lanka’s problems are more deep-rooted and have their origins in economic policy that focused on providing fi scal sops and a family-run political establishment that enabled the government to ignore sound advice.

Governing Locally: Institutions, Policies and Implementation in Indian Cities by Babu Jacob and Suraj Jacob, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, New Delhi and Singapore: Cambridge University Press, 2021; pp xxv + 293, $110 (hardback).