Does Disclosure Reduce Pollution? Evidence from India’s Green Rating Project

Public disclosure programs that collect and disseminate information about firms’ environmental performance are increasingly popular in both developed and developing countries. Yet little is known about whether they actually improve environmental performance, particularly in the latter setting. We use detailed plant-level survey data to evaluate the impact of India’s Green Rating Project (GRP) on the environmental performance of the country’s largest pulp and paper plants. We find that the GRP drove significant reductions in pollution loadings among dirty plants but not among cleaner ones. This result comports with statistical and anecdotal evaluations of similar disclosure programs. We also find that plants located in wealthier communities were more responsive to GRP ratings, as were single-plant firms.     

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? GENDER,LABOR, AND DISCOURSE IN THE NOIDA EXPORT PROCESSING ZONE AND DELHI

Abstract

Export processing zones (EPZs) are like islands of globalization. Much of the literature on EPZs and export-oriented industries (EOIs) notes a preponderance of women who are constructed as “cheap,” “nimble fingered,” and “docile” labor. This literature is dominated by socialist feminist thinkers, and this paper argues that there is a need to incorporate the insights of postmodern feminist thinkers. The article focuses on the role that language, discourse, and subjectivity play in the gendering process in handmade jewelry production in the Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ) and in the ranch production units related by common ownership in Delhi, India. It thus gives “voices” to women and men, and brings out their agency in structuring the labor market. The study confirms that gender division of labor is a product of discursive and material practices that are reproduced through discourses into which different actors invest, and that feed into the gendered subjective identities of these actors.     

Cultural determinants of alliance management capability – an analysis of Japanese MNCs in India

This study examines the role of national and organizational culture in alliance management in the context of three prominent joint ventures between India and Japan, which reached diverse alliance outcomes. It uses the case study method as a tool for an initial rich exploratory analysis (Yin 2013) of alliance management capabilities that may later be tested on a larger dataset. The study finds that national and organizational culture is both important factors of alliance management capability. It highlights the specific role of trust, consensus in decision-making, communication and relationship building as key constituents of alliance management capability. This paper thus contributes to an important strand of literature on alliance management in the context of two important Asian players from the developed and emerging markets. Its focus on cultural factors as determinants of alliance management helps to establish a managerial blueprint leading to positive alliance outcomes for such ventures in future and to establish a roadmap for increased interaction between India and Japan.     

Global Warming, Endogenous Risk, and Irreversibility

This paper develops two-period analytical and numerical models to study the question: given a stock of greenhouse gases that poses a risk of future damages of unknown magnitude, and the possibility of learning about damages, how do sunk abatement capital and a nondegradable stock of greenhouse gases affect optimal first-period investment? We show that both affect investment, the former negatively and the latter positively. Additionally, endogenous risk – the risk of damages dependent on the stock of gases – results in an increase in optimal investment for any level of capital ‘sunkness’ or greenhouse gas degradability. Quantitatively, the effect of sunk capital is stronger than the effect of greenhouse gas irreversibility or that of endogenous risk.     

Impact of computerized automation on indian manufacturing industries

This article is based on the survey of a group of Indian manufacturing industries using computerized automation (CA). Areas covered include: the reasons for using CA, benefits achieved from it, planning and investment criteria, experience gained by the organizations, etc. The findings of the survey point toward the increasing use of CA among Indian manufacturing firms and that the large scale use of such technologies is imperative to help change the face of Indian firms that have now been thrown open to the winds of international competition.     

Poverty and resource dependence in rural India

Previous studies of rural households in developing countries have tended to find that the dependence of these households on common-pool resources declines with income. Our study of households in Jhabua, India, finds a more complex relationship. Using the share of resource income in total long-run or “permanent” income as our dependence measure—which we argue is more appropriate than the short-run income-based measure commonly used in the literature—we find that for households that collect any resources at all, dependence exhibits a U-shaped relationship with income. That is, the poorest and richest households depend more on resources than households with intermediate incomes. The poorest and richest households are also found to be least likely to collect, however, indicating that resource use at the income extremes is bimodal—either zero or above average. Moreover, the observed trends for resources as a whole are not mirrored in those for individual resources. Dependence on fuelwood and dung declines with income, for example, while dependence on fodder and construction wood increases. These findings suggest that common-pool resources are a productive source of income not just for the poor but also for the rich, and that improvements in the stocks of these resources can potentially form the basis of poverty reduction efforts in these economies.     

The growing popularity of spiritual brands: What drives purchase intent?

In this study, we investigate the reason for the growing popularity of FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) household products branded, promoted and sold in India by local spiritual leaders. We find that religiosity and normative community pressure are important purchase drivers for such products. Surprisingly, pragmatism in the presence of normative pressure also contributes to demand. We argue that self-identity theory provides a contextualized explanation in association with social identity theory to explain the influence of normative pressure on increased demand. The results of the study suggest that integrating social and self-identity theories provides a fuller insight into consumer behaviour in a complex social context.     

The Clean Development Mechanism’s Low-hanging Fruit Problem: When Might it Arise,and How Might it be Solved?

It is widely recognized that industrialized countries’ commitments under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions will be far less costly to achieve if they can be met at least in part through investment in cheap abatement options available in developing countries, as is permitted under the Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. Developing-country NGOs and others involved in the policy debate on the CDM have frequently raised concerns, however, about the so-called “low-hanging fruit” problem. The standard characterization of this problem is that if developing countries allow their cheap abatement options to be used now, they may find themselves worse off in future when they take on emissions-reduction commitments of their own, because only expensive abatement options will remain. We show that under plausible CDM-market imperfections a low-hanging fruit problem may indeed arise, but that the standard characterization of the problem is incorrect. We also present a potential solution, based on mandating a “virtual” option clause in CDM-investment contracts.     

The irreversibility effect in environmental decisionmaking

We provide a new, more general, definition for the irreversibility effect and demonstrate its relevance to problems involving environmental and other decisions under uncertainty. We establish several analytical and numerical results that suggest both that the effect holds more widely than generally recognized, and that an existing result (Epstein’s Theorem), giving a sufficient condition for determining whether the effect holds, can be applied more widely than previously indicated, in particular to problems involving intertemporally nonseparable benefit functions. We further show that a low elasticity of intertemporal substitution will however result in failure of the effect.