Socioeconomic and demographic analysis of occupational patterns in Delhi slums, India

Slums are a major concern for the contemporary urban planners, especially in the developing world. They typically represent an imbalance between migration into cities and economic growth of the city. For a long time, governments have tried to improve the quality of life for the slum dwellers, with varying degree of success. Such efforts understate the need to continually understand various aspects of the slum economics. This article is an attempt to comprehend the socio-demographic and economic patterns of the population in slums of Delhi, India. The study employs the use of field survey technique comprising of questions that tapped the education level, income, gender and occupational status of the respondents. The sample consisted of 5053 participants and further classified as working and non-working population. On the basis of the survey, the occupational patterns are analyzed and classified at three different levels （macro, meso and micro）. The study reveals high degree of positive correlation between the education level, economic status and gender parity in the slums.     

The Effect of Household Socioeconomic Status on the Demand for Child Health Care Services

The health of the child is an important factor for proper childhood development. Unfortunately, efforts to improve child health in many countries have not yielded the desired results as many children do not receive appropriate health care, hence contributing to high child mortality and morbidity from avoidable causes. To address this problem, it is important that we understand the factors that drive the demand for child health care services. This study, employing the binary and multinomial logistic regression models, examines the effect of household socioeconomic status on the demand for child health care in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia using data from the 2014 Demographic and Health Surveys. The results indicate that the likelihood of seeking appropriate health care for the child is higher when both parents make decisions. The findings further indicate that the odds of seeking treatment for the child falls with the birth order and age of the child, but increases with household wealth, insurance status and proximity to the health facility. Working women are more likely to demand child health care than their counterparts who are unemployed. Our results, therefore, suggest that improving child health will need the participation of both parents in the household on such decisions. Besides, there is the need to educate parents on the importance of seeking appropriate care for all the children born irrespective of the birth order and age of the child. There should also be deliberate efforts to improve the economic lot of households to enhance their purchasing power and encourage them to participate in health insurance schemes to enable effective utilization of health care services for the child in the efforts to improve child health.     

Biology,Complexion, and Socioeconomic Status: Accounting for Nineteenth Century Body Mass Index by Race

Nineteenth‐century US whites were taller than their mulatto and darker complexioned African‐American counterparts, a pattern known as the ‘Mulatto Advantage’. If this pattern was due to social preferences, fairer complexioned whites would have had greater body mass index (BMIs) values. This study shows that late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century US BMIs differed by race, and darker complexions were associated with greater BMI values. Mulattos had greater BMI returns associated with socioeconomic characteristics, indicating that while blacks had greater BMIs than fairer complexioned whites and mulattos, part of the difference was offset by socioeconomic characteristics that favoured fairer complexions.     

Socioeconomic Determinants of Child Health: Empirical Evidence from Indonesia

This paper characterizes the socioeconomic determinants of child health using height‐for‐age z‐score (HAZ), a long‐run measure of chronic nutritional deficiency. We construct a panel data that follows children between ages 3 and 59 months in 1993 through the 1997 and 2000 waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey. We use this data to identify the various child‐level, household‐level and community‐level factors that affect children's health. Our findings indicate that household income has a large and statistically significant role in explaining improvements in HAZ. We also find a strong positive association between parental height and HAZ. At the community level, we find that provision of electricity and the availability of paved roads are positively associated with improvements in HAZ. Finally, in comparison to community‐level factors, household‐level characteristics play a large role in explaining the variation in HAZ. These findings suggest that policies that address the demand‐side constraints have greater potential to improve children's health outcomes in the future.     

The Allocation of Publicly-Provided Goods to Rural Households in India: On Some Consequences of Caste, Religion and Democracy

What determines the allocation of publicly-provided goods to rural households in India? Although empirically driven this paper draws on the characteristics of India's institutional structure and the implications of existing literature for framing the answer to this question. We confront the main empirical implications drawn from this framework with a unique data set which brings together widely used district data with a recently constructed data set on political participation. We identify three robust determinants of this allocation process: formal and informal characteristics of each state allocation mechanism; selectivity in the allocations against Muslims and scheduled castes; and bureaucratic rules and behavior.     

中国居民慢性病的经济影响

慢性病的经济负担在世界范围内增加,但基于个体经济层面的研究较少.利用中国健康与营养调查(CHNS)数据和Heckman两阶段模型,分析了慢性病对个体医疗支出、非医疗消费、家庭间转移支付及工作时间的影响,结果显示:慢性病显著地增加了医疗费用开支;慢性病患者的周工作时间下降;慢性病患者接受来自其他家庭(亲属)的转移收入明显增加,这表明个体能够通过家庭间风险分担的非正式制度处理机制,来应对慢性疾病的冲击;尽管有来自其他家庭的转移收入,慢性病人的非医疗消费水平降低;富裕个体在抵御慢性病冲击上明显比贫困的慢性病患者有利.最后,文章提出应当引入卫生筹资的政策干预.     

Religion as an Investment: Comparing the Contributions and Volunteer Frequency among Christians,Buddhists, and Folk Religionists

The magnitude of the reward of an afterlife promised in the case of Christians is significantly greater than that in relation to both Buddhism and Taiwanese folk religions. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether these differences in the promised rewards of an afterlife across religions and the extent of the belief in the existence of an afterlife within the same religion are positively correlated with religionists' contributions to their religion and the frequency of their voluntary activities. This positive correlation is verified across different religions and within Christianity in regard to the religionists' contributions.     

Special economic zones and growth in China and India: an empirical investigation

This paper investigates the role of special economic zones (SEZs) in liberalizing the Chinese and Indian economies and their impact on economic growth. The policy change to a more liberalized economy is identified using SEZ variables as instrumental variables. The results indicate that export and FDI growth have positive and statistically significant effects on economic growth in these countries. The presence of SEZs increases regional growth but increasing the number of SEZs has negligible effect on growth. The key to faster economic growth appears to be a greater pace of liberalization.     

Products,processes and incomes: Cotton clothing in India

This analysis seeks to relate the processes of different production modes to product characteristics and incomes of consumers within a particular industry. A dynamic interpretation of the cross-sectional relationships suggests that with rising incomes consumers pass through the product and process characteristics of the earliest pre-capitalist formations to those of successively later periods.     

Enforcement,Socioeconomic Diversity,and Tax Filing Compliance in the United States

In this article, we examine the determinants of tax filing compliance in the United States. We use county‐level data on non‐filing rates for the tax year 2000, obtained directly from the Internal Revenue Service. We include explanatory variables identified in the “rational compliance” framework, including an enforcement index against identified non‐filers, the audit rate of filers, and the average penalty rate for both filers and non‐filers. We also examine the role of socioeconomic diversity on tax compliance, testing whether within‐county heterogeneity in household income, language, race, and religion can help explain variation in non‐filing rates. We find that non‐filing is increasing with heterogeneity by race, although not by income or language, and that non‐filing is decreasing with heterogeneity by religious membership. As for enforcement variables, we find that non‐filing rates tend to fall with the enforcement index. Other variables have somewhat mixed results.     

万象香昆的宗教之美

如果用颜色来形容老挝,那么它就是绿色和红色的。老挝,这个东南亚惟一的内陆国,属热带、亚热带季风气候,一年四季都适合植物生长。有人说,在老挝,筷子插到地上都能长成树。从飞机上远远望去,整个老挝几乎被树林覆盖。所以说,它是绿色的。老挝的首都万象人口61万,僧人就有近千名。可以说,在万象随处都能看得到出家人。     

Inputs,networks and quality-upgrading: Evidence from China in India

This paper exploits China's accession to the WTO to investigate the impact of a supply shock on quality across the Indian production network. After controlling for increased import competition, including in downstream and third-country markets, and for new export opportunities, we find that a fall in input tariffs raises revenue, quality and prices, whilst lowering quality-adjusted prices and the probability of product exit – consistent with a simple model of multi-product manufacturers gaining access to higher-quality components. Upgrading persists for at least ten years; at the peak in 2010, products with a 10% higher pre-accession input tariff, and hence a larger post-accession fall in tariffs, have 5.3% higher quality. This in turn raises quality further down the supply chain, with input-output linkages amplifying the one-step effect by up to 75%. These results highlight a potential beneficial impact of the “China shock” in developing countries, namely supply-driven quality upgrading.     

结合广西实际浅析我国高等教育自学考试现状及其发展趋势

高等教育自学考试既是一种具有国家考试特征与权威的学历考试制度,同时又是一种开放的教育形式。进入新的世纪,自学考试遇到了前所未有的挑战。文章基于对自学考试面临的挑战的认识,对自学考试的发展空间和前景进行了有意义的分析和思考。     

Health Status and Earnings of Migrant Workers from Rural China

The migration of rural laborers into cities for employment has been one of the main driving forces of China's economic growth over the past three decades. Based on a dataset collected by the Ministry of Agriculture of China from 2003 to 2007, this paper examines the impact of health on the earnings of migrant workers engaging in physically‐intensive work requiring good health. Our findings indicate that a poor health status not only weakens the incentive of rural laborers to participate in the migrant labor force but also significantly reduces their earnings. A migrant worker in poor health only earns 67 percent of what a healthy worker makes. Among all the human capital characteristics and family economic factors, health status is the most influential on earnings for less educated workers. Labor productivity has a greater impact on earnings than the annual number of days that a person works. Ongoing health‐care reforms aimed at the improvement of the health‐care services available to rural laborers are urged to help reduce poverty in rural China.     

Socioeconomic equity and fertility in developing countries: A block-recursive model

Summary This paper explores the interrelationships among fertility and three measurable aspects of socioeconomic equity: life expectancy, schooling, and income distribution. A block-recursive model of interaction among these variables is tested on cross-sectional data for developing countries. The structural results validate the initial hypotheses, with an important exception: income distribution does not act directly on fertility. Taking indirect effects into account, by deriving the reduced form of the system, shows life expectancy and schooling as major determinants of fertility, and income distribution as a lesser influence. The feedback from fertility to income equity considerably exceeds the net effect in the other direction.This paper was completed while the author was a visiting scholar at The Carolina Population Center and Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Richard Bilsborrow, Boone Turchi, and 7. Richard Udry provided helpful comments on an earlier version. Sang E. Lee and V. Panoutsopoulos kindly made available unpublished data from World Bank files.