The Evolution of Indian Industrial Relations: A Comparative Perspective

This article examines the evolution of Indian industrial relations in an historical and structural context. In India, the evolution of industrial relations has been ‘incremental’ and ‘adaptive’ and not ‘discontinuous’ and ‘revolutionary’. The relationship between changing industrialisation strategies and industrial relations institutions and practices in India is considerably more subtle than is often supposed in comparative industrial relations narratives, especially when detailed endogenous political economy considerations are taken into account.     

Economic and Internet Growth Effect on Electricity Consumption in the BRICS Countries

International Advances in Economic Research - This study investigated the impact of information communication technology and economic growth (measured as gross domestic product) on electricity...     

Social Affiliation and the Demand for Health Services: Caste and Child Health in South India

This paper assesses the role of social affiliation, measured by caste, in shaping investments in child health. The special setting that we have chosen for the analysis - tea estates in the South Indian High Range - allows us to control nonparametrically for differences in income, access to health services, and patterns of morbidity across low caste and high caste households. In this controlled setting, low caste households spend more on their children's health than high caste households, reversing the pattern we would expect to find elsewhere in India. Moreover, health expenditures do not vary by gender within either caste group, in contrast once again with the male preference documented throughout the country. A simple explanation, based on differences in the returns to human capital across castes in the tea estates is proposed to explain these striking results.     

Women as agents of change: Female income and mobility in India

Economic globalization will give many women in developing countries access to steady and relatively remunerative employment for the first time, potentially shifting bargaining power within their households and changing the choices that are made for their children. This paper exploits a unique setting — a group of tea plantations in South India where women are employed in permanent wage labor and where incomes do not vary by caste — to anticipate the impact of globalization on mobility across social groups in the future. The main result of the paper is that a relative increase in female income weakens the family's ties to the ancestral community and the traditional economy, but these mobility enhancing effects are obtained for certain historically disadvantaged castes alone. Although the paper provides a context-specific explanation for why the women from these castes emerge as agents of change, the first general implication of the analysis is that the incentive and the ability of women to use their earnings to influence household decisions depends importantly on their social background. The second implication is that historically disadvantaged groups may, in fact, be especially responsive to new opportunities precisely because they have fewer ties to the traditional economy to hold them back.     

Terrorism and its Determinants in the Sub‐Saharan Africa Region: Some New Insights

Terrorism is undesirable as it adversely affects the economic development of countries. This study explores the determinants of terrorism in 29 countries of sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA). The data is extracted from reliable sources spanning over 2005 to 2016. Econometric techniques relevant for panel data that control for unobserved heterogeneity (fixed effects) and endogeneity (generalized method of moment) are employed to estimate the specified models. The results indicated that low growth in per capita incomes along with political instability are the main driving forces responsible for terrorism. Similarly, military expenditures are influencing terrorism positively whereas corruption has impacted terrorism negatively in the SSA region. Further, the growth of both physical as well as human capital reduces terrorism. The paper suggests that the region should take appropriate steps for increasing income of the population, education and capital stock, along with ensuring political stability to eradicate terrorism from the region.     

Social norms and the fertility transition

This paper provides a norm-based explanation for two features of the fertility transition that have been observed in many different settings: the slow response to external interventions and the wide variation in the response to the same intervention. Most societies have traditionally put norms into place to regulate fertility. When the economic environment changes, individuals gradually learn through their social interactions about the new reproductive equilibrium that will emerge in their community. This characterization of the fertility transition as a process of changing social norms is applied to rural Bangladesh, where norms are organized at the level of the religious group and interactions rarely cross religious boundaries. Consistent with the view that changing social norms are driving changes in reproductive behavior in these communities, we find that the individual's contraception decision responds strongly to changes in contraceptive prevalence in her own religious group within the village whereas cross-religion effects are entirely absent. Local changes in reproductive behavior occur independently across religious groups despite the fact that all individuals in the village have access to the same family planning inputs.     

Offshoring and occupational wages: Some empirical evidence

Offshoring has changed the pattern of international competition; labor in specific occupations rather than whole firms and sectors are now facing competition. Accordingly, wages in offshorable occupations are affected in new ways. In this article, we investigate the effects of offshoring on relative occupational wages in 13 countries for 1990–2003. Our findings show that offshoring competiveness is associated with higher relative wages in offshorable occupations, and that export growth of IT-related services leads to higher relative wages in offshorable occupations, whereas import growth of such services reduces them.     

How Efficiently is Capital Allocated? Evidence from the Knitted Garment Industry in Tirupur

This paper studies the effect of community identity on investment behaviour in the knitted garment industry in the South Indian town of Tirupur. We document very large and systematic differences in both levels of capital stock and the capital intensity of production in firms owned by people from two different community groups. We argue that the differences in investment cannot be explained by productivity differences alone. We suggest that the most likely explanation is that the two communities differ in their access to capital.     

Experiential Education In New Product Design And Business Development

We describe an experiential approach to teaching new product design and business development in a year‐long course that combines intensive project work with classroom education. Our course puts together up to six teams of graduate students from management and engineering who work on projects sponsored by individual companies. Student teams work with faculty from multiple disciplines and personnel from the sponsoring companies. The year‐long format and involvement with company personnel provide opportunities for students to gain hands‐on experience in a real product development project. Time constraints, coupled with students' determination to demonstrate what they can accomplish, stimulate teams to learn how to compress the design and development cycle. To help students generalize from their own projects to a wider universe of product design and business development phenomena, students participate continuously in constructive critiques of others' projects; and in presentations, case discussions and workshops that help them learn about the product and business development process itself. This article describes course objectives, syllabus, projects, sponsors, faculty, students and our course administration. In an effort to move towards a “paperless” course, we have put as much of the course material as possible on the World Wide Web; relevant websites are referred to in the article. At the end of the course each team presents a prototype and a protoplan to the sponsoring company in a final report, which in many cases includes suggestions for the sponsor on how to improve its design and development process. Students' positive evaluations, along with their comments, indicate that they are attaining their educational goals. Course projects have resulted in commercialized products, patents, continuing development projects in sponsoring companies, and placements for students. The course has generated public relations value for the units involved and for the university as a whole. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.