No Poverty

This study aims to empirically establish the co-movement of price indices of seemingly unrelated commodities, suggesting that the Central Bank should not decouple fluctuation in the national price index into volatile and core components. An attempt is also made to understand whether monetary policy can influence the factors responsible for price fluctuations in the states of India. The study becomes especially relevant under Indian conditions where flexible inflation targeting has been adopted by the Reserve Bank of India (Central Bank of India) and achieving the targeted inflation is a primary concern of the Indian government. The results of the empirical analysis clearly reveal that unrelated price indices co-move in India, and that monetary policy initiatives fail to influence the common factors of the states of India. The empirical results have crucial implications for the Reserve Bank of India and, as such, a conscious effort is needed to enable policy to influence the price indices of the states of India.

Over the past decades, an increasing number of developing countries in Asia have experimented with decentralization in varying degrees to achieve good governance and promote democracy. In Viet Nam, even though decentralization has been limited to de-concentration (or administrative decentralization), foreign direct investment (FDI) management is vigorously decentralized at the provincial level and has proven to be problematic. In one instance, it led to an environmental disaster in 2016. The objective of the present paper is to explore the factors resulting in ineffective decentralization of FDI management in Viet Nam, focusing on the challenges that the local government has been dealing with under the decentralization set-up, in particular with respect to environmental protection. Drawing on the case study of the Hung Nghiep Formosa Ha Tinh Steel project in Ha Tinh province, it is argued that Viet Nam continues to lack the essential prerequisites for effective decentralization. It is the time for Viet Nam to reconsider the policy of decentralization in the area of FDI management. Bearing in mind that economic development is vital, it should go hand in hand with environment protection in order to ensure the country’s sustainable development.

The present study entails an investigation of the empowerment of married women aged 15 to 49 in Myanmar from socioeconomic and demographic perspectives based on data from the Myanmar Demographic and Health Survey 2015-16. The dimensions of women’s empowerment are categorized into two parts: women’s control over their earnings, and women’s participation in household decision-making (decisions on major household purchases, visits to family or relatives, their health care; and the well-being of their children). These two dimensions are combined to create an index of women’s empowerment. A binary logistic regression is used, by means of odds ratios to assess the relationship between women’s level of empowerment and their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Overall, the findings of the study show that a higher empowerment level is associated with women’s employment, increased age, urban residence, a higher educational attainment, a higher wealth quintile, and a lower level of husband’s education. In addition, women that have one child or up to four children are more likely to have a higher level of empowerment than women with no children. About three fourths of the women in the sample live in rural areas. Among those women, the ones with a higher level of empowerment are more educated, employed and have higher household income. Generating employment opportunities for women and educating women are important factors that can lead to an increase in women’s income, and accordingly, help raise the levels of women’s empowerment.

The present study focuses on the Indian flagship financial inclusion scheme – the Self Help Group-Bank Linkage Programme, which successfully leverages the social collateral concept and the vast network of bank branches in India to deliver financial services to small, cohesive and participatory women’s self-help groups. To develop a deeper understanding of the topic of sustainability of self-help groups, we propose a framework that conceptualizes sustainability by integrating the financial and organizational aspects of functioning of self-help groups. Sustainability is assessed in the light of the group’s performance (on set of indicators) with respect to the primary objective of the Self Help Group-Bank Linkage Programme, which is financial intermediation. Subsequently, we ascertain the effect of plausible contributory factors related to group management practices on the sustainability of self-help groups. The results of regression analysis on primary data captured from a survey of 170 self-help groups show that such factors as equitable access to credit, group savings, growth in savings, loan utilization in income generation activities, members depositing a savings contribution or loan installment on each other’s behalf, and distance from bank contribute significantly to group sustainability. Accordingly, designing suitable measures to monitor and improve group governance and management practices would be a critical policy intervention.

Do people cheat because they can get away with it or because they feel that the rules are unfair? This paper addresses this question in the context of tax evasion. Specifically, taxpayer perception is incorporated into a widely used consumption-based method for estimating income tax evasion. Compared to the standard method, which distinguishes taxpayers only by their occupational or income type as a way of measuring their “ability” to misreport income, the refined method introduces taxpayers who may be “able but unwilling” to cheat because they feel fairly treated with respect to public services and as compared to other taxpayers. Applied to a longitudinal data for the Republic of Korea (2007–2015), the standard method yields a uniform tax evasion rate of 13 per cent, but the refined method provides a range of 7 to 25 per cent based on taxpayer perception. This implies that strategies for improving tax compliance must be tailored to different motivations for tax evasion.

Literature on regional growth suggests that divergences in infrastructure is a major factor behind the wide and persistent imbalances in regional growth in India. Using a state infrastructure expenditure function, possible factors that determine infrastructure expenditure and its role in the regional imbalance in infrastructure creation across 14 major Indian states are examined in the present paper. The study indicates that such factors as lagged expenditure, resource mobilization and per capita income may cause varying amounts of infrastructure expenditure across states. It also indicates that spending by the infrastructure-deficit states, political stability and positive spatial dependence in infrastructure expenditure have a balancing effect on infrastructure creation across regions. Those results suggest the need to do the following: (a) harness the favourable factors influencing public expenditure that include improving the financial capacity of the infrastructure-deficit states; (b) strengthen the positive spatial dependence among states through the creation of interstate infrastructure networks, such as railways and national highways; and (c) enable a conducive investment climate, which could boost competition among states for improved infrastructure creation.

Many argue that the benefits of trade liberalization do not equitably accrue to everyone. To counter this trend, some governments have proposed adding labour provisions in preferential trade agreements. The eradication of child labour is included in most of those agreements. Using unique new data, the present study is an assessment on whether preferential trade agreements with labour provisions have resulted in less child labour in 18 developing economies in the Asia-Pacific region over the period 1997-2014. The analysis reveals that countries with more preferential trade agreements with labour provisions have lower incidences of child labour. Robustness exercises, however, show that those trade policies are unlikely to reduce child labour and that instead, improving educational access is likely to lower this phenomenon. Accordingly, governments tend to sign those agreements after labour market conditions improve. This is useful in that it signals to other countries their concern about labour standards, which have been found to increase foreign direct investment. Alternatively, signing those preferential trade agreements can protect their own labour markets from a potential race to the bottom.

The objective of the present paper is to examine the extent to which economic growth and public social expenditure in Asia and the Pacific have translated into an increasing middle class. Using international poverty lines and an absolute definition of the middle class, it is estimated that between 1999 and 2015, 1.2 billion people moved into the Asia-Pacific middle class and that the share tripled, from 13 to 39 per cent of the total population. This expansion, however, did not translate into an income-secure middle class, as almost one billion people are vulnerable and at risk of falling back into poverty. Examination at the country-level reveals that large disparities persist in the region, as most countries need to sustain economic growth and at the same time guarantee that the gains are sufficiently distributed to increase the size of the middle class.

Borrower overindebtedness is a serious issue faced by the microfinance industry globally. In that regard, the purpose of the present article is to identify the extent and determinants of borrower overindebtedness among microfinance borrowers.

The Pacific is often characterized as a subregion of relative peace because the absence of inter-State conflicts, but episodes of violence, political unrest and instability have hampered development in these island States; a “business as usual” approach to development does not guarantee that the Pacific will remain peaceful in the future. The link between peace and development is a central tenet of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, presenting an opportunity to expand on traditional concepts of development and security.