Economics

University of Calcutta (informally known as Calcutta University or CU) is a collegiate public state university located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.&nbsp;Within India it is recognized as a &quot;Five-Star University&quot; and accredited &quot;A&quot; Grade by National Assessment and Accreditation Council.

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The University of Calcutta has secured the Fifth position among the Universities of India in the prestigious &quot;Indian University Ranking 2019&quot; list, released by the NIRF of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.

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It was established on 24 January 1857, and was one of the first institutions in Asia to be established as a multidisciplinary and Western-style university. Its alumni and faculty include several heads of state, heads of government, social reformers, prominent artists, only academy award winner and Dirac medal winner in India, many Fellows of the Royal Society and five Nobel laureates as of 2019 which is highest in South Asia.

University Of Calcutta

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Working Paper

Identity and Learning: a study on the effect of student-teacher gender interaction on student's learning

With child malnutrition detected as a persistent problem in most of the developing countries, public policy has been directed towards offering community-based supplementary feeding provision and nutritional information to caregivers. India, being no exception, has initiated these programs as early as 1970s under integrated child development scheme. Using propensity score matching technique on primary data of 390 households in two districts of West Bengal, an Eastern state in India, the study finds that impact of being included in the program and receiving supplementary feeding is insignificant on child stunting measures, though the program can break the intractable barriers of child stunting only when the child successfully receives not only just the supplementary feeding but also his caregiver collects crucial information on nutritional awareness and growth trajectory of the child. Availability of regular eggs in the feeding diet too can reduce protein-related undernutrition. Focusing on just feeding means low depth of other services offered under integrated child development scheme, including pre-school education, nutritional awareness, and hygiene behavior; thus repealing a part of the apparent food-secure population who puts far more importance on the latter services. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Fulltext

Maternal and Child Nutrition

Impact of integrated child development scheme on child malnutrition in West Bengal, India

Routledge Handbook of Marxian Economics

Transition

Debates and Counter-Debates on the Underdevelopment Thesis

Does status matter in community-based forest management? If so, are the high-status households more benefited than the low-status households? What drives status differences, if any, in the appropriation of forest resources? To address these questions, we draw on a theory of status and resource use that defines one’s status as one’s relative position in a group on the basis of power, prestige, honor and deference. Following this perspective, we surveyed the heads of 341 forest-based rural households in India from 2009 to 2010. We find that collective actions themselves are status-driven and the high-status households are more interested and involved in status-maintaining collective actions such as decision-making and implementation, while the low-status households perform general tasks like forest patrol. Moreover, the high-status households derive benefits from local forest significantly more than the low-status households. Further, decomposition analysis shows that a household’s prestige and honor measured by its access to social resources, problem faced and useful contacts explain about 56&nbsp;% of the status gap in forest benefits, while socioeconomic characteristics explain only 16&nbsp;% of the gap. Thus, due emphasis on household status from a broader socioeconomic perspective is required to reduce inequality in participation and the distribution of forest benefits in co-management. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

GENERAL

Physics

Environment, Development and Sustainability

Status differences in collective action and forest benefits: evidence from joint forest management in India

Arthaniti-Journal of Economic Theory and Practice 16 (1-2)

The gap between construction and usage of toilets: An under-identified problem

Empirical evidence suggests that use of child labor as domestic help has increased significantly in recent years although the overall incidence of child labor across the globe has declined satisfactorily. This should draw the attention of economists and policymakers because domestic child labor is considered as exploitative and in many cases hazardous. This paper purports to explain this apparently perplexing finding theoretically in terms of a three-sector general equilibrium model with a nontraded sector where only child labor is used to render services to the richer section of the society. The analysis shows how FDI-led economic growth increases the size of the services sector although it lowers the overall incidence of child labor in the economy and improves the welfare of the poor families that supply child labor. Finally, a composite policy has been recommended that can deal with all three aspects favorably. © 2016 John Wiley &amp; Sons Ltd

Review of Development Economics

Foreign Direct Investment and Domestic Child Labor

Despite the initiatives of the Finance Commission of India, fiscal performance has been deteriorating and increasingly diverging across Indian states. Given that the state governments are endowed with expenditure autonomy, this chapter investigates whether the composition of expenditure of the subnational governments has an impact on the degree of indebtedness. A panel analysis for the 17 non-special category states over 1980–2013 indicates that apart from the budget structure, the state-specific factors affecting fiscal performance play an important role in government borrowing. Curiously enough, government borrowing is more responsive to revenue expenditure than capital outlay and has more growth-augmenting effect through revenue expenditure. © Asian Development Bank Institute 2017. All rights reserved.

Central and Local Government Relations in Asia: Achieving Fiscal Sustainability

Debt dynamics, fiscal deficit, and stability in government borrowing in india: A dynamic panel analysis

A damaging property of the two-sector, mobile capital Harris–Todaro model (known as the Corden–Findlay model) is that growth in capital (labor) endowment accentuates (mitigates) urban unemployment in a dual economy, limiting the model's applicability to the field of trade and development. To resolve this problem, we introduce the informal credit market, which provides consumption loans to rural workers during the lean season. The informal interest rate is endogenously determined from the maximizing behavior of the informal sector lender. Factor accumulations produce their expected results on the absolute level of urban unemployment, while poverty eradication programs raise the informal interest rate and diminish borrowers' welfare under a wide range of parametric values. Finally, a wage subsidy policy to the urban sector unambiguously lowers the informal interest rate. Urban unemployment decreases while worker welfare improves under reasonable conditions. The result on unemployment is contrary to results of the Corden–Findlay model. © 2017 The Applied Regional Science Conference (ARSC) and John Wiley &amp; Sons Australia, Ltd

Review of Urban and Regional Development Studies

HOW COULD THE CREDIBILITY OF THE HARRISâ€“TODARO MODEL BE IMPROVED?

Does gender matter in people's attitudes and cooperation in community-based natural resource management? If so, how do gender differences in conservation-related attitudes help or hinder sustaining the commons? Since biases ingrained in community norms and expectations often exclude women from decision making in co-management, it is imperative to find plausible answers to these queries in order to understand gender relations and cooperation in co-management. To this end, the authors conducted psychometric surveys and trust experiments on 196 forest-dependent households in West Bengal, India during 2009-2010. The findings suggest that, despite an overall negative perception about women's involvement in co-management, women are more conservation friendly and pro-social than men. It is also noticed that forest biomass and forest incomes as the indicators of sustainability have increased in those forest communities where women's proportional strength as decision makers is greater and people hold an overall positive conservation attitude. © Copyright 2016 Cambridge University Press.