Suchergebnisse

In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major investments in the social sector; but how much they will really be able to do so will depend on the conditions of their finances. For the Indian states we find that government investment in the social sector is extremely important to reduce poverty, but the government's debt burden is actually stopping several states from attaining the MDG targets. Although, in the medium term the impact of the debt on poverty is not very harmful, in the longer run it has a significant negative impact. Therefore for policy purposes reduction in debt should be given a priority.

Abstract
This chapter is a short thematic introduction to the papers that appear in this special volume on the phonetics and phonology of a selective but representative set of languages from the South Asian sprachbund. The volume consists of five papers that engage with a broad set of topics, namely, acoustics of Kalasha affricates, perception of breathiness in Gujarati, syllable structure of Kuki-Chin, syllable structure and incipient vowels in Lamkang, and vowel harmony in Assamese. These papers, we hope, are representative in terms of the choice of theoretical frameworks and methodologies employed in addressing the various linguistic phenomena.

"This book investigates issues related to health inequality with a particular interest on developing countries. It provides rigorous empirical work on both trends and causal factors behind health inequality, analyzes the implications of health deprivations on poverty traps and suggests practical policies which can be implemented"--

This paper presents a theoretical model to show how distributional concerns can engender social conflict. We have a two‐period model that highlights the crucial role of future inequality. Equality of assets and income in the current period does not stop conflict from arising the anticipated future inequality is significant. Further we find that the impact of inequality on conflict is not straightforward. Societies with low levels of inequality show no conflict; groups engage in conflict only when inequality exceeds a certain threshold level. Additionally the model shows that the link between inequality and conflict may be non‐monotonic.

There is a growing interest on dynamic and broader concepts of deprivation such as vulnerability, which takes in to account the destitution of individuals from future shocks. We use the framework of decision making under uncertainty to arrive at a new measure of vulnerability to poverty. We highlight the importance of current standard of living to better capture the notion of vulnerability. In conceptualizing the new class of measures of vulnerability we thus move beyond the standard expected poverty measures that is commonly found in the literature. We also axiomatically characterize the new class of measure and discuss some of it's properties.

In measuring social deprivation in a multidimensional framework, ideally one should first measure each individual's overall deprivation, and then aggregate the overall deprivation levels of all individuals. However, given only aggregate data, one is often forced to measure social deprivation in terms of each attribute separately and then to aggregate them so as to get the overall social deprivation. This paper shows that it is only under extremely stringent conditions that this procedure would always yield the same result as the conceptually sound procedure referred to earlier. A similar difficulty also arises in measuring a society's standard of living.