Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTEnvironmental regulation in the developing countries is undermined by weak enforcement. Lack of information and public awareness are fundamental factors that render informal regulation by civil society ineffective. In India, a number of environmental problems have been addressed using the institution of public interest litigation (PIL) by 'public-spirited' citizens. This paper examines the economic advantage of PIL over other conventional legal forms. An important outcome of judicial interventions of this kind in environmental cases in India is aspillover effect, which generates public information via media coverage. Using a case study, we test whether the judicial directives that followed a PIL filed and the subsequent spillover effect of media publicity were effective in getting the state to enforce the standards. This is done using autoregressive distributed lag models and univariate structural break analysis. The results show that judicial intervention and public information were effective in controlling pollution.

AbstractThis study examines whether the impact of intergovernmental transfers on tax effort of Indian states depends on the composition of transfers (conditional vis‐à‐vis unconditional). It also tests the asymmetry hypothesis, which states that subnational governments respond to increases in transfers differently from losses. The evidence suggests that tax collections, including both indirect and direct taxes, are inversely related to unconditional transfers irrespective of whether they are increasing or decreasing. Imposition of conditions on transfers has prevented the Indian states from substituting such transfers for tax collection (direct tax collection is an exception). Direct tax collection responds most sensitively to transfers.

SUMMARYWeak legal enforcement of contracts leads to inefficient breach and an overall increase in breaches for firms and individuals. We suggest that firms use inventory holdings as a means to counteract weak contract enforcement. We test the hypothesis that firms operating in weak legal environments have a higher ratio of inventories to net sales than firms operating in strong legal environments. Empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis using data from over three hundred comparable firms from fourteen product groups across thirty‐nine countries is presented.

Not Available ; The purpose of this study is to develop a novel Reverse Transcriptase Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) based assay for in vitro profiling of heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) in bovine peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) culture model utilizing the absorbance level of magnesium pyrophosphate—a by-product of LAMP reaction. A set of bovine Hsp70 specific RT-LAMP primers were designed to detect the differential absorbance level of magnesium pyrophosphate by-product which signifies the degree of Hsp70 amplification from cDNA of thermally induced cultured cells at different recovery periods. The study revealed significant (P < 0.05) correlation between absorbance level and the fold change of Hsp70 transcripts at different kinetic intervals of heat stress recovery in bovine PBMC cell culture models. RT-LAMP based absorbance assay can be used as an indicator to measure the degree of bovine Hsp70 transcripts produced during thermal stress and can be used as an alternative to the traditional Real time PCR assay. Developed RT-LAMP assay can be used as a cost-effective method for profiling of bovine HSP70 gene. ; Science and Engineering Research Board, Government of India (YSS/2014/000279)