Persistent and Emerging Challenges to Development

This book covers a wide range of the issues in development studies. Recognizing the existence of manifold challenges in achieving and sustaining economic development, it is divided into four sections—(i) The Macroeconomy: Foreign Trade, Structural Transition and the Environment, (ii) Health and Standard of Living, (iii) Education, Human Capital and Evolution of the Employment Quality in India, and (iv) Banking and Credit: Access, Efficiency and Stability. The book brings together a right mix of senior and young economists who use cutting edge econometric techniques and/ or revisit a perennial question with much sharper focus and tools to unravel insights that are important and will inform tomorrow’s theorisation and policy making. The volume looks at important questions like spatial concentration of low infant and child health outcomes, trade liberalisation and export quality, intergenerational occupational mobility, multidimensional poverty incidence in rural India, robustness of the banking sector, to name a few. To do so, the contributions use novel and esoteric methods like machine learning, spatial econometrics, system GMM, quintile regression and counterfactual decomposition (QRCD), and so on. The rich collection holds importance for researchers and policy makers alike, and also for practitioners working in different developmental sectors.