The primary objective of this study is to assess the readership status and pattern from the perspective of “leisure book” or “non-text” reading of north-east India. In order to have a relative understanding of the situation in the north-east, the study further aims to compare the results for the north-east with national level findings. It also attempts to compare the results with similar findings from one rich and one backward state of the country. Another important objective of the study is to identify how different demographic and socioeconomic factors impact the likelihood of reading leisure books by literate youth and to measure the level of impact.
While many studies explored impacts of political quotas for females on public goods provision, knowledge on immediate and longer term economic impacts of such interventions remains limited which is undesirable in view of the widespread adoption of such policies. We use nation-wide data from India on current outcomes and a village’s reservation status for the entire period for which reservations had been in place to assess recurrent and longer-term impacts of this policy. Beyond recurrent impacts on public good delivery, we find evidence on persistent effects of reservation on voicing of concerns to local authorities if there are problems, the amount of time females spend on domestic duties and in the labour market, as well as their bargaining power regarding reproductive choices and control of finances within the household.
Although there has been considerable interest on wage discrimination, available studies largely dealt with formal rather than informal markets that are of little relevance for the poorest. Focusing on of India’s informal labour markets leads to three findings of interest. First, gender wage discrimination is larger in informal than in formal labour markets, resulting in losses that are larger than receipts from one of the country’s most important safety-net programmes. Second, economic growth will not make gender discrimination in wage labour markets disappear. Finally, contrary to what is found for gender, the hypothesis of no significant wage discrimination based on caste cannot be rejected.
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Indian democracy was a huge success from the beginning until recently when serious questions emerged about governance which we now must address.
Economics (which the authors address in the book and forms its main theme) was a disaster at the outset because of a counterproductive policy framework, embraced and defended for long by most economists due to mounting evidence of failure.
