This book provides a comprehensive review of the evolution and performance of SEZs from historical and comparative perspectives by tracing the experiences of SEZs in 23 developing countries including Korea, Taiwan, and China. Using a framework that integrates the basic tenets of the industrial cluster approach with existing theories, it proposes a set of evaluation criteria for SEZs.
The study report provides an assessment of the impact of expanding air travel and the civil aviation sector in India by using the experience of one of the largest international carriers operating in India – Emirates Airlines. Emirates began its operations in India in the mid-1980s and carried 12 per cent of India’s international passengers and 14 per cent of international freight in 2010–11.
This paper examines whether and to what extent changes in inheritance legislation impact women’s physical and human capital investments using disaggregated household level data from India. We use inheritance patterns over three generations of individuals to assess the impact of changes in the Hindu Succession Act that grant daughters equal coparcenary birth rights in joint family property that were denied to daughters in the past. The causal effect is isolated by exploiting the variation in the timing of father’s death to compare within household bequests of land given to sons and daughters in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. We show that the amendment significantly increased daughters’ likelihood to inherit land, but that even after the amendment significant bias persists. Our results also indicate a significant increase in educational attainment of daughters, suggesting an alternative channel of wealth transfer.
Reservations enjoy great popularity to overcome deep-rooted inequality. However, in part due to a short horizon of analyses, evidence on the impact of reservations and the mechanisms through which they may work remains ambiguous. Nationally representative village- and household level data from India for the last 3 Panchayat periods allow us to explore dynamic effects of female reservation on subjective and objective quality of public service delivery, political participation, and willingness to contribute to public goods. We find little impact on perceived quality of service provision but a clear link to higher and more effective political participation that then results in greater willingness to contribute to public goods. Contrary to the temporary nature of the first, the latter effects persist even once reservation has lapsed suggesting that conceptualising the policy in such a framework offers a promising avenue for analysis.
This paper explores the impacts of the amendment to the 1956 Hindu Succession Act on Hindu females’ intergenerational transfers of physical and human capital. Information on the timing of three generations’ key life events helps isolate the causal effects. Our primary estimation strategy is a difference-indifference estimator in which we compare the share of total assets received by male and female siblings in the same household between households whose heads died before and after the amendment. In the case of human capital investment, we compare primary education attainment of young cohorts who were potentially benefit from the reform and the older cohorts who were unlikely to benefit from the reform. In light of the fact that the amendment applies only to Hindus but not to Muslims, we compare the results between Hindus and Muslims for a robustness check. The results suggest that the amendment increased the share of total physical assets received by Hindu females who were single before the reform by 0.216. They also point towards an increase in the share of gifts transferred to Hindu females by 0.147. Hindu girls gained 0.594 years of more primary education than boys relative to the old cohort after the amendment.