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Showing all content in India
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Blog post
India's commodity tax system leads to low compliance
Data on tax rates in India for the past fifteen years reveals how rates vary by state and product. This heterogeneity and volatility results in high compliance costs, inter-state distortions, and households substituting toward lower-tax products. Tax in India India’s commodity tax system is complex, with large variation across states, products and time. We document the...
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Publication - Project Report
Community origins of industrial entrepreneurship: Theory and historical evidence from India
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Blog post
Factors determining rural-urban market linkages in India
Bihar is enjoying increased rural-urban connectivity thanks to infrastructure improvements, fueling demand for goods, services and jobs. The factors influencing market linkages include sourcing inputs, catering to rural consumers, and access to public services. Jhanjharpur, India We were wandering down the main market of Jhanjharpur, a small town in North Bihar in India,...
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Project
Tax policy and firms: Evidence from West Bengal
Our aim in this project is to investigate How the Value-Added-Tax (VAT) affects firms' compliance and production decisions in a large developing economy. How the tax system affects the overall economic efficiency of production networks, in particular by distorting the quantity and quality of supplier-buyer matches. The impact of a tax reform that lowered...
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News Item
International Growth Centre awarded funding for research supporting Indian policymakers in alleviating poverty
The International Growth Centre (IGC), based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), has been awarded a $4.2 million grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a new programme helping researchers, practitioners and policymakers seeking sustainable poverty alleviation in India. The three-year programme, Building evidence, evaluation capacity...
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Project
Judicial institutions and economic development: Examining micro-evidence from India
The questions examining the relationship between a country’s legal environment and its economic outcomes are important. These are motivated by theories linking judicial efficiency and economic outcomes as developed under the new institutional economics (North, 1990 and Williamson, 1995). First, as a regulator, the judiciary is responsible for enforcing the rules of law....
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Project
The impact of community-driven accountability on land rights governance: Evidence from a homestead land titling initiative
How and under what circumstances can civic mobilisation improve local governance and service delivery? This project seeks to contribute to debates on this question through a multimethod analysis of a homestead land entitlement support program in rural Gaya District, Bihar. Homestead land entitlement in much of the developing world represents a cornerstone on which...
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Publication - Working Paper
Managing waste at the household level: Field evidence from Delhi
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Project
Mapping the urban world: Integrating high-resolution satellite imagery and night light data
Tracking how an economy allocates resources across space and time is difficult. Reliable data sources, particularly from developing countries, are scarce. Those that do exist (e.g., population censuses) are typically measured at low frequencies, difficult to obtain, hard to compare across countries, and available only for coarse spatial units (e.g., districts or counties)....
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Project
Promoting energy and water efficiency in irrigation through direct and indirect incentives
Groundwater irrigation has revolutionised agriculture in India, but in many areas, over-extraction is now worsening water quality, increasing poverty, and overloading the electric grid. Meanwhile, plenty of water- and energy-efficient techniques and technologies exist – such as micro-irrigation – but adoption remains low. What is the best way for governments, utilities,...