Department of Economics

Global human development has improved, partly due to the transformative wave of globalization. However, despite progress in poverty reduction over the past two decades, recent United Nations SDG reports highlight substantial setbacks among developing countries, especially low- and middle-income economies. This study investigates the threshold impact of globalization benefits on poverty and demonstrates the non-linearity of the benefits to poverty at different regimes of institutional quality. The Hansen panel threshold model is employed to analyze data of 116 developing countries from 2000 to 2021, with complementary regional estimates. The reliability and validity of the findings are reinforced using panel-corrected standard errors and dynamic GMM estimators as robustness checks. The results establish non-linear poverty-reducing benefits of globalization, with more pronounced impacts under high global interconnectedness. Additionally, the study provides nuanced evidence of globalization's diminishing marginal social welfare returns to poverty at higher thresholds of integration. Finally, it argues that strong institutions are essential to amplify globalization benefits towards achieving sustainable development goal 1 and to mitigate the negative externalities associated with intensified globalization.

Despite the fact that mining activities are necessary for economic growth, it is imperative that the health hazards connected with them be reduced. The extent to which several factors influence the healthcare cost and health status of the local community in mining locations remains poorly understood. Thus, this article aims to determine the factors that cause a high amount of health expenditure and identify the socio-demographic and economic reasons behind the respiratory illness (RIs) in six mining villages in Talcher coalfield of Odisha. The analysis used estimation techniques like descriptive statistics, ordinary least square (OLS) regression and Probit method. The findings of this article revealed that social infrastructure, such as education of the household head, age group, gender and social categories, along with economic condition, have a significant role in affecting the volume of health expenditure. The findings also highlighted the importance of the socio-demographic indicators for a high level of RIs in this location. Therefore, policymakers need to focus on the health infrastructure and socio-demographic and economic backgrounds in the mining areas to improve proper healthcare utilisation in the mining villages.

The shift in economic structure from agricultural to the modern service sector is hypothesized to promote growth by delivering inclusive quality employment. However, service sector is primarily associated with ‘high skilled’ labour, and in a context of labour surplus economy like India, there are concerns about labour absorption in services due to high presence of low and unskilled labour. Women make up a significant proportion of unskilled workers, but little is known about their participation in the service sector in the aftermath of economic structural change. Therefore, it becomes imperative to examine the participation of women within informal labour market in the services sector jobs. This article examines how employment opportunities fare for informal women workers within the services sector in cities? Can employment avenues that arise from expansion of services provide quality employment opportunities by leading them to step out of existing gender stereotypes in the labour market? Further, are these jobs equally accessible to all women? This is examined through micro-level analysis from survey, interviews and case studies of women workers in low-income neighbourhoodsof Hyderabad, India. In recent decades, Hyderabad has emerged as an epicentre for IT, attracting domestic and foreign players and drastically changing the city's labour and social landscape. Based on findings, the article attempts to analyse gendering the labour in modern informal service sector akin to the traditional categorization of women’s work. The article posits there is strong segmentation in modern economy and informal labour market based on institutional lines, which influences inclusion and exclusion of female workers. While the jobs are segmented on basis of gender, caste, education, new forms of segmentation are emerging in the forms of age, appearance, and intra-household factors, keeping women limited to only certain avenues in the modern economy.

Aligning with the United Nations SDGs, global efforts to enrich environmental quality can only be realized by decarbonizing carbon-intensive sectors, including transportation. Although emerging economies contribute substantially to the world economy, they struggle to achieve environmental sustainability with increasing industrialization, urban mobility, and transportation. Therefore, this study analyses whether the environmental tax (ET), green technology innovation (GTI), and biofuel use (BF) abate emissions from the transportation sector, considering 11 emerging economies from 2004 to 2022 using the dynamic fixed effect and CS-ARDL estimation techniques. The empirical analysis also discloses the imperative role of institutional quality (IQ) by integrating IQ's direct and moderation effects with GTI, BF, and ET. The empirical evidence highlights that while BF (−0.138), GTI (−0.074), and IQ (−1.303) ameliorate the decarbonization process, ET (−0.123) does not significantly decarbonize the transportation sector in the long-run. Furthermore, the results disclose an important role of IQ in moderating the emissions mitigation effectiveness of GTI (−0.174), BF (−0.129), and ET (−0.193) in emerging economies, indicating that benevolent institutional support is crucial for the sustainable transformation of the transportation sector in the long-run. Thus, this study suggests including policy mandates for generating second-generation biofuels, modernization of transportation infrastructure through green innovations, and strengthening institutional settings through a decentralized governance system to realize higher benefits and environmental goals.

In this paper, we re-examine the Phillips curve for Canada from June 1976 to October 2022 in a time-varying manner. Our findings reveal that the impulse response of inflation to the changes in the unemployment rate gap has reduced over time till 2010 and strengthened thereafter. The response of inflation to the changes in the unemployment rate gap has increased in short and medium horizons after 2010. On further examination, we find that changes in both average import tariff and forward participation in the global value chain have reduced the inflation response to the changes in the unemployment rate gap. Empty 10.

This chapter briefly discusses Indian electronics industry, followed by a discussion on the literature on determinants of productivity. The Indian electronics industry has a 2.3 per cent share in India's GDP, while the overall manufacturing share is below 20 percent. Given the importance of the electronics industry as an independent contributor to the growth of the economy and the input contribution to other sectors, the growth and productivity performance of this industry are crucial from the point of the overall growth of the economy. The electronics industry holds strategic importance at firm-(or country-) level with extensive usage in military, space and security systems, and partly explains the inter-firm (or country) competition to innovate, acquire and maintain the technology gap. The electronics industry is highly capital-, skill-and scale-intensive. It requires specialized materials and components leading to emergence of GVCs, such that manufacturing and knowledge production are spread across geography.