Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research

About: Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research is a facility organization based out in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 307 authors who have published 1021 publications receiving 18848 citations.

Maternal Health Care Seeking Behavior in a Post-Conflict HIPC: The Case of Rwanda

Abstract: Rwanda is one of nine post-conflict heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) of the world. There was a worsening of health indicators since the early nineties on account of conflict. In light of this, we examine factors affecting maternal health care seeking behavior in Rwanda using three rounds of Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey (RDHS) data (1992, 2000, and 2005). We find that progress towards increasing the share of assisted deliveries has been slow. There has been no significant increase in the proportion of women seeking antenatal care. This could partially explain why a large proportion of women continue to deliver at home without professional assistance. Further, women who gave birth in the 5 years preceding the 2000 RDHS are less likely to deliver in a health facility than those who gave birth in the 5 years preceding the 1992 RDHS. We do not find such a result for the year 2005. We also find that women are more likely to deliver at home with professional assistance in 2000 and 2005 compared to 1992.

To bt or not to bt? Risk and uncertainty considerations in technology assessment

Abstract: The acreage under the transgenic Bt cotton seeds in India has risen significantly since its legalization in the year 2002. Discussions on the advantages from the technology have focused on increments in productivity and income, without much analysis on risk. We point out that claims on productivity gains seem to be misplaced, as appropriate counterfactuals do not exist for the same hybrids. In this article we analyse production costs and crop incomes in drought years to test a simplistic theory of risk based on first principles. We employ a mixed-methods framework to draw inferences by combining data from two cross-sectional surveys in Gujarat (Saurashtra and Southern-Plains) and Maharashtra (Western Vidarbha) for the period 2009-10 and compare it with unit-level data for the corresponding regions from a nationally representative sample for the period 2002-03. Empirical evidence, though limited, brings out the problem of how a high cost technology could be associated with higher risks and may be dominated by traditional alternatives under certain conditions. Ethnographic accounts from the field provide qualitative support to our understanding of potential risks and uncertainties associated with the new technology.

The Enron story and its lessons

Abstract: When economic reforms in India opened up the power sector to foreign private power plants, the Enron corporation of the USA was the first foreign firm to offer to build a power plant at Dabhol, a coastal town 250km south of Bombay In spite of public criticism, Maharashtra State Electricity Board signed a power purchase agreement Subsequently, even though construction had started, a new state government first cancelled the deal and then renegotiated a new power purchase agreement The paper tells this story, assesses the economics of the original and renegotiated agreements, examines various objections against the original agreement, speculates on the political economy of the episode and draws lessons for power policy as well as for the various actors involved namely, the central government, state electricity boards and private investors

How much should you own? Cross-ownership and privatization

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of cross-ownership on optimal privatization, and vice-versa, in mixed duopoly. It shows that cross-ownership is profitable to the private firm only if the level of privatization of the public firm is sufficiently high. In equilibrium, cross-ownership does not take place even if there is partial privatization. However, the possibility of cross-ownership significantly limits the socially optimal level of privatization in most of the situations. Moreover, it demonstrates that full nationalization is socially optimal, in case of sufficiently convex identical cost functions and homogeneous goods. These results have strong implications to both divestment and competition policies.