The paper critically reviews the arguments for and against both employment guarantees and income guarantees when viewed as rights-based policy instruments for poverty reduction in a developing economy, with special reference to India.

This paper published by Center For Global Development, critically reviews the arguments for and against both employment guarantees and income guarante

Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. This paper questions this assumption, using nutritional status as a proxy for individual poverty.

It is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of India's secondary towns or big cities mattered more to recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data deficiencies have made this a difficult question to answer previously.

Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991. The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991, despite rising inequality.

India’s 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Work is provided in public works projects at the stipulated minimum wage. 

India’s huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982–99.

This paper examines the performance thus far of MGNREGS in meeting the demand for work across states. It focuses in the scheme‘s ability to reach India‘s rural poor and other identity-based groups, notably backward castes, tribes and takes a closer look at women‘s participation and how this is influenced by the
rationing of work under MGNREGS.

The authors revisit the findings of their past research on poverty and growth in India in the light of the 14 rounds of the National Sample Survey now available for the period since economic reforms began in 1991.

Brazil, China and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different reasons.

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