Towards a comprehensive social security system: an assessment of recent UBI proposals

Few people would disagree that welfare programmes in India are characterized by corruption, mistargeting and poor coordination, and impose high financial and environmental costs. A more pernicious consequence is the political culture of clientelistic vote buying they help create. Parties woo swing voters with the delivery of private short-term benefits such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) work, cheap food, liquor, sarees, domestic appliances, cash, subsidized loans, loan waivers and access to government services. Public goods or systematic programmes for lowering poverty, dependence, ignorance and disease (such as land reform, education, sanitation and public health) are neglected. Clientelism thrives on the provision of short-term benefits to a subsection of the poor, keeping them poor and perpetuating dependence on their patrons. Voting decisions of the poor are driven by self-interested considerations of securing political patronage, rather than expressing judgement on governance. It is no wonder then that public policy disasters and corruption scandals scarcely dent vote margins of popular chief ministers. Democracy thereby fails to deliver government accountability or long-term development.Accepted manuscrip

Prospects for measuring ttˉt\bar{t} production cross-section at s=10\sqrt{s}=10 TeV using the likelihood method with the ATLAS detector

Due to the large $t\bar{t}$ production cross-section at the LHC energies, the ATLAS experiment is expected to have enough statistics to measure $t\bar{t}$ cross-section even at initial luminosities. Recent studies performed in ATLAS on the development of $t\bar{t}$ cross-section measurements in the lepton+jets channel at $\sqrt{s}$=10 TeV using the likelihood method will be discussed. The expected statistical and systematic uncertainties for the cross-section measurement using the likelihood method are evaluated for an integrated luminosity of 50 pb$^{-1}$ of Monte Carlo (MC) simulated data. Measurements with data that will be collected in the first year of the LHC operation are emphasized.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of DPF-2009, Detroit, MI, July 2009, eConf C09072

Globalization, oh that versitile villian!

The contemporary phase of economic globalization is regarded by some social scientists as a serious source of problems. There are others who, logically or illogically, consider it a negative, harmful, destructive, marginalizing and malevolent influence over economies and societies. No doubt, globalization can create opportunities for accelerating growth for the participating economies, but it can also pose myriad of challenges to and impose constraints on policymakers. In addition, it is justly blamed for uneven distribution of benefits from globalization. They are badly skewed within countries and between countries. Present policy environment is far from globalization-friendly. This paper focuses on the limitations of globalization in an objective and unbiased manner