Elderly health, wealth and coresidence with adult children in rural India

Little is known about the living conditions of a growing number of elderly in India who predominantly coreside with their children. Mutual sharing of responsibilities is important in coresidency arrangements involving exchange of financial and other services between the elderly and their coresident children. The paper focuses on health and wealth effects of elderly coresidency arrangements. In an attempt to redress the resultant endogeneity bias, we estimate a correlated recursive system of equations. There is evidence that the probability of coresidence is lower for those disadvantaged older elderly who lack health, wealth or both, thus necessitating social protection

Elite dominance and under-investment in mass education: Disparity in the social development of the Indian states, 1960-92

Literacy rates continue to be strikingly low among women and low caste population compared to the general population not only in any Indian state, but more so in the worst performing ones. The present paper offers an explanation of this disparate development in terms of the hypothesis of elite dominance that discriminates against women and low-caste people and systematically under-invests in mass education. We experiment with various indirect economic and political measures of elite dominance. Results based on the Indian state-level data for the period 1960-92 suggest that higher share of land held by the top 5% of the population (a) lowers spending on education as well as total developmental spending and (b) increases total non-developmental spending. (c) Greater proportion of minority representations (female and low caste members) in the ruling government however fails to have any perceptible impact on both development (including education) and non-development spending in our sample. (d) While underinvestment in education by the elite is supported by the lack of demand for education from the poorer population (who are often the marginalised people), greater initiatives of the state to enact land reform legislations enhance the spending on education

Old age poverty in the Indian States: What do the household data tell us?

In the absence of any official measures of old age poverty, this paper uses National Sample Survey household-level data to investigate the extent and nature of living standards and incidence of poverty among elderly in sixteen major states in India. We construct both individual and household-level poverty indices for the elderly and examine the sensitivity of these poverty indices to different equivalence scales and size economies in consumption. Our analysis highlights the complex nature of old age poverty in the Indian states. While poverty estimates taking into account equivalence scale and size economies in consumption suggest that households with elderly members are less poor than others, the interpretation of this result is more complex. Further analysis suggests that the results are partly a function of differences in demographic composition of the households and a possible survivorship bias due to positive correlation between household incomes and life expectancy. After correcting for the possible sources of bias (including the survivorship bias), there is evidence that poverty is increased by the presence of older elderly (75 and above) in all states. Meanwhile, the conclusion that households with elderly aged sixty and above are less poor appears to be robust across most states

Poverty, heterogeneous elite, and allocation of public spending: Panel evidence from the Indian States

In this paper, we explore how in the world’s largest democracy, India, the presence of different elite groups – the dominant landed and capitalist elite and the minority elite (who are the elected representatives of the marginalised women and low caste population) – could affect the nature and extent of public spending on various accounts, especially education. Our results suggest that the dominant landed elite tends to be unresponsive to the underlying poverty rate while the capitalist elite respond to the poverty rate by increasing the share of education spending. After controlling for all other factors, presence of the minority elite has a limited impact, if at all. Results are robust to alternative specifications

Understanding the effects of siblings on child mortality: evidence from India

Given the intrinsically sequential nature of child birth, timing of a child’s birth has consequences not only for itself, but also for the older and younger siblings. The paper thus argues that prior and posterior spacing between consecutive siblings are important measures of the intensity of competition among siblings for limited parental resources. While the available estimates of child mortality tend to ignore this simultaneity bias, we use a correlated recursive model of prior and posterior spacing and child mortality to correct it. There is evidence that uncorrected estimates underestimate the effects of prior and posterior spacing on child mortality

Fiscal decentralization and development: How crucial is local politics?

Does fiscal decentralization in a politically decentralized less developed country help strengthen democratic institutions at the grass root level? And is the impact of such decentralization on local politics important in determining local development? Our study on Indonesia suggests that fiscal decentralization enhanced free and fair local elections, though the incidence of elite capture, and the consequent breakdown of local democracy, was also present in significant proportions. Fiscal decentralization promoted development mostly in communities which transited out from elite capture to embrace free and fair elections. This was followed by communities that experienced the emergence of elite capture. Communities that continued to remain under either elite capture or free and fair elections did the worst. These findings suggest that while the emergence of elite capture exists, it may not necessarily be the most harmful. Instead, and surprisingly so, stability of local polity hurts development the most