On incidence of diarrhea among children in India:Can the Gordian knot of complementarities be cut?

Drinking water, sanitation and hygiene behaviour, referred to as the wash variables by the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund, are acknowledged as the three main determinants of diarrhoeal diseases. But the impact of their complementarities on disease incidence remains understudied. This study uses state and household level data to examine the determinants of child diarrhoeal incidence. It introduces indicators of wash quality and combined presence, both atthe household and state levels. It combines them in a novel analysis to understand their roles. In the Indian states, with the worst wash infrastructure, these variables are strategic substitutes, but as wash infrastructure improves, they become strategic complements. Thus, resource allocation to lower diarrhoea incidence must take into account the complementary rather than individual presence of these focal variables. Further, the quality of wash also matters. The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, targeting universal sanitation coverage, is unlikely to be effective unless it breaks the Gordian knot of complementarities and wash quality holding up the burden of childhood diarrhoea

Co-Patenting Patterns in Nanotechnology: A Comparison of South Korea and Germany

A number of scholars consider innovations to emerge within a system through interactions between different economic actors such as the state, public agencies, firms, public laboratories, universities, civil society, etc. (Freeman, 1987; Lundvall, 1992; Nelson, 1993). Initially, such systems were considered at a national level (Porter, 1990), but increasing globalization of innovation processes has replaced the national focus with a more outward, internationalized, outlook, to include regional (Cooke, 1994; 2002) and sectoral (Malerba and Orsenigo, 1997) perspectives. In these innovation systems, universities, public research organizations directly sponsored by government and firms are the dominant players engaged in R&D activity. Together, they are instrumental in determining the "rate and direction of inventive activity." Therefore, collaboration between these actors is deemed particularly important for the build-up of capabilities in new science based sectors like nanotechnology. But what kinds of collaborations are most effective? Are there patterns which are most suitable for a specific context or a target than another? The existing literature is relatively silent on such issues. This leads to the query, since the race to acquire capabilities in nanotechnology is relatively recent, and public-private collaboration is important for the same: can different countries exhibit different patterns of cooperation between public laboratories and private firms? In this chapter we attempt to provide a partial answer to the above question, by identifying and comparing patterns in collaborative patents in Germany and South Korea