Inclusive Innovation, Development and Policy: Four Key Themes

There is widespread recognition of political economy factors that underline ‘inclusive innovation’. Key among these include the trio of states, markets and society; the conditions that lead to technology transfer, adoption and finally diffusion in a new context; the corresponding creation of indigenous capacity with participation from local actors and stakeholders; and socially inclusive outcomes that can thrive from complementarities of technology and social innovation. Building on these ideas from the IDS 50th Anniversary Conference in July 2016, this article links them with the Heeks Ladder of Inclusive Innovation to discuss the prospects for further inclusive innovation and development

Innovation, structural change, and inclusion. A cross country PVAR analysis

Structural change can be both, a cause or a consequence of innovation, while structural change and innovations are usually accompanied by short-term outcomes of social inclusion or exclusion. Inclusion may in turn have an impact on further innovations. Yet, we find little evidence in the literature on the three-way relations between innovation, structural change and inclusion. This paper advances a first exercise in this direction. Given the multidimensionality of each (innovation, structural change, and inclusion), we extract the underlying unobserved common factor structure from various well-known macro indicators. With a structural vector auto regression (SVAR) model for a short panel of developing countries over 13 years, we nd the following main results. First, we con rm the virtuous cycle between innovation and structural change, aligning with existing literature. Second, the strongest result is the positive effect of inclusion on both innovation and structural change, that suggests policy to improve inclusion beyond poverty and inequality. Third, on decomposing the innovation index (formal, firm-level and ICT), we find each related differently to both structural change and inclusion, that suggests specific policy roles in their infl uence on inclusion and structural change

A Correlational Encoder Decoder Architecture for Pivot Based Sequence Generation

Interlingua based Machine Translation (MT) aims to encode multiple languages into a common linguistic representation and then decode sentences in multiple target languages from this representation. In this work we explore this idea in the context of neural encoder decoder architectures, albeit on a smaller scale and without MT as the end goal. Specifically, we consider the case of three languages or modalities X, Z and Y wherein we are interested in generating sequences in Y starting from information available in X. However, there is no parallel training data available between X and Y but, training data is available between X & Z and Z & Y (as is often the case in many real world applications). Z thus acts as a pivot/bridge. An obvious solution, which is perhaps less elegant but works very well in practice is to train a two stage model which first converts from X to Z and then from Z to Y. Instead we explore an interlingua inspired solution which jointly learns to do the following (i) encode X and Z to a common representation and (ii) decode Y from this common representation. We evaluate our model on two tasks: (i) bridge transliteration and (ii) bridge captioning. We report promising results in both these applications and believe that this is a right step towards truly interlingua inspired encoder decoder architectures.Comment: 10 page

Urban Cooperative Banks: A Case Study of Karnataka

The Urban Cooperative Banks catering to the needs of the people of the weaker sections in the urban areas are a powerful means of financial empowerment and financial inclusion. Urban Cooperative Banking is based on the twin model of Banking & Cooperation. In spite of immense heterogeneity in assets, operation area, nature of operation; UCBs have immense potential to tackle externalities that inhibit smooth credit flow at a local level.I have undertaken a Case Study on UCBs in Karnataka. It is based on first-hand qualitative and quantitative data from the UCBs, secondary data from RBI Offsite Surveillance System, Bank’s Balance Sheets & RBI Inspection reports. A survey of the selected UCBs in June 2009 yielded meaningful insights

Inclusive Structural Change: Case Studies on Innovations in Breeding Practices in Kenya and Anti-Retroviral Therapy Service Provision in Mozambique

Innovation, accompanied by structural change, is at the heart of economic growth and development. Yet there is limited evidence to understand interactions between innovation, structural change and inclusion in the context of low-income and emerging countries, or how these processes best support sustainable and inclusive societies. Through case studies of innovation pathways in breeding practices in the Kenyan dairy sector and anti-retroviral therapy service provision in Mozambique, we study how innovations in specific contexts lead to adoption, diffusion and upgrading, and further to structural change and inclusion or exclusion of marginalised groups. The case studies unpack the conditions for these outcomes by identifying key variables, actors and interactions that shape the innovation pathways. We find that capabilities is a key variable. In particular, we find that inclusiveness and structural changes impact successive phases of innovations through ‘reinforcing’ or ‘balancing mechanisms’, operationalised by the impact of innovation on capabilities. Other factors include the presence of interrelated innovations, power relations between actors, and the role of institutions (formal and informal). The Kenyan case suggests parallel non-competing innovation pathways, while for Mozambique, we observe competing pathways that remain to be examined further. Findings from the cases provide the basis of future primary research on inclusive structural change.International Development Research Centr

Essays in Indian trade policy

My thesis explores the political economy of trade protection in India. The first essay outlines the political economy of trade protection in India. My second essay asks: Has Protection really been for Sale in India? To answer this question, I use a unique dataset to explain the political economy of trade protection since liberalisation. The traditional Grossman and Helpman (1992) (GH henceforth) model of Protection for Sale (PFS henceforth) is used with a new measure of political organization. I undertake cross-sectional analysis for several years from 1990-2007 and use the pooled dataset. The third essay outlines the modified PFS framework that introduces a new measure of lobbying effectiveness to analyse how heterogeneity in lobbying affects trade protection. The underlying framework is based on the idea that government preferences or the market structure of the industry can influence lobbying effectiveness. The empirical evidence provides estimates on effectiveness and examines its determinants. The fourth essay explores: Is Protection still for Sale with Lobbying Effectiveness? I undertake an estimation of the modified PFS model against the conventional results presented in my second essay. I examine if differences in lobbying effectiveness can explain the variation in tariff protection levels across Indian manufacturing sectors and construct a direct measure of lobbying effectiveness for Indian manufacturing. Finally, I include additional political factors of importance to Indian trade policy. The fifth essay asks: Join Hands or Walk Alone? I examine the factors that affect the choice of lobbying strategy of Indian manufacturing firms for trade policy and consider the exclusive use of a single strategy, to lobby collectively (Join hands) and lobby individually (Walk Alone), along with the possibility of a dual strategy i.e. a combination of collective and individual lobbying using information from a primary survey across 146 firms. The results are new for India and reveal the overall preference of a dual lobbying strategy

Urban Cooperative Banks: A Case Study of Karnataka

The Urban Cooperative Banks catering to the needs of the people of the weaker sections in the urban areas are a powerful means of financial empowerment and financial inclusion. Urban Cooperative Banking is based on the twin model of Banking & Cooperation. In spite of immense heterogeneity in assets, operation area, nature of operation; UCBs have immense potential to tackle externalities that inhibit smooth credit flow at a local level.I have undertaken a Case Study on UCBs in Karnataka. It is based on first-hand qualitative and quantitative data from the UCBs, secondary data from RBI Offsite Surveillance System, Bank’s Balance Sheets & RBI Inspection reports. A survey of the selected UCBs in June 2009 yielded meaningful insights