Playing in Invisible Markets: Innovations in the Market for Toilets to Harness the Economic Power of the Poor

Sanitation is at the heart of not only environmental security but also food security and health. Today about 41% of the global population or about 2.6 billion people do not have access to toilets and about 42,000 people die every week due to drinking water polluted with faecal matter. The problem is most acute in India, China, many countries of Africa and a few countries of Latin America. Why is there such a crisis in the toilets market? How much of the present problem is due to a lack of supply and how much is it due to a lack of demand? What is the optimal role of the State, the firms and the NPOs? The present paper attempts to give some insight on the above questions through the case study of the market for toilets for the poor in India. It examines the toilet history and achievements of India, the innovations in the market for toilets targeting the group at the bottom of the income pyramid and the factors that influence the adoption and usage of toilets in an Indian coastal village, in order to infer answers to the above questions.Toilets, Innovation, India, Health, Hygiene, Sanitation, BOP, Income Inequality, Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, Government Policy

Concerning Technology Adoption and Inequality

Empirical evidence suggests that there has been a divergence over time in income distributions across countries and within countries. Furthermore, developing economies show a great deal of diversity in their growth patterns during the process of economic development. For example, some of these countries converge rapidly on the leaders, while others stagnate, or even experience reversals and declines in their growth processes. In this paper we study a simple dynamic general equilibrium model with household specific costs of technology adoption which is consistent with these stylized facts. In our model, growth is endogenous, and there are two-period lived overlapping generations of agents, assumed to be heterogeneous in their initial holdings of wealth and capital. We find that in a special case of our model, with costs associated with the adoption of more productive technologies fixed across households, inequalities in wealth and income may increase over time, tending to delay the convergence in international income differences. The model is also capable of explaining some of the observed diversity in the growth pattern of transitional economies. According to the model, this diversity may be the result of variability in adoption costs over time, or the relative position of a transitional economy in the world income distribution. In the more general case of the model with household specific adoption costs, negative growth rates during the transitional process are also possible. The model’s prediction that inequality has negative impact on technology adoption is supported by empirical evidence based on a cross country data set.inequality, technology adoption, international income differences, altruism, negative growth rates.

Catching up in pharmaceuticals: a comparative study of India and Brazil

Since the mid-twentieth century, the national objective of India and Brazil has been to develop industrial capabilities in essential sectors such as pharmaceuticals. At the outset, they shared some common features: a considerable period of lax intellectual property rights regimes, large internal market and a reasonably strong cadre of scientists and engineers. However, over fifty years, India has had much more success in building indigenous capabilities in pharmaceuticals than Brazil, at least to date. Why? In exploring the answer to this question, we show that in both countries the design of State policy played a crucial role and the endogenous responses in the national system of innovation consisted of two parts. On the one hand, most of the time, the predicted and desired outcome was partially realized and on the other hand, there were invariably, other unpredicted responses that emerged. The latter unexpected elements, which were specific to the two countries, pushed them along distinctive trajectories.Pharmaceutical industry, India, Brazil, industrial capabilities, Catching up, Technology transfer

Catching up in pharmaceuticals: a comparative study of India and Brazil

Since the mid-twentieth century, the national objective of India and Brazil has been to develop industrial capabilities in essential sectors such as pharmaceuticals. At the outset, they shared some common features: a considerable period of lax intellectual property rights regimes, large internal market and a reasonably strong cadre of scientists and engineers. However, over fifty years, India has had much more success in building indigenous capabilities in pharmaceuticals than Brazil, at least to date. Why? In exploring the answer to this question, we show that in both countries the design of State policy played a crucial role and the endogenous responses in the national system of innovation consisted of two parts. On the one hand, most of the time, the predicted and desired outcome was partially realized and on the other hand, there were invariably, other unpredicted responses that emerged. The latter unexpected elements, which were specific to the two countries, pushed them along distinctive trajectories.Pharmaceutical industry, India, Brazil, industrial capabilities, Catch-up

Concerning Inequality, Technology Adoption, and Structural Change

Empirical evidence suggests that there has been a divergence over time in income distributions across countries and within countries. In this paper we study a simple dynamic general equilibrium model of technology adoption which is consistent with these stylized facts. In our model, growth is endogenous, and agents are assumed to be heterogeneous in their initial holdings of wealth and capital. We find that in the presence of barriers or costs associated with the adoption of more productive technologies, inequalities in wealth and income may increase over time tending to delay the convergence in international income differences. The model is also capable of explaining the observed diversity in the growth pattern of transitional economies. According to the model, this diversity may be the result of variability in adoption costs, or the relative position of a transitional economy in the world income distribution.income distributions, inequality, technology adoption, structural change

Voluntary agreements and community development as CSR in innovation strategies

The present paper examines how an innovating firm decides between two forms of voluntary agreements (VA) in a context, where a non-governmental organization (NGO) rather than a regulator watches over citizens' interests. The innovation generates profit and consumer surplus as well as environmental damage. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the innovation process is considered in terms of a redistribution of profit towards community development, with or without additional abatement efforts via a VA. Bargaining between firm and NGO yields the amount allocated to community development. The model demonstrates that the firm's choice of VA hinges on the tradeoffs between appropriating the full innovation profit and paying a higher lump sum towards community development or sacrificing some of the innovation profit by lowering innovation effort, but gaining in terms of paying a lesser amount towards community development. CSR with abatement is unlikely in the case of radical innovations. There is also a clear divergence of interests between the firm, the NGO and the State for some parameter configurations, which are duly identified.Corporate social responsibility, voluntary agreements, community development, donations, innovation

R&D cooperation, asymmetric technological capabilities and rationale for technology parks

Starting from the premise that firms are distinct in terms of their capacity to create radical product innovations, the present paper attempts to explore how firms choose between different forms of R&D cooperation and their consequences for social welfare. It studies a duopolistic market, where firms have to choose between R&D competition, a cost sharing alliance, an information sharing alliance or an R&D cartel. The paper demonstrates that asymmetry has an impact on alliance choice and social welfare. With similar firms, the cost sharing alliance will be preferred to R&D competition or any other form of collaboration. With significant asymmetry no alliance may be formed. In terms of social welfare, any alliance is preferable to R&D competition and the R&D cartel is the best. Given this inherent contradiction between private preferences and optimal social choice, the paper provides a rationale for public investment in terms of science and technology parks to promote R&D cartels. --R&D competition,R&D cooperation,technology parks

Describing the impact of health research: a Research Impact Framework.

BACKGROUND: Researchers are increasingly required to describe the impact of their work, e.g. in grant proposals, project reports, press releases and research assessment exercises. Specialised impact assessment studies can be difficult to replicate and may require resources and skills not available to individual researchers. Researchers are often hard-pressed to identify and describe research impacts and ad hoc accounts do not facilitate comparison across time or projects. METHODS: The Research Impact Framework was developed by identifying potential areas of health research impact from the research impact assessment literature and based on research assessment criteria, for example, as set out by the UK Research Assessment Exercise panels. A prototype of the framework was used to guide an analysis of the impact of selected research projects at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Additional areas of impact were identified in the process and researchers also provided feedback on which descriptive categories they thought were useful and valid vis-à-vis the nature and impact of their work. RESULTS: We identified four broad areas of impact: I. Research-related impacts; II. Policy impacts; III. Service impacts: health and intersectoral and IV. Societal impacts. Within each of these areas, further descriptive categories were identified. For example, the nature of research impact on policy can be described using the following categorisation, put forward by Weiss: Instrumental use where research findings drive policy-making; Mobilisation of support where research provides support for policy proposals; Conceptual use where research influences the concepts and language of policy deliberations and Redefining/wider influence where research leads to rethinking and changing established practices and beliefs. CONCLUSION: Researchers, while initially sceptical, found that the Research Impact Framework provided prompts and descriptive categories that helped them systematically identify a range of specific and verifiable impacts related to their work (compared to ad hoc approaches they had previously used). The framework could also help researchers think through implementation strategies and identify unintended or harmful effects. The standardised structure of the framework facilitates comparison of research impacts across projects and time, which is useful from analytical, management and assessment perspectives

Can Social Externalities Solve the Small Coalitions Puzzle in International Environmental Agreements?

A puzzle in the literature on the formation of coalitions supporting International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) is that if an IEA leads to substantial gains, then it will not be supported by many countries. The non-cooperative game theoretic literature highlights the “small coalitions†puzzle by which only a small number of countries are willing to sign an environmental convention. In these models, a global coalition comprising all countries and generating significant benefits is not sustainable. Moreover they indicate that greater the number of countries in the coalition, higher the incentive of signatories to not respect their engagement. The present paper resolves this puzzle by introducing social externalities, in order to explain why some treaties can be sustained by nearly all countries, while others can be supported only by a handful.