Macroeconomics and Growth Policies

This United Nations Background Note on Macroeconomics and Growth provides practical guidance on how to operationalize alternative equitable and employment-generating macroeconomic and growth policies in National Development Strategies. This Policy Note has been developed in cooperation with UN agencies, and has been officially reviewed by distinguished academics/ development specialists such as Jose Antonio Ocampo, Jomo K.S. and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.macroeconomics, growth, development planning

The Economic and Social Effects of Financial Liberalization: A Primer for Developing Countries

This paper considers the main elements of the standard pattern of financial liberalization that has become widely prevalent in developing countries. The theoretical arguments in favour of such liberalization are considered and critiqued, and the political economy of such measures is discussed. The problems for developing countries, with respect to financial fragility and the greater propensity to crisis, as well as the negative deflationary and developmental effects, are discussed. It is concluded that there is a strong case for developing countries to ensure that their own financial systems are adequately regulated with respect to their own specific requirements.financial liberalization, development banking, financial fragility, financial crisis, deflation.

Trade Liberalization in Agriculture: An Examination of Impact and Policy Strategies with Special Reference to India

human development, aid, trade, security

Migration and Gender Empowerment: Recent Trends and Emerging Issues

Women are increasingly significant as national and international migrants, and it is now evident that the complex relationship between migration and human development operates in genderdifferentiated ways. However, because migration policy has typically been gender-blind, an explicit gender perspective is necessary. This paper attempts this, beginning with an examination of recent trends in women’s migration, internationally and within nations. It then considers the implications of the socio-economic context of the sending location for women migrants. The process of migration, and how that can be gender-differentiated, is discussed with particular reference to the various types of female migration that are common: marriage migration, family migration, forced migration, migration for work. These can be further disaggregated into legal and irregular migration, all of which affect and the issues and problems of women migrants in the process of migration and in the destination country. The manifold and complex gendered effects of migration are discussed with reference to varied experiences. Women migrants’ relations with the sending households and the issues relevant for returning migrants are also considered. The final section provides some recommendations for public policy for migration through a gender lens.gender, female migration, policy reform

Migration and gender empowerment: Recent trends and emerging issues

Women are increasingly significant as national and international migrants, and it is now evident that the complex relationship between migration and human development operates in genderdifferentiated ways. However, because migration policy has typically been gender-blind, an explicit gender perspective is necessary. This paper attempts this, beginning with an examination of recent trends in women’s migration, internationally and within nations. It then considers the implications of the socio-economic context of the sending location for women migrants. The process of migration, and how that can be gender-differentiated, is discussed with particular reference to the various types of female migration that are common: marriage migration, family migration, forced migration, migration for work. These can be further disaggregated into legal and irregular migration, all of which affect and the issues and problems of women migrants in the process of migration and in the destination country. The manifold and complex gendered effects of migration are discussed with reference to varied experiences. Women migrants’ relations with the sending households and the issues relevant for returning migrants are also considered. The final section provides some recommendations for public policy for migration through a gender lens.gender, female migration, policy reform

Inequality in India: A survey of recent trends

This paper analyses the nature and causes of the patterns of inequality and poverty in India. Since the economic liberalization in the early 1990s, the evidence suggests increasing inequality (in both spatial and vertical terms) as well as persistent poverty. The macroeconomic policies possibly responsible for these trends include—fiscal tightening, regressive tax policies and expenditure cuts; financial sector reform that reduced institutional credit flow to small producers and agriculturalists; liberalization of rules for foreign and domestic investment, leading to more regional imbalance and skewed investment patterns, and trade liberalization, which has affected livelihoods and employment generation.India, inequality, poverty, growth and distribution, macroeconomic policies

The left in India: emerging, enduring or evolving?

JNU’s Professor Jayati Ghosh contextualises the growing political relevance of Left movements in India and other parts of the ‘emerging’ world

An Analysis of the Spatial and Economic Variations of Ethnic Groups, Ontario

This study is concerned with six ethnic groups in the province of Ontario: the British, considered the “core group”, and the French, Italian, Indo-Chinese, Indo-Pakistani and Caribbean, the “peripheral groups.” The principal interest of the research has been to study the ethnic mosaic in two ways, both in a core-periphery context. It was hypothesised that there has been persistence of socio-economic stratification between the British core and the peripheral groups. This thesis analyzes variation in the occupation-income between and within the ethnic immigrant groups. The secondary objective is to examine these groups spatially, that is, in terms of a southern core and a northern periphery. Ten municipalities represent the core: Ottawa-Carleton, Durham, York, Toronto, Peel, Hamilton-Wentworth, Niagara, Haldimand-Norfolk, Essex and Middlesex. Ten counties represent the northern periphery: Algoma, Cochrane, Glengarry, Prescott, Russell, Lennox and Addington, Hastings, Timiskaming, Rainy River and Kenora. The data used in this study are from Statistics Canada, Special Computer Runs of the 1981 and 1971 censuses. The research found that the vertical mosaic continues to exist much as it did in the late nineteenth century. Ethnic job segregation has prevailed; however, in certain occupations the persistance of the core-periphery structure is less significant, reflecting integration and assimilation to a certain extent. Spatially, a core-periphery structure is even more evident now than earlier. The southern core of Ontario is the first choice of most recent immigrants. The diverse economic base of the south attracts more immigrants than the peripheral north, particularly those immigrants arriving in Canada after the Second World War who possess higher education and skills than earlier immigrants

Hindutva, Economic Neoliberalism and the Abuse of Economic Statistics in India

This essay argues that attempts at implementing the Hindutva agenda adversely affect economic activity. At first sight, Modi’s unabashedly neoliberal and pro-big capital claims could seem contradictory to his politics of hatred that severely disrupt economic growth. However, the ability of the government to persuade the public that the economy is doing well or that adverse outcomes are not the result of its own policies, actually serves the neoliberal agenda by taming the resentment of the poor and enabling further concentration of wealth. The Modi government is focused on the management of perception rather than on actually developing and implementing economic policies that would benefit the people. In this regard, manipulation and/or destruction of the statistical system are decisive, which is why an aggressive attitude to economic statistics has become one of the defining features of the government

An automatic and efficient foreground object extraction scheme

This paper presents a method to differentiate the foreground objects from the background of a color image. Firstly a color image of any size is input for processing. The algorithm converts it to a grayscale image. Next we apply canny edge detector to find the boundary of the foreground object. We concentrate to find the maximum distance between each boundary pixel column wise and row wise and we fill the region that is bound by the edges. Thus we are able to extract the grayscale values of pixels that are in the bounded region and convert the grayscale image back to original color image containing only the foreground object