Persistent and Emerging Challenges to Development: Insights for Policy-making in India

This book covers a wide range of the issues in development studies. Recognizing the existence of manifold challenges in achieving and sustaining economic development, it is divided into four sections―(i) The Macroeconomy: Foreign Trade, Structural Transition and the Environment, (ii) Health and Standard of Living, (iii) Education, Human Capital and Evolution of the Employment Quality in India, and (iv) Banking and Credit: Access, Efficiency and Stability. The book brings together a right mix of senior and young economists who use cutting edge econometric techniques and/ or revisit a perennial question with much sharper focus and tools to unravel insights that are important and will inform tomorrow’s theorisation and policy making. The volume looks at important questions like spatial concentration of low infant and child health outcomes, trade liberalisation and export quality, intergenerational occupational mobility, multidimensional poverty incidence in rural India, robustness of the banking sector, to name a few. To do so, the contributions use novel and esoteric methods like machine learning, spatial econometrics, system GMM, quintile regression and counterfactual decomposition (QRCD), and so on. The rich collection holds importance for researchers and policy makers alike, and also for practitioners working in different developmental sectors..

Supravat Bagli is currently working as an Associate Professor at the department of Economics, Presidency University, Kolkata. Before joining the Presidency University Dr. Bagli served the Department of Economics, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, as an Assistant Professor and Head of the Department. He has been engaged in teaching at undergraduate level since 2005 and post graduate level since 2012. His teaching area extends Microeconomics, Public Economics, Statistics, Advanced Econometrics. His research interests include rural development, poverty and inequality, microfinance, financial inclusion. He has published one book titled ‘Group Centric Microfinance for Financial Inclusion Theories and Empirics’ and over forty research papers in different reputed national and international journals like Journal of Rural Development, The Indian Economic Journal, The Indian Journal of Economics, The Asian Economic Review etc. and in different edited books from reputed publishing houses like Springer Nature, Emerald, IGI Global, Serial Publications. 

Gagari Chakrabarti obtained M.Sc., M.Phil and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Calcutta.  She is teaching since 2001 and is currently serving Presidency University, Kolkata as an Associate Professor in Economics.  Chakrabarti has served as Dean of Students (additional charge) at Presidency University. She has, in her repute, a number of publications in national and international journals and monographs and edited volumes published from international publishing houses such as Springer and Palgrave MacMillan.  Her research interest lies in the areas of Financial Economics, Financial Econometrics, Complex and chaotic financial markets and more recently, in emotional intelligence and problems of ethical decision making in workplaces.

Prithviraj Guha is an Assistant Professor in the department of Economics at Presidency University, Kolkata. Dr. Guha received his Ph.D in Economics from New York University, U.S.A. Prior to joining Presidency University, Dr. Guha served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College of the City University of New York. He is an applied researcher specialising in the fields of Development Economics and Political Economy. His research has mostly focused on the socio-political economy of India traversing the questions of electoral competition, state capture, political cycles, targeted government spending, public sector bank lending, health infrastructure capacity, intergenerational occupational mobility and poverty dynamics. Most recently, the Applied Economics Letters in 2021 published his work interconnecting Labour Rights and Human Rights in the context of a cross-country dynamic panel.