Recent cgirs items

Essays on India’s Economy: Growth and Innovation

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common themes of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from August 2010 to June 2014, are issues of growth and innovation in India, considered in two sequential parts, each part ordered chronologically. Topics considered in the first part include the quality and limits of economic growth, rights and other aspects of well-being, spatial dimensions, and drivers of growth. The second part examines innovation in the context of manufacturing, education, information technology, management and tax incentives.

Essays on India’s Economy: Perspectives on Policy Reform

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common theme of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from June 2010 to March 2014, is the India’s struggles with economic policy reform. The essays are organized into several broad topical groupings, and chronologically within each section. The first section considers overall development goals, followed by a group of essays on foreign investment in retailing, financial inclusion and tax reform. This is followed by a section on macroeconomics and international finance, including several discussions of inflation policy and exchange rate policy. Two short sections discuss aspects of the corporate sector and job creation. The last section covers several topics: water, food, intergovernmental transfers and rural road construction.

Essays on India in a Global Context

Tue, 1 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common theme of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from October 2010 to May 2014, is the issue of how India is finding its place in the world, after a history of colonization and post-colonial suspicions. The essays discuss rebalancing the world economy, the G20 and India’s place in that newish grouping, foreign policy and comparisons to the US, China and Russia, cultural and financial impacts of globalization, and the role of India’s diaspora. The concluding essay considers some global positioning options, good and bad, for India’s new government.

Essays on India’s Political Economy

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common theme of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from September 2010 to June 2014, is the issue of governance in India, and how politics combines with societal and institutional structures to shape the quality of governance. The essays discuss corruption, citizenship, effective delivery of public goods and services, taxation and the evolution of democracy at different levels of the Indian polity. The collection begins with the corruption surrounding the Commonwealth Games, and ends with the implications of India’s recent, potentially path-breaking general election.

Reform or Radicalism: Left Social Movements from the Battle of Seattle to Occupy Wall Street

Wed, 2 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We examine two recent cases of relative Left success—the Battle of Seattle and Occupy Wall Street—and argue that in each case an effective dynamism between radical and reform wings drove gains. This analysis is not meant to deny political difference and hawk false unity. Instead we want to challenge the luxury of mutual dismissal with the actually existing benefits of movement dynamism. By dynamism we mean contributions arising from different activist wings and productively interacting to increase overall movement power. Our ultimate claim is that the North American Left will yield greater success by becoming more self-conscious about the concrete benefits of movement dynamism.

The Coming Environmental Crisis in the Middle East: A Historical Perspective, 1750-2000 CE

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This essay argues that the Middle Eastern environment, with its legacy of squandered water resources, deforestation and pollution of all kinds, reveals a distilled essence of the coming environmental crisis of the planet. This is so because of the evident vulnerability of Middle Eastern semi-arid and arid landscapes. The essay examines the transformation of the regional environment over the period 1750-2000 CE. It considers modern human impacts in three broad ecological zones: the Middle East of the river valleys (where we survey the role of engineers in major water management projects), the Mediterranean zone of dryfarming (where we examine the imposition of the California model of irrigation in Morocco), and the pastoral rangelands (where we evaluate the impact of scientific range management in the Maghreb). In the course of this survey, we come to understand that modernity was an outgrowth of a deeply rooted Eurasian development project. Ottoman reformers did not need the...

Control y supervision de la banca multilateral de desarrollo

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Control y supervision de la banca multilateral de desarrollo

State Power and Clientelism: Eight Propositions for Discussion

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

State Power and Clientelism: Eight Propositions for Discussion

CommunityOrganizedHouseholdWaterIncreasesNot Only Rural incomes, but AlsoMen’sWork

Mon, 2 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This paper explores community-organized, household water supply in seven communities in western Kenya. We compare water use, labor use, income and the conditions for collective action in three sets of communities: two have protected springs and piped homestead connections; two have protected springs but no homestead connection; and three draw potentially contaminated water from unprotected springs. We ﬁnd that piped water reduces the work of women and girls, and facilitates home garden and livestock production. Together these changes lead to increased household incomes. Women recognize clear time-beneﬁts. Men, however, experience extra work. No overall pattern emerges regarding the preconditions for collective action.

Access to water in a Nairobi slum: women's work and institutional learning

Wed, 7 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This paper describes the ways that households, and particularly women, experience water scarcity in a large informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, through heavy expenditures of time and money, considerable investments in water storage and routinized sequences of defer red household tasks. It then delineates three phases of adaptive water and social engineering undertaken in several informal settlements by the Nairobi Water Company in an ongoing attempt to construct effective municipal institutions and infrastructure to improve residential access to water and loosen the grip that informal vendors may have on the market for water in these localities.

Targeting the Poorest: The Role of the National Indigenous Institute in Mexico's National Solidarity Program

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Targeting the Poorest: The Role of the National Indigenous Institute in Mexico's National Solidarity Program

Coaliciones transnacionales de la sociedad civil y el Banco Mundial: Aprendizajes sobre proyectos y campanas de incidencia en politicas institucionales

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Coaliciones transnacionales de la sociedad civil y el Banco Mundial: Aprendizajes sobre proyectos y campanas de incidencia en politicas institucionales

Agrarian Reform and Populist Politics

Mon, 1 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Agrarian Reform and Populist Politics

“Prólogo” (“Prologue”) in Sylvia Escárcega and Stefano Varese, eds., La ruta mixteca: El impacto etnopolítico de la migración transnacional en los pueblos indígenas de México